Demolition of the cooling towers at the Grafenrheinfeld Nuclear Power Plant, Germany, 16 August 2024.
Demolition of the cooling towers at the Grafenrheinfeld Nuclear Power Plant, Germany, 16 August 2024.
Photo by Michael Bemmerl. Wikimedia Commons.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Orsini, Davide, and Uwe Lübken. “(Dis)Empowered Communities: A Conversation with Davide Orsini.” Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review, no. 8 (November 2025). http://doi.org/10.5282/rcc-springs-17462.
Anthropologist and historian Davide Orsini and his research partners are conducting a five-year comparative study that explores the hidden costs and environmental implications of decommissioning nuclear power plants and facilities. Nuclear experts define decommissioning as the process of safely disposing of obsolete nuclear installations at the end of their productive life, with the objective of returning sites to public use or other purposes, if possible. Launched in March 2025, Davide’s Volkswagen Foundation Change! project seeks to foster research collaborations between academic and nonacademic partners to promote social change. It sheds light on the uncertainties surrounding decommissioning projects and aims to involve affected communities in the management of decommissioning strategies. (Dis)Empowered Communities promises to challenge consolidated, and often misleading, ideas about the fate of obsolete nuclear facilities, as Davide explains in an interview with historian Uwe Lübken. (From the interview)
This article was originally published in Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review. Springs is an online publication featuring peer-reviewed articles, creative nonfiction, and artistic contributions that showcase the work of the Rachel Carson Center and its community across the world.
2025 Davide Orsini and Uwe Lübken
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This license refers only to the text and does not include any image rights.
Please see captions in the PDF for individual licenses.