Gabrielle Hecht

Images from the French countryside often show enormous nuclear cooling towers juxtaposed with idyllic villages and old castles. The French take just as much pride in the technological artifacts as in the traditional countryside. This award-winning book from Gabrielle Hecht examines how technology, politics, the environment, and national identity have interacted to create modern French culture. She examines the history of French nuclear power during the 1950s and 1960s in great detail. Her strategy is "to trace the social, political, and cultural life of reactors as artifacts" (p. 5). Her two main protagonists are the competing institutions Électricité de France (EDF) and Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA). The main question was what a nuclear reactor really was: should it be built for energy production or to provide plutonium for French nuclear arms program? Thus, politics and technology were deliberately embedded in the early nuclear reactors, restricting and shaping future developments. Hecht argues that acknowledging the political nature of technological development – technopolitics – may contribute to including and respecting “the full range of stakeholders in technical decisions” (p. 339).… (meer)