During and immediately after the Second World War, physicists and engineers in several countries worked intensively and in competition to develop nuclear weapons and to control the chain reaction creating nuclear energy. An experience of urgency and a sense of revolutionary future promise permeated the activities and largely outweighed the risks as they were calculated at the time. As a result, small experimental reactors were built at research institutes or universities relatively close to city centres and densely populated areas—the key localization factor being the physicists’ own geography. This chapter focuses on three of the early pioneering urban reactors, located in Chicago, Moscow, and Stockholm, which were all symbols of national prowess as humanity was entering the nuclear age, and later became objects of heritage processes. We scrutinize the early operations as well as the making of atomic heritage, through the conceptual lens of the ‘security theatre’. The concept highlights the relationship between, on the one hand, calculable risk and security, and on the other hand, perceived risk and security. We argue that, overall, the security theatre displays reversed characteristics if comparing the establishment period with the processes of heritagization in the way that the calculable risks were initially high but downplayed, while subsequently being low but exaggerated. This tension between calculable risk and perceived risk, we suggest, forms the key to the attraction of contemporary atomic heritage. This chapter is based on historic and contemporary written and visual sources, together with interviews and on-site visits.

In this article, I articulate a tension between sublime and non-sublime nuclear nature imaginaries through an investigation of four types of atomic fish practices in and around nuclear power plants: fish farms, sports fishing, management of fish in cooling water systems, and finally, test fishing as part of environmental monitoring programs. Nuclear technology is generally understood as exceptional, be it from a utopian or a dystopian point of view. This understanding, combined with the sociotechnical imaginary of containment, forms the basis for an (inherently contradictory) nuclear technological sublime. In contrast to this dominant imaginary, I suggest that there is a partly interrelated, partly parallel, set of nuclear imaginaries characterized by domestication, normality and the non-sublime, discernible through mundane activities such as atomic fish practices. The existence of fish farming at nuclear power plants, along with sports fishing in the surrounding waters, shapes an understanding of atomic fish as a normal, or even slightly improved human diet, to harvest or to hunt, while the controlling practices of managing and testing fish in cooling water systems and environmental monitoring build an imaginary of normality based on everyday routines. Domesticated nuclear natures therefore signify, on the one hand, a containment of the exceptional aspects and, on the other hand, normalizing practices on the household scale. I conclude that domestication of nuclear natures must not only imply the control and containment of something exceptional or wild in a sublime sense, it can also denote normalization without grandeur. The nuclear nature imaginary may be completely non-impressive and non-sublime, still it is highly decisive for local perceptions of the nuclear technology.

This essay considers two industrial sites, an old open-pit mine in Malmberget in northern Sweden and the closed Ignalina nuclear power plant in northeastern Lithuania, to see to what extent each might possibly become part of local heritage processes. Both sites once represented visions of progress and modernity, but today they present problems of waste and unemployment that evoke ambiguous feelings in their communities. These are wounded landscapes that are difficult to heal. However, the physical scars are also part of the stories that are the fabric of heritage, and these landscapes of waste may reemerge as new landscapes of memory and community identity that are directed toward the future.