Who exactly shares responsibility for the geographies shaped by past crimes and present injustices? How might an application of a “politics of place beyond place” shift dominant discourses on energy? Agata Lisiak, Jen Richter, and Siarhei Liubimau address these questions in their contribution to the “Kin City” series, exploring the politics of nuclear energy in Visaginas, Lithuania.
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In the contemporary moment, the world has been brought, yet again, to the brink of a nuclear crisis. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the vulnerabilities of nuclear-reliant energy systems became starkly clear, as the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is the first NPP in history to be occupied by military force. Not only Ukraine’s national energy security, but also the larger geopolitical stability of the region, as well as the planet, are under risk, should another nuclear crisis similar to Chernobyl in 1986 occur, or Russia carry out its threat of using nuclear armaments against Ukraine. The nuclear dimension of Russia’s war against Ukraine thus requires rethinking geographies of nuclear power in Europe and beyond.
Despite the evident vulnerability of nuclear plants, many nations are pursuing nuclear power. For Central and Eastern European countries, ironically, one of the major drivers is to lessen dependence on imports of natural gas from Russia, which have decreased due to sanctions. The focus on nuclear energy, rather than renewables, stems from the familiarity with these systems from the Soviet era, as well as a focus on energy independence and the ability to export excess energy. In addition, according to the EU Taxonomy for Sustainable Activities, nuclear energy is seen as a more stable and sustainable energy than renewables and coal.
Energy (crises) of the future
However, these nuclear aspirations are complicated by the fact that Russia still controls a significant percentage of uranium conversion and enrichment, both necessary steps for producing nuclear fuel. Another complicating factor is expense and funding, as nuclear power plants require extensive capital outlay initially. Finally, under EU law, each member state is required to deal with their own nuclear waste, including processes for deep geologic repositories (DGR). Currently, the only country with a fully constructed DGR is Finland, while Sweden has chosen a site. Other states are struggling to create processes for siting a DGR, including finding willing host communities.
Energy production typically inspires macro questions that not infrequently veer into abstraction. A focus on time- and place-specific manifestations of energy crises – what precedes them, how they unravel, what comes in their aftermath – is one way to move beyond the abstract, by articulating how they are embedded in multiple spatialities and temporalities. As geographer Doreen Massey has argued, place is not bounded, it is always part of interdependencies with places elsewhere; and it mustn’t be conceived without taking into account its temporal dimensions. When she wrote: “you can’t hold places still,” she acknowledged the inherent changeability of place and insisted that it is impossible to return to an idealized past. It also means that we cannot insist on capturing any place (a city, a town, a neighborhood, a village) in our present. We are obligated to look forward while simultaneously recognizing power inequalities that limit our visions of more just futures.
We argue that decisions around nuclear energy production need to be framed by energy justice, and incorporate all the different scales of production and consumption, spatially and temporally. What are we producing energy for? To what ends, and for which communities, at what cost and for how long? And how will we deal with the waste? These questions are often implied, but rarely articulated, as discussions devolve into pro- or anti- rhetoric of different energy sources. Moreover these questions are rarely grounded by field research with a deliberate multi-sited approach.
From the perspective of a nuclear city
In May 2023, we visited Lithuania’s Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) and its satellite town Visaginas with undergraduate students from Phoenix, Berlin, and Vilnius, as part of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network-funded Generator Project. In the course of the field school in Vilnius and Visaginas, we delved into the ways that the INPP is perceived locally as economically and socially beneficial while also representing an ongoing national concern. We visited several sites key to Lithuania’s nuclear past and its unfolding energy futures; we also engaged in conversations with energy experts to better understand how to imagine a positive energy future from a vantage point of a nuclear town.
We met with INPP’s former general director, vernacular DIY energy designers, national institute of energy research, an NGO cultivating Visaginas’ nuclear history as urban heritage, and Visaginas environmental monitoring laboratory as situated actors differently invested in imagining and enacting diverse energy geographies. The field school cultivated our sensitivity to those actors’ strikingly different configurations of agency, pragmatic interests, cultural repertoires, and access to resources. The diverse geographical and disciplinary backgrounds of the Generator Project participants added further complexity in the processes of understanding and narrating possible and desirable trajectories of energy change.
Lithuania is struggling with how to achieve energy production that is just and equitable, not only in the present but in the far future as well. The concept of energy justice illuminates several of these issues, as energy infrastructures are informed by imaginaries of economic development, and national security. Energy justice focuses on the distributive aspects of energy production, including how benefits and burdens are calculated and articulated, as well as the misrecognition of communities and environments that have historically been harmed and silenced by energy production.
The entire nuclear fuel cycle
In the case of nuclear energy, for example, it is too simple to promote nuclear power as a means of providing ‘clean and safe’ energy, when the entire nuclear fuel cycle (from uranium mining to long-term waste disposal over thousands of years) as well as political vulnerabilities are ignored in the same discussion. Energy justice also focuses on procedural concerns, to highlight how decisions are made in energy development. Nuclear waste creates a systemic energy injustice, as it burdens all future generations of humanity with an intractable problem of safely storing nuclear waste over thousands of years.
The government of Lithuania is looking for a permanent site for nuclear waste, but has yet to start any sort of process, meaning INPP operates currently as a de facto nuclear waste site. The loss of INPP has also left a gulf in energy production for Lithuania, which now imports more than half its energy. While biomass and renewables are being explored to address energy poverty concerns, how to scale up renewables for the nation is a pressing concern (LEI).
Soviet energy cultures and geographies in the 1970s and 1980s have left an indelible mark across Europe, with formerly operational energy infrastructural linkages and generational capacities now becoming legacies to be rethought and overcome in line with green transition and energy independence vis-à-vis Russia, creating systemic and structural energy injustices both locally and nationally.
Lithuania’s INPP, with the same type of reactor (RBMK) as the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, began operations in 1983 and was decommissioned in 2009; its closure was a condition for Lithuania’s admittance to the European Union in 2004. INPP was the main provider of electricity for the Baltic States and Belarus; Visaginas was created as a mono-functional town for INPP workers and their families. At its peak, more than 5,000 out of the 30,000 inhabitants were employed by INPP; currently, only 1,500 still work at the site. A temporally and legislatively difficult process, the dismantling of INPP is projected to last until at least 2038, if not longer.
‘Out of time’
For years, Visaginas’ identity was defined by its belonging to the network of nuclear sites in the former USSR, through shared technologies, personnel, professionalization milieus, and exclusive access to resources. This identity is now being replaced by the other evolving forms of embeddedness in wider geographical configurations, reflecting Lithuania’s changing political conditions. Once a key element in the Soviet North-West United Energy System (including Leningrad, Smolensk, Kursk, Chernobyl, and Ignalina NPPs), INPP is now a piece of very costly infrastructure, ‘out of time,’ and since late 1990s no longer politically acceptable to policymakers in Vilnius and Brussels.
Decommissioning of INPP changes Visaginas’ embeddedness not only in wider energy infrastructural settings, but also in wider cultures and geographies. Nuclear power plants and their satellite towns are not only sources of energy and loci of political power, but have also been increasingly recognized by the cultural and business sectors, media, and social sciences as knowledge infrastructures. Engaging closely with Visaginas’ knowledge production, cultural imaginaries, and national interests, colleagues in the Knowledgescapes of Urban Utopias project ask: Which institutions and infrastructures in Visaginas become responsible in the process of reimagining the energy industry’s local and national futures?
Relatedly, in “World City,” her 2007 book about London, Doreen Massey raises the question of extended responsibility, i.e., “a responsibility that is not restricted to the immediate or the local.” That kind of responsibility forms the basis of what she calls “a politics of place beyond place” and inspires related questions about the politics of creating, articulating, and nurturing kinship: Who exactly shares in the responsibility for the geographies shaped by past crimes and present wrongs? How could an application of “a politics of place beyond place” shift the dominant discourses on energy?
Inspired by such questions, the Generator Project explored the interdependencies between local and distant energy communities and, consequently, troubled the dichotomy of urban vs rural, showing how energy suppliers and energy users are intimately linked, even as calls for more decentralized energy systems are growing. Projects of this kind – experimental, interdisciplinary, translocal, international – expand our understanding of kinship between communities by focusing on the relational aspects of the technology, rather than allowing technologies to determine our futures without us.