REX

In March 2011, Japan suffered a triple disaster - an earthquake, a tsunami and a major nuclear accident - the echoes of which are still being felt. This event has become part of the genealogy of major disasters, called, like Chernobyl, to mark our times. To this day it has forced major recalibrations in the way we look at technological risks, linking them to the movements of the planet and its future. "We're going to have to reckon with the Earth" is the lesson we would like to learn from what happened in Japan - and it's this linkage that we propose to work on. Building on collective work begun in 2012, our project focuses on three sites: 1/ the 1,000 kilometres of Pacific coastline in Japan between the Fukushima accident zone and 2/ the municipality of Rokkasho in the far north of the island of Honshu, Japan, a municipality that has established itself as one of the country's major energy hubs by covering the entire nuclear fuel cycle (uranium enrichment plant, radioactive waste storage centre, 'temporary' storage centre for high-level radioactive waste and nuclear waste reprocessing plant built on the model of the plant in La Hague); 3/ La Hague itself, in the north of the Cotentin peninsula, which has a similar combination of nuclear infrastructures in France, and is also currently involved in a major GeoPark project designed to showcase the region's geological treasures. On the basis of this triangulation, we propose to examine the iteration of certain motifs, foremost among which are fear, vulnerability and security - and the ability of states like France or Japan to anticipate the future by producing reliable and robust 'worst-case scenarios' to overcome both technical and natural hazards. Our hypothesis is that what we call 'experience feedback' serves as an empirical starting point for worst-case scenarios, which disorientate linear time by turning the aftermath (post atomic bomb, post Fukushima, etc.) into a beforemath from which to work, calibrate nuclear infrastructures, prepare populations, etc. Our ambition on these thorny issues is to keep the question of energy choices open by appealing to a variety of audiences so that other scenarios can proliferate.