9 – 10 September 2025, University of Exeter Funded by the Nuclear Waste Services and the Societies and Cultures Institute
Organised by Sebastian Koa and Caitlin Mullin, this two-day Nuclear Societies international symposium explored the changing relations between energy infrastructures and the communities that depend on, form around, and evolve with them. It brought together a diverse group of academics and professionals from nine universities across the UK, France, Germany, USA, and Canada.
Speakers included:
Esther Egele-Godswill, University of Edinburgh Infrastructures of (Dis)connections: The Social Life of Oil Pipelines in Nigeria’s Niger Delta
Prerna Gupta, University of British Columbia From Promise to Peril: Experiencing Nuclear Energy in Tarapur
Paula Duffy, University of Aberdeen Temporal Rhythms of Solar Infrastructure: An analysis of Ground-mounted Solar PV Development in England, UK
Sebastian Koa, University of Exeter The Project and its Outsides: Timescapes of Nuclear Power Plants in Construction
Helena Hastie and Damien Mansell, University of Exeter Plot, power, promises: Policy-making at the land-energy nexus in South Africa
Frederik Gremler, BASE Germany Who rejects compensation offers for energy infrastructures and why? The case of a repository for nuclear waste in Germany
Tara Panesar and Oliver Carpenter, Science Museum London Representing energy infrastructures and their communities in Science Museum displays
Yoi Kawakubo, Southampton Solent University The New Clear Age: Nuclear Infrastructures, Generational Memory and the Temporalities of Energy Communities
Lucas Lopez, Bordeaux Montaigne University The structuring of a European community through the crossed construction trajectories of the nuclear power plant fleet, the interconnected electricity transmission network and the political unification of Europe, from the 1950s to the 2010s
Riley J Fisher, University of Michigan The People of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle: A Demographic Analysis of Nuclear Sites in the United States
