Funded PhD - Evaluating Nuclear Heritage: Developing New and Practical Approaches to a Complex Industrial Landscape
4 November 2022
Key information
A PhD project funded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to be hosted at the University of York, jointly between the Departments of Archaeology and Physics.
Lead academic supervisors: Professor John Schofield (Archaeology) and Professor David Jenkins (Physics)
NOTE: This opportunity is only available to Home (i.e. UK) citizens. This is based on the fact that students will need to receive national security clearance both for access to sites and archives held at Nucleus, and that this clearance may be problematic for EU or International students.
Applications must be submitted by midnight GMT on Friday 4th November 2022 to the University's online system. Interviews will be held on 24/25th November 2022. The studentships will ideally begin in January 2023.
For academic enquiries relating to these scholarships, please contact the supervisors (details below). For general enquiries relating to the application, please contact archaeology-pg@york.ac.uk.
Project Description
UK-based researchers are amongst the frontrunners in developing new understandings of contemporary industrial heritage including its values and long-term legacies. For the nuclear industry, this heritage includes: sites and buildings; items and infrastructure; documents; scientific and engineering developments some of which were world-leading at the time; and the memories of communities that often remain after decommissioning. This is therefore a specialised field where social- and knowledge-based values are essential to informed decision making.
This innovative project will address NDA’s Priority Area E9 by defining new ways to assess the heritage values of these complex and often contested places. The project will benefit from the combined expertise of specialists from archaeology/heritage and physics who have worked together previously at CERN.
The PhD study will: explore the various ways that heritage values can be applied to the nuclear industry; and translate this knowledge into NDA policy. The project will involve: developing and promoting key skills required to help NDA carry out its mission over the coming decades; and encouraging knowledge transfer between academic and industrial communities working on nuclear decommissioning; while exploring the opportunity for including citizen engagement in decision making. Outputs from the project will include accessible and practical heritage guidelines for NDA staff alongside academic and publicly accessible outputs.
How the project will support the NDA mission
In response to Priority Area E9, this project has the specific aim of creating social and knowledge-based understanding to inform guidelines for future heritage decision making across the NDA Estate. As stated under E9: ‘There is a lack of research on the heritage value of the nuclear industry in the UK. There is a risk that losses may occur during decommissioning through a failure to recognise the value of what is there.’
Building on SCHOFIELD’s prior experience in heritage policy and management related to contested and contemporary heritage, and his previous collaboration with JENKINS at CERN, the project will use a combination of site visits and archival research to define social and knowledge-based values that will: 1) contribute to informed decisions about the future of the nuclear estate, by helping to identify which sites, buildings or infrastructure should be preserved in situ and by record and which can be adaptively reused; 2) promote and enhance public (including local) understanding of the significance of the UK’s nuclear heritage; and 3) help to establish how sustainable or publicly acceptable various decommissioning solutions might be.
The project aligns closely with SCHOFIELD’s previous work on the military estate where the same risks existed, that vital aspects of heritage could be considered to lack or hold negative value and, as a result, be needlessly destroyed without record. This danger is evident for NDA in the absence of any mention of heritage in its Draft Strategy in spite of growing interest across the heritage sector in: heritage futures; managing profusion; and dealing with contemporary, contested and toxic legacies. A failure to fully engage with the industry’s heritage would contradict the terms of Historic England’s (2017) Protocol for The Care of The Government Historic Estate, and specifically its requirement to ‘ensure that the significance of any heritage asset is taken into account when planning change or development’.
There is no suggestion that everything across the NDA Estate should be retained. But, as with Cold War military sites, specific items may merit either preservation in situ or by record, or benefit from careful and adaptive re-use. Such decisions can only be taken on the basis of social and knowledge-based evaluation. While a strong foundation has been established in the form of English Heritage’s (2006) Strategy for England’s Atomic Age, combined with the political context of Hill’s (2013) An Atomic Empire, such an evaluation has not yet been undertaken.
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