The Politics of Nuclear Energy and the Limits of Exceptionalism

• In Event: Political Ecology (Co-sponsored by Environmental Sociology Section)

Abstract

Across a range of theoretical traditions, nuclear energy has been associated with centralized, top-down, and authoritarian forms of political power — grounded in its shared fuel cycles, expertise, and security imperatives with nuclear weapons, and in grid architectures that require centralized control. These material properties have also generated a broader cultural and political exceptionalism that shields nuclear arrangements from democratic contestation. What these accounts share is a tendency to theorize nuclear's politics against the backdrop of crisis, real or imagined, as the moment where that association is created and recreated. But the real nuclear crisis, when examined sociologically, looks quite different: Chernobyl reveals not a hermetic system activating its latent political structure but improvisation and confusion about what kind of crisis it even was.
This paper proposes a reorientation toward the routine political and economic relations nuclear energy generates and sustains over time. Drawing on Gorz's (1975) argument that nuclear centralization is instrumentally desired by state technocracies and industrial capital rather than technically necessitated, it attends to the relations nuclear energy produces: infrastructure path-dependencies, fuel cycle lock-ins, state financing structures, and the political actors nuclear institutions generate.
The paper develops this argument through the case of Rosatom's (Russian nuclear corporation) foreign expansion. By bundling financing, fuel supply, technical assistance, and spent fuel return into long-term contracts, Rosatom manufactures dependency through routine institutional arrangements. What makes nuclear distinctive in this regard is duration: the dependence of Hungary and Slovakia on Rosatom for fuel supply, itself a legacy of Soviet reactor exports through Comecon, shows how such arrangements become political constraints that far outlast the contexts that produced them, as post-2022 European politics has made clear.

Author

• Olga Alexandrovna Feldberg, University of Virginia