In 2020 there are 408 nuclear reactors operating worldwide, with the mean age of a reactor being 31 years old and 20% of the nuclear reactor fleet being over 41 years old (The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2020). In addition to this, there are 31 reactors worldwide in the phase of being closed down. Given the fact that the mean age of decommissioned nuclear reactors between 2015 and 2019 is around 42 years; the fact that 40 years is considered to be a conventional lifespan of a nuclear reactor; and the fact that the mean age of a nuclear reactor has been rising since 1984, the issue of planetary futures after nuclear power is increasingly acute.

One could expect more and more cases where research grounded urbanist re-conceptualization and re-tooling after nuclear facility decommissioning is required. Such potential cases are located in different world regions, with specific sets of nuclear entangled economic, political, military and scientific complexities. This book proposes to scrutinize variable and invariable space/society relations inherent in nuclear development in order to build a multi-scalar research and design scaffolding for nuclear industry sites after their productive phase. Both the temporal and spatial complexity of these sites has strong resonance with attempts to think and practice social and natural worlds with a planetary sensitivity. In this project, we show how critical urban studies as a research agenda and critical urbanism as an applied stance towards the environment are nurturing such sensitivity by re-tooling the knowledge infrastructures of this particular site with its real-world dilemmas.

More at https://visaginas-workshop.org/