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Долгое замыкание: технологические ожидания и (пост)советская ядерная энергетика будущего
Abstract. In January 1959, from the platform of the XXI Party Congress, the communist
leaders promised the Soviet people the developing of material and technical conditions for the
transition to the Light Future at the end of the first seven years plan, and physicists promised unlimited
access to new energy sources. The promises of physicists remain viable: today Russia is developing a
thermonuclear reactor and is closing the nuclear fuel cycle. These ambitious technoscientific programs,
implemented in the USSR since the middle of the last century by competing nuclear centers, have
already demonstrated their ability to shape the national sociotechnical imaginaries, colonize the future,
accumulate symbolic capital and “long-term expectations”. Now they are integrated into the actual
technological, political, economic and media landscapes.
As the experience of the 2010s has shown the repertoire of Cold war propaganda, developed in the
Soviet era, can be reused in contemporary Russia. Are the “engineering utopias” of the Late socialism
subject to recycling? How do they work? Who and how is trying to adapt them to actual circumstances?
How does the nuclear community, reacting to this re-installation, articulate its (non)readiness for a
new round of long-term expectations revealing, thereby, the trace of utopia, planned economy, Big
Soviet science and life, given to (not)implemented technoscientific program? The author answers these
questions by dissecting the discourse about the closure of the nuclear fuel cycle for breeder reactors.
Through study of historical documents, memoirs, interviews with nuclear veterans, nuclear forums
and media publications it will be shown that the closuring the nuclear cycle is not only a project and
ideology, but also a specific way of nuclear community being in time.