Nuclear energy as cultural heritage

Last week I participated in a somewhat unusual conference at Södertörn University here in Stockholm: Nuclear Legacies: Community, Memory, Waste & Nature, organized by Anna Storm at Stockholm University. The most important parts dealt with nuclear energy as cultural heritage. The programme comprised presentations by a wide arrange of scholars, with speakers not least from the former Soviet Union playing a very active and important role.

But the real highlight of the conference was a visit to the decommissioned Swedish nuclear power plant at Ågesta in southern Stockholm. It was shut down permanently already in the mid-1970s, but when you visit the facility, sitting down for a while in the red chairs in the main control room, touching the emergency shut-down button or wandering around (well, under guidance) in the deserted reactor hall, you get the feeling that the plant could have been in operation until yesterday. Everything is still there, save the most radioactive components (notably the fuel elements).

At Ågesta you step directly and abruptly into the Swedish nuclear age in its formative phase. This was Sweden’s first commercial-size nuclear power plant. It delivered electricity to Stockholm’s electricity grid and especially heat to the new district heating system in the modernist suburb of Farsta, 2 kilometres to the north of the plant, opposite Lake Magelungen. The facility is small compared to the reactors that were later taken into operation at Oskarshamn, Barsebäck, Ringhals and Forsmark. But it has a much stronger – and sinister – story to tell than those plants. It is a relic of the Swedish vision, now long forgotten, of becoming a nuclear-weapons nation; Ågesta’s reactor, moderated by heavy water and fuelled by natural (rather than enriched) uranium, was designed so as to enable it to produce Swedish weapons-grade plutonium. The fuel, or so the plan said, was to be sourced from western Sweden’s promising uranium deposits. Sweden was to become self-sufficient, independent of the great powers in its nuclear programme – and the Swedish nuclear programme, this was regarded as self-evident in the years around 1960, was to become the heart of Sweden’s industrial and societal development. Ågesta, quite literally, radiated Sweden’s high modernity. With one word, Ågesta was a centre-piece of technology for both warfare and welfare.

The question is now what is going to happen with Ågesta. SVAFO and Vattenfall, who jointly own the plant, told us during our visit that they simply want to demolish the whole facility, unbuild it – and that they are actually obliged to this by Swedish law. As an historian of science and technology, however, I find this strategy shocking. Anybody with a sense of Swedish postwar history who visits Ågesta will inevitably come to the opposite conclusion: that this facility needs to be preserved, in one way or the other! It’s a totally unique facility from which the entirety of Sweden’s post-war and Cold War reality emerges! No other industrial creation could tell the story of Sweden in the nuclear age in the way Ågesta is able to! So, is there really no other way forward than to destroy and dismantle it?