内容简介：

The 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan has highlighted the centrality of water in nuclear energy operations. In this talk I will reinterpret the history of nuclear power as a history of water, and the history of nuclear accidents as a special case of droughts, floods, and other water-related disasters. The utmost importance of large-scale uninterrupted water flows for cooling nuclear facilities, and the need to simultaneously protect them from flooding and from contaminating their wet surroundings, have turned nuclear engineers into hydraulic engineers who interact with and transform nature in a variety of ways. The “nuclear age”, to the extent that it can be said to have materialized, is fundamentally a hydraulic age, and as such it draws heavily on experience gathered from hydraulic societies in the past. These historical affinities become particularly visible in times of crisis, and in the talk I will discuss several concrete examples of nuclear disasters, trying to discern what really make such disasters special in relation to other, “normal” droughts and floods.   

学者简介：

Per Högseliusis Associate Professor at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Working in the intersection between environmental history and the history of science and technology, he has primarily focused on the history of energy supply in international perspective and the relations between environmental and other types of risk from an historical point of view. His latest book is the freshly publishedRed Gas: Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence(Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series, 2013). Ongoing projects include “Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature,” “Sweden and the Origins of Global Resource Colonialism,” and “Fuelling the World: A Global Energy History.”