ABSTRACT
Nuclear energy, today often associated with devastating environmental catastrophes, inspired promethean imaginaries of large-scale nature improvement in the postwar heydays of high-modern optimism. Fuel-reproducing fast breeder reactors (FBRs) in particular were expected to provide unlimited quantities of inexpensive energy in the near future for purposes such as the large-scale desalination of seawater – an application both the United States and the USSR deemed highly promising for the development of arid regions within and beyond their borders. Materializing these visions became a focal point of superpower competition in the third quarter of the twentieth century, and the nuclear oasis of Shevchenko on the Caspian's arid eastern shore represented one of the Soviet Union's most comprehensive attempts to do so. Built in the 1960s as a hub for the development of abundant uranium and hydrocarbon deposits on the desert peninsula of Mangyshlak in Western Kazakhstan, the city of 200 000 inhabitants depended on the world's first industrial-scale FBR operating in tandem with the largest nuclear-powered water desalination plant ever built for energy and freshwater provision and was showcased domestically and abroad to unanimous acclaim. This chapter analyzes Shevchenko as a hybrid space where technology and ecology were purposefully reblended in historically specific ways, as part of Soviet nuclear technopolitics. Tracing later developments reveals a learning process in which the authors of the nuclear technopolis came to acknowledge not only the graveness of technology's unintended detrimental effects on the environment, but also the latter's unforeseen potential to interfere with technology in beyond-design-basis events such as earthquakes and rising levels of the Caspian, thereby posing the danger of large-scale envirotechnical accidents.
