Abstract
This paper examines how uranium mining in East Germany - embedded in the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War - produced specific nuclear cultures that continue to shape the present. Framing the management of nuclear legacies as a local and global security issue, the paper highlights how uranium extraction and its afterlives intersect with environmental, health, and societal security concerns across generations. Drawing on the spatio-temporal entanglements of extraction and post-extractive remediation, the article demonstrates that the ‘nuclear’ is not solely a technological phenomenon but is deeply rooted in everyday life-worlds, social relations, and cultural practices. Precisely because of this embeddedness in the everyday, nuclear legacies emerge as long-term security challenges in which risks may become normalized, rendered invisible, or politically depoliticized. By analysing ambivalences - between exceptionalism and banalisation, risk and privilege, destruction and infrastructure, secrecy and everyday life, as well as trauma and nostalgia - the paper shows how uranium mining has shaped identity, memory, and regional belonging. Particular attention is paid to the role of knowledge archives, nuclear cultural heritage, and global circulations of expertise, as well as to the challenges posed by long-term radioactive temporalities. In doing so, the paper contributes to a broader understanding of how the nuclear becomes effective in everyday life and how its material and immaterial afterlives can be remembered, communicated, and responsibly shaped across generations. It argues that the governance of nuclear legacies constitutes not only a technical or environmental concern, but a societal and security-relevant task central to safeguarding the well-being of present and future generations.
Panel: Politics at the Intersection of Climate, Industrialization and Security