This paper explores the historical formation of nuclear engineering expertise and education in the United States and Sweden between the 1950s and 1970s. It investigates how the definition of nuclear expertise evolved through the institutionalization of nuclear engineering education, shaped by government policy, industrial demands, and interdisciplinarity. Drawing on archival research, oral history, and case studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Royal Institute of Technology, and Chalmers University of Technology, this paper argues that nuclear engineering developed as a hybrid, interdisciplinary field through educational “trading zones” that brought together physics, mechanical engineering, chemistry, and other disciplines. It analyzes nuclear engineers as an “epistemic community,” in which knowledge production and political influence are shaped by education.

Crucially, the analysis reveals how curricula changed over time. As reactor technologies scaled up and safety concerns evolved, the “nuclearity” of knowledge evolved from focusing mostly on theoretical physics to applied thermal-hydraulic and metallurgical engineering. Ultimately, this paper contends that understanding the historical roots of nuclear knowledge–making can inform current debates about the education needs in the nuclear industry and the sociotechnical expertise required in today’s energy transition.

This article examines the Franco-Belgian Chooz A nuclear power plant as a transnational laboratory for nuclear knowledge-making in postwar Europe. Situated on the French–Belgian border, Chooz A was the first pressurized water reactor built in France and one of the earliest collaborations between the French utility EDF, Belgian companies, Westinghouse, and Euratom. We argue that Chooz A is an example of how nuclear knowledge was produced outside of scientific institutions through experimenting, testing, and tinkering. Previous scholarship has tended to analyze nuclear knowledge production from the perspective of “big science” and experiments at scientific institutions. By conceptualizing Chooz A as a laboratory, this article argues that nuclear power plants, often viewed merely as industrial installations, can also be understood as experimental arenas for producing more practical knowledge. Particularly in border settings, nuclear diplomacy was crucial in shaping knowledge production, and collaborative ideas for this knowledge production often coexisted with national interests. Drawing on unexplored archives from EDF, ASNR (the French Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Authority), Westinghouse, and the Belgian National Archives, as well as oral history interviews, we explore five examples that demonstrate Chooz A’s experimental nature: its unconventional cavern design, the operation of the plant as a social laboratory and arena for nuclear diplomacy, the 1968 thermal-shield incident, tritium contamination controversies, and early MOX (mixed-oxide) fuel experiments. In all these instances, not scientists but engineers, technicians, and regular workers produced practical knowledge that would prove crucial in France’s, Belgium’s, and arguably Europe’s energy transition toward nuclear in the postwar period. These examples all demonstrate, to a greater degree than scholars have previously recognized, that the boundary between laboratory experimentation and energy infrastructure was blurrier, as engineers, technicians, and regulators collectively generated tacit and practical knowledge that informed later postwar European nuclear programs.

The disaster in the Bois du Cazier mine in Marcinelle, Belgium was one of the biggest mining accidents in post-Second World War Western European history. The death toll was large: 262 miners died, of whom 136 were Italian. This article studies the transnational impact of that event by combining theoretical frameworks from both risk studies and European integration literature, with a specific focus on the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). After the catastrophe, numerous actors shifted the question of blame from an individual and national level to the European level. Mining risks were discussed as a structural and European issue. Furthermore, the ECSC saw the disaster as an opportunity for more European integration in new domains, most notably social policy. An intergovernmental conference in 1957 placed new policy areas, such as the harmonization of technical standards, emergency management, working conditions, wages and arrangements for foreign labourers on the political agenda. The conference and the body that was founded after it – the Mines Safety Commission – are often portrayed as failures because they did not manage to complete this ambitious social agenda. Still, the Marcinelle accident had a long-lasting impact on the way in which risks and disasters were managed on the European level. Some measures were deemed more ‘technical’, but played a social role as well. The implemented and established institutions and practices within the High Authority remained influential in the decades to come. On a more theoretical level, the case of Marcinelle illustrates the importance of combining risk and European integration frameworks. By studying Marcinelle from a risk management perspective, it is possible to transcend the current historiographic discussions, which seem stuck in a normative quarrel about responsibilities and blame.

Water and nuclear reactors are much closer intertwined than usually perceived. First, water is the source of the steam that drives the turbines of most nuclear power plants around the world. Next to generating electricity, water is the key to preventing accidents in nuclear plants. As uranium keeps on generating heat when the power plant is turned off, its core needs to be cooled continuously. This crucial connection between water and nuclear is focus of the paper. Nuclear safety will appear as relying heavily on earlier knowledge, institutions, and regulatory frameworks, which were related to water. The three parts of this article discuss technologies, actors and risks of nuclear power. Studying water as a resource in a much broader sense than being boiled for steam shows how determining water is to make nuclear power function. As this paper is part of a special issue, Water History in the time of COVID-19, it has undergone modified peer review.

This article examines how the fire in the Innovation department store in Brussels (1967) influenced the politics of risk management in Belgium. I rely on the frameworks of disaster and risk studies and a historical focus on temporality and actors. The Innovation fire was a decisive part of a longer political and societal process within Belgium’s risk community. After the disaster, political changes occurred in the domains of fire prevention regulation, coordination of first aid organisations, and local traffic regulation. In addition, the catastrophe provided an opportunity for Brussels’ city planners. The perception of the fire as a national disaster, abundant media coverage, and a public debate on the risks of long-term modernisation made the catastrophe an opportunity for change. However, many regulatory changes had already been instigated, making the disaster an accelerator rather than a cause of change. Four actors who set the agenda and implemented the new legislation are identified: politicians, journalists, experts, and insurance companies. In sum, it is argued that the Innovation disaster is a model case study for both disaster research and political history.