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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2022

Making the accident hypothetical : how can one deal with potential nuclear disaster ?

Résumé

Atomic power can cure as well as kill. It can fertilize and enrich a region as well as devastate it. It can widen man's horizons as well as force him back into the cave.-Alvin M. Weinberg, nuclear physicist, testimony to the US Senate Commission on Atomic Uses, December 1945 Geneva, 1955. The first international conference of the Atoms for Peace program took place on the shores of Lake Geneva. Initiated by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, Atoms for Peace was created, with UN patronage, to promote all the peaceful uses of nuclear technology over the world, and the conference signaled an energetic optimism. Industrial achievements, mostly American, were exhibited for the first time, harbingers of a massive use of promising energy. As the historian John Krige (2006) has shown, this was not simply a question of using a new source of energy but enabling the advent of affluence across societies, in which energy would be so cheap that the electricity meters could simply disappear. It was a far cry from the image of destruction and devastation that had gripped the world a decade earlier and seemed to signal a radical change in the trajectory of the atom. Since the very development of nuclear power industry, the destructive potential of the atom has been made concrete. The transition from experimentation to the commercial exploitation of the atom between the 1950s and 1970s was accompanied by numerous reflections on the new risks generated by the use of nuclear energy. Of course, destruction was not the purpose of civilian technologies, but accidents, experts cautioned from the start, could occur. In particular, nuclear physicists cautioned that nuclear energy raised a new form of risk, and plant designers worked to imagine the damages that an accident might cause. This is why, at the Geneva conference, a small session addressed the issue of reactor safety, in conjunction with the issues of "industrial hygiene" and "radiation protection." Jean Bourgeois, head of the French subcommittee
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hal-04384386 , version 1 (13-02-2024)

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Maël Goumri. Making the accident hypothetical : how can one deal with potential nuclear disaster ?. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent; Soraya Boudia; Kyoko Sato. Living in a Nuclear World : From Fukushima to Hiroshima, Routledge, pp.148 - 165, 2022, 9781032130668. ⟨10.4324/9781003227472-7⟩. ⟨hal-04384386⟩
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