Critical geopolitics and the dynamics of nuclear energy in Europe: Comparing the spatial representations of nuclear power in France, Germany and Sweden

Résumé

Recent research in energy geography have shown that the difficulty encountered by modern societies to decrease their fossil fuel consumption could be explained by the influence of spatial path dependencies, encompassing their place-based economic, material and cultural aspects. Energy is thus thoroughly embedded in our daily environments both through its materialities and the spatial representations it replicates. While this approach has been widely used to unwrapped the spatialities of hydrocarbons, what about nuclear power? What if looking at these spatial path dependencies and the deeply entranched perceptions of space it relies on could help us understand the heterogeneities of national nuclear policies? In this talk, we offer to compare the multiscalar spatial representations of nuclear energy in three countries, Sweden, France and Germany, which have recently followed three different strategies. After identifying the similarities and differences between these cases studies, we’ll unveil their production process.