The Spiral Research Center is hiring!
Projet MUNDEC - déclin banal des infrastructures nucléaires
Recruitment of a full-time post-doctoral researcher for a period of one year:
Mundane Decay: An Inquiry into the Deterioration of Nuclear Infrastructures
The project
The Mundec research project examines a type of infrastructure that is both expensive to maintain and extremely difficult to decommission: nuclear power plants. It adopts an original perspective by focusing on a particular phenomenon in the life of infrastructures: their mundane decay and its management modes, or lack thereof. Mundane decay, in this project, is defined as the set of changes that occur continuously and normally in the materiality of nuclear infrastructures. Mundec proposes to study these material transformations and the related political decisions and socio-technical practices, ranging from maintenance when infrastructures wear out and deteriorate to decommissioning when it is decided to scrap them.
The objective of this project is to understand the processes of routine decommissioning of nuclear infrastructures by (1) analyzing in depth the decommissioning of a nuclear power plant in four European countries that are diverse in terms of nuclear policy, share of nuclear energy in the electricity generation mix, age and status of nuclear facilities: Belgium, France, Finland and Austria; (2) conducting a qualitative comparison of these cases.
The start date of the work contract is September 15, 2022 (possibly to be negotiated).
