Making Nuclear Materials Cohabit: the French La Hague Plant as a Place for Negotiating a New Nuclear Habitat Policy

The La Hague plant is the place where all spent fuel is processed either in the form of storage or in the form of transformation by chemical processes. This process aims to separate the radioactive elements in order to reintegrate them into the production system or to store them on site. This plant, spread over 125 hectares, is today the largest storage site for radioactive materials in the world. This storage is today subject to unprecedented tensions, due to a saturation of the "pools" where these materials are stored under water. I propose to understand this situation as a crisis of the nuclear habitat. Such a problematization makes it possible to show three points: (i) that the nuclear production system cannot function without the integration, at various scales, of habitats for nuclear materials; (ii) that the nuclear habitat has become today one of the main locus of controversy on nuclear issues; (iii) and that the question of the care of this habitat is at the heart of these controversies.
Faced with the risk of saturation of the nuclear habitat, two decisions have been taken: that of densifying the occupants of the habitat and that of building new habitats, by replicating or changing the technical modalities of storage. From the articulation of these two choices, a new policy of nuclear habitat could emerge, where the materials contained therein could either remain assets for the future with the need to take constant care of them, or liabilities awaiting underground storage - another type of habitat - minimizing the necessary care.