Events, practices, and processes in managing nuclear power often have both an exceptional and a mundane side to them. As Hecht (2009, 2014) and many others have shown, nuclear technology has simultaneously profited from regulatory, political, and cultural processes that mark it as requiring exceptional treatment while also being characterized as everyday, safe, under control, and comparable to other technologies and materials. Examples include struggles around negative environmental and health effects of nuclear disasters and uranium mining (Kuchinskaya, 2014; Makhijani et al., 2000; Jacobs, 2022), social cleavage due to conflicts between the state and anti-nuclear activism (Chandra, 2021; Masco, 2006, 2021), or deep time requirements of nuclear waste storage and communication of knowledge about nuclear waste into the far future (Joyce, 2020; Ialenti, 2020; Keating and Storm, 2023).

This special issue’s focus is on the mundane in nuclear energy cultures as a site of nuclear politics in its own right. Lewis Mumford noted already a century ago that planning, as an exercise of power, is mostly a boring activity. Richard White further expanded on this: Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention (White, 1995, p. 64). The same can be said of nuclear power and radioactive waste management: even though it is prone to the extraordinary or spectacular (like Chernobyl, Fukushima, or the anti-nuclear movement) and often shrouded in secrecy, most processes behind it are mundane and sometimes even boring. Furthermore, these processes take place openly. However, they require specialized technical and scientific knowledge and are subject to the long decision-making timeframes of legal regulation and political action. This may lead to societal negotiation processes being bogged down in an overwhelming number of documents, often difficult to access and understand.

Yet, incorporated in procedures of planning approvals (e.g. of final disposals), safety inspections (in running power plants or above-ground disposal sites), and radioactive dose measurements (around nuclear facilities and of waste from decommissioning), to name just a few, are classifications and standards that consolidate socio-political and socio-scientific narratives (Bowker and Star, 2000). Once set, these become norms not to be questioned and difficult to change. Norms, categories, and legal frameworks, however, are acts of silencing, whereby the exceptional of the nuclear becomes negotiated in mundane acts of power. A closer look at who is being silenced and how this affects the ability to scrutinize routine processes opens up questions of justice and eventually even leads to potential safety issues.

Bowker, G. C. and Star, S. L.: Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, MIT Press, ISBN 9780262522953, 2000.
Chandra, V. K.: Society, Resistance, and Civil Nuclear Policy in India Nuclearising the State, Routledge, ISBN 9780367607555, 2021.
Hecht, G.: The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II, MIT Press, ISBN 9780262581967, 2009.
Hecht, G.: Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, MIT Press, ISBN 9780262526869, 2014.
Ialenti, V.: Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now, MIT Press, ISBN 9780262539265, 2020.
Jacobs, R. A.: Nuclear Bodies the Global Hibakusha, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300230338, 2022.
Joyce, R.: The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780190888138, 2020.
Keating, T. P. and Storm, A.: Nuclear Memory: Archival, Aesthetic, Speculative, Progress in Environmental Geography, 2, 97–117, https://doi.org/10.1177/27539687231174242, 2023.
Kuchinskaya, O.: Politics of Invisibility Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl, MIT Press, ISBN 9780262548861, 2023.
Makhijani, A., Hu, H., and Yih, K. (Eds.): Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects, MIT Press, ISBN 9780262632041, 2000.
Masco, J.: The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico, Princeton University Press, ISBN 9780691120768, 2006.
Masco, J.: The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making, Duke University Press, ISBN 9781478011149, 2021.
White, R.: The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 9780809015832, 1995.

Review process: all papers of this special issue underwent the regular interactive peer-review process of Safety of Nuclear Waste Disposal handled by guest editors designated by the SaND managing editors.