Per Högselius is awarded ERC Consolidator Grant

The contract for my new ERC Consolidator Grant has now been signed by KTH and the EU, and it comes to my mind that I have totally forgotten to write about it here in the blog, although it was announced already last December. The grant is worth €2 million or roughly 20 million SEK, and KTH co-funds it with another 4 million SEK. So from a financial point of view there is no excuse why this grant should not generate exciting new research results.

The project linked to the grant is called NUCLEARWATERS: Putting Water at the Centre of Nuclear Energy History and is set to start in May this year. The ambition is to revise, in a quite radical way, the history of nuclear energy as it has so far been narrated and analyzed. Instead of focusing on the history of nuclear physics, nuclear chemistry and nuclear reactors, I intend to place nuclear water supplies (for cooling the reactors) at the very centre of the story. There is good reason to do so, for example, because if you look into the reports about nuclear accidents and incidents worldwide, you will quickly find that most of them are related to failures of the water supply arrangements: a broken pipe, a valve that has been accidentally left open or closed, a dike that has collapsed, a pump that has stopped working and so on.

The radical implication, from a broader historiographical point of view, is that nuclear energy, seen from this perspective, is perhaps not as modern as it might seem. It is not a radical new technology. Rather, nuclear energy engineering builds on centuries and even millennia of earlier hydraulic-engineering efforts and, culturally speaking, on earlier “hydraulic civilizations” – from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern Netherlands. So the project will integrate the history of nuclear energy into a narrative about a much deeper human past.

Read more about the project here. See also my 2013 report from a seminar I gave at Renmin University in Beijing, in which I initially developed the ideas underlying this project.