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Between 2021 and 2024, working in collaboration with the Center for Asian Studies, Tim Oakes hosted a series of four workshops on nuclear power development and disaster in Asia. The workshops were funded by a generous grant from the Albert Smith Nuclear Age Fund. The first, held in commemoration of the 10^Ìýyear anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan, explored how people in Japan have lived with the aftermath of this disaster. The second focused on China’s efforts to expand its nuclear power industry and export its nuclear technology. The third examined the broader political and cultural configurations of the nuclear realm from an Asian perspective, while a fourth workshop brought together most of the participants of all three previous workshops for a final extended discussion on what we might learn from the different aspects of nuclear power development and disaster in Asia.

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Residents in Pingtung County, Taiwan, protest against a referendum on whether to reactivate the Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant. July, 2025. Source: Taiwan Central News Agency: https://focustaiwan.tw/society/202507030010.

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While the issues swirling around nuclear power are often portrayed in purely technical terms, the workshops sought to demonstrate that nothing is ever ‘just technical’. The project’s sociotechnical perspective sought to recognize that nuclear power enrolls people, as individuals and as groups, into a particular and peculiar set of relationships with technology. Those relationships blur the boundaries between science and society, and between technology and culture, in unique and compelling ways. How do people – in their everyday lives – understand and practice their relationship to radiation? How do they calculate different kinds of risk? How do they come to be involved in the measurement of radiation and the science of predicting its health-related effects? What have been the unexpected political outcomes of people’s encounters with nuclear technology? How do we define responsibility when considering the risks and benefits of nuclear energy? How have cultural practices been shaped by people’s relationship with the technologies and infrastructures of nuclear power, or with the technological interventions brought about by the disaster? These are just some of the questions workshop participants grappled with.

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Residents in Lianyungang, China, protest government plans to build a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. August, 2016. Source: South China Morning Post: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2001726/nuclear-plant-scheme-halted-eastern-china-after.

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Along with CU Boulder Anthropologist Kate Goldfarb, Oakes is co-editing a collection of papers from the workshops in a volume to be published in 2026 by the ³Ô¹ÏÍø of Toronto Press. Living in Nuclear Asia: Sociotechnical perspectives on nuclear power development, risk, and vulnerability will, in the broadest sense, address what it means to survive in the nuclear age in Asia. Collectively, the chapters in the book ask: what do we learn by paying attention to Asian experiences of ‘nuclearity’?Ìý Nuclear power is typically written about from the policy perspectives of proliferation, containment, and security. This is especially the case regarding work on nuclear development in Asia. Living in Nuclear AsiaÌýmarks a departure from this trend, emphasizing instead nuclear technologies themselves, including nuclear power infrastructures, and the socio-cultural, economic, and political relations that swirl around them.