Nuclear power has been a controversial technology since it was contested during the 1960s and 1970s as high-risk, polluting, and harmful. However, in recent years, it has made a remarkable comeback. Climate change is pushing national governments to phase out fossil fuels and produce clean energy that does not generate carbon emissions. Therefore, the nuclear industry and many national governments try to market new reactor designs as a safe, reliable, innovative, and sustainable solution to making that energy transition happen.
Ageing reactors and rising maintenance challenges
At the same time, however, many existing nuclear power plants in Europe have been experiencing shutdowns related to breakdowns. During the winter of 2022-2023, at the height of the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, the Ringhals 4 reactor in Sweden was shut down for repair. During the same period, French nuclear power plants were experiencing unprecedented problems with stress corrosion cracking in reactor pipes. A year earlier, in the United Kingdom, a maintenance outage at the Sizewell B reactor went much overtime because of safety concerns over repairs to steel components. In other majorly nuclearised countries, like Belgium and the United States, utilities have been facing similar breakdowns. And these maintenance-related breakdowns are expected to continue plaguing the industry, as the lifetimes of many nuclear power plants all over Europe and the US are being extended much further than they were initially designed for.
It is thus clear that the nuclear industry has reached a crucial moment during which demand for nuclear power is increasing, but the reliability of reactor operation is unpredictable due to mounting maintenance issues. This project, therefore, addresses a crucial problem in the energy transition and development of nuclear energy today: the nuclear industry and policymakers are too preoccupied with new reactor designs and building projects, while reliable reactor operation and (preventive) maintenance are undervalued. Nuclear power will have a hard time expanding as a solution to climate change if even the existing plants cannot be kept running without breaking down.
Maintenance work, knowledge, and nuclear safety
In order to understand why they break down, this project will explore ageing infrastructure in the nuclear industry, and the maintenance work and workers who try to address it. It will particularly focus on the workers' techniques – types of knowledge on how to use or repair a technology that is not necessarily written down. I will also focus on the way the risks of maintenance work – to the workers, but also the risk of insufficient maintenance to society – are assessed, and how much ‘agency’ or capacity to work and act independently workers possess while using their maintenance techniques.
Although scholars who have studied nuclear safety have paid attention to the organisation of maintenance, the workers themselves and the techniques they use have largely been overlooked. Nuclear power production has mostly been analysed from the perspective of innovation, focusing on new reactor designs and not on the invisible work by the thousands of maintenance workers that keep these installations running. This research has the potential of moving both the study of nuclear safety and the scholarship on technology and maintenance forward in significant ways.
Data for this project will be gathered by interviewing maintenance workers, following and observing them when they do their work (participatory observation), and consulting documents (such as manuals, handbooks, and regulatory documents). The field work will take place at two nuclear facilities: Forsmark 3 in Sweden and Sizewell B in the United Kingdom. Both reactors have experienced numerous maintenance-related shutdowns in recent years. The results will be published in a series of academic articles, a policy-report, and debate articles in news outlets in Sweden and the UK.
The project aims to make more tangible to Swedish and international audiences the challenges of ageing infrastructure and maintenance work in nuclear power plants, and how breakdowns have been historically managed and prevented. In this way, I hope to make the debate about nuclear energy less about fancy innovations and more about the existing infrastructures and people who run them, finding solutions for better power plant safety and reliability – in the interest of society at large, and for the maintenance community.
