On 31 January 2022, Valérie Arnhold will submit a thesis in sociology entitled: Normalising the apocalypse: organisations and recompositions of the nuclear sector in the face of accidents.

Jury :

Jenny ANDERSSON, 
Olivier BORRAZ (Dir), 
Sylvain LAURENS,
Turo-Kimmo LEHTONEN,
Christine MUSSELIN,
Sezin TOPCU

The public defense will take place on 31/01/2022 at 9:00 am in the meeting room, 5th floor, IEP de Paris, 224 boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris 7th

Summary :

Taking the Fukushima Dai-ichi accident in March 2011 as a starting point, this dissertation studies the ways in which the nuclear sector was able to overcome this disaster in a way that has not destabilized its institutions and politics. Relying on an in-depth study of the French case, on an analysis of European and international spaces of cooperation on nuclear accidents and on an analysis of the German case as a counterpoint, this work retraces the ways in which regulatory agencies, in relation with the nuclear industry, have dealt with nuclear accidents since they became a public problem following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. The analysis is based on an ethnographic study of the work of nuclear professionals on the Fukushima accident, as well as on archives and a media analysis.

The dissertation describes a process of normalization through which nuclear organizations integrate major accidents into their ordinary practices, transforming them into seemingly surmountable and ultimately acceptable events, which do not question the continuity of the nuclear politics and institutions anymore. The study of working practices of nuclear experts and internal relations between nuclear organizations allows understanding the social conditions of these processes. First, nuclear safety experts approach accidents above all as a problem of knowledge production and writing, in ways that set aside their material effects on health and the environment and avoid confrontation with empirical data. Second, the multiplication of regulatory and oversight organizations of the nuclear sector has contributed to strengthen the sectors’ autonomy with respect to the executive, with the aim of resisting against a government at a distance and avoiding future political crises.

The dissertation intends to contribute to the sociology of public action, by studying the conditions of autonomy of the nuclear sector vis-à-vis politics. It contributes to STS by highlighting the political dimensions of maintenance work, as well as the ways in which organizations act on temporal and material characteristics of adverse events. It also contributes to the understanding of crises, by showing how organizations reverse the meaning of “adaptation”: it is not the organizations that adapt to envision the real occurrence of disasters, but the accidents that are approached from the angle of what the organizations are already able to manage, thereby displacing the protection mandates of public organizations.