Nuclear Futures is a new humanities and social science research area within Nuclear Critical Studies at Linköping University. We are currently in the midst of recruiting a team of scholars with the capacity to address complex socio-technical questions occupying the space between new nuclear technological development, changing organisational and governance structures for energy and the environment, and various societal responses.
A dedicated focus on Nuclear Futures is indeed critical in relation to recent societal changes, such as the current upsurge in new nuclear energy production, and the decisive moment of started construction of a deep underground final repository for spent nuclear fuel in Forsmark, Sweden, preceded only by one similar repository worldwide, currently under construction in Finland. Specific topics which are becoming pertinent to scrutinise from a humanities and social science perspective include, for example, future imaginations and hopes connected to emerging nuclear technologies like small modular reactors (SMR), challenges and prospects of deep future thinking in relation to long-lived radioactive materials, and new types of civil society involvement, not least from non-governmental environmental organisations, given the increasingly black-boxed technological choices connected to nuclear developments. In sum, the ambitions of the new research area centred on Nuclear Futures are to contribute scholarly, stringent perspectives on critical contemporary concerns.
