The natural archives of La Hague: Cold War legacies, radioactive rivers, and the endless accident

Abstract

This thesis introduces the nuclear cluster of La Hague in Normandy, France, to the field of nuclear culture by exploring its complex and ongoing legacies of radioactive contamination. The two sites addressed are a nuclear reprocessing plant (Orano) and a nuclear waste near-surface repository (ANDRA). The ecosystems and natural environment surrounding both sites have been subjected to continuous fallout and toxic spills which, over seventy years of development and constant redeployment, have progressively laced the peninsula with invisible and radiotoxic residues and traces.

Rivers and marshlands are pivotal to the research, serving as material witnesses to the slow nuclear violence operating in the peninsula—the wet accident continuously unfolding. The thesis probes the entanglements between nuclear infrastructures and the natural environment, while outlining the relational dimension of residues and the failures of waste management, maintenance, and containment. This is achieved by establishing connections between data provided by the local NGO ACRO, which has monitored the area since 1986, and the rare official documentation of past accidents. The work aims to retrospectively reconstruct the political contexts of spills and accidents as well as to emphasise their long-lasting consequences.

Two events take centre stage: a tritium leak that contaminated the St. Hélène River, and a fire at Silo–130, whose contamination was detected by the Ruisseau des Landes thirty years later. In both instances, probing the events and their legacies highlights the voiding of official information and the ways in which, since the Cold War, secrecy has cloaked the nuclear facilities. One isotope, plutonium, helps establish a direct lineage between the reprocessing plant and repository and the French nuclear military programme that led to the French atomic bomb. The research foregrounds the agency of aquifers and rivers as natural entities that coalesce, redistribute, store, and redeploy isotopes in time and space.

The radioactive liquidscape of La Hague encompasses past toxic legacies and their future redeployments. In this way, the absence of official data and documentation is alleviated by approaching La Hague’s ecosystem as a natural archive. Sediments, water, and plants possess a material memory open to decipherment and critical political realignment. This endeavour explores and documents La Hague’s nuclear memory, and articulates alternative narratives for its Cold War legacies.

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ORCID for Agnes Villette: orcid.org/0000-0002-8854-8972

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