Funded PhD - Evaluating Nuclear Heritage: Developing and Practical Approaches to Complex

• Funded PhD - Evaluating Nuclear Heritage:
  Developing New and Practical Approaches to a Complex Industrial Landscape

4 November 2022

A PhD project funded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to be hosted at the University of York, jointly between the Departments of Archaeology and Physics.

Lead academic supervisors:
Professor John Schofield (Archaeology) and Professor David Jenkins (Physics)

NOTE:

This opportunity isonly available to Home (i.e. UK) citizens. This is based on the fact that students will need to receive national security clearance both for access to sites and archives held at Nucleus, and that this clearance may be problematic for EU or International students.

Applications must be submitted by midnight GMT on Friday4th November
2022 to the University's online system . Interviews will be heldon 24/25th November 2022. The studentships will ideally begin in January 2023.

For academic enquiries relating to these scholarships, please contact the supervisors (details below). For general enquiries relating to the application, please cont

UK-based researchers are amongst the front runners in developing new understandings of contemporary industrial heritage including its values and long-term legacies. For the nuclear industry, this heritage includes: sites and buildings; items and infrastructure; documents;scientific and engineering developments some of which were world-leading at the time;and the memories of communities that often remain after decommissioning.

This is therefore a specialised field where social- and knowledge-based values are essential to informed decision making. This innovative project will address NDA’sPriority Area E9by defining new ways to assess the heritage values of these complex and often contested places. The project will benefit from the combined expertise of specialists from archaeology/heritage and physics who have worked together previously at CERN.

The PhD study will: explore the various ways that heritage values can be applied to the nuclear industry; and translate this knowledge into NDA policy. The project will involve: developing and promoting key skills required to help NDA carry out its mission over the coming decades; and encouraging knowledge transfer between academic and industrial communities working on nuclear decommissioning; while:exploring the opportunity for including citizen engagement in decision making.

Outputs from the project will include accessible and practical heritage guidelines for NDA staff alongside academic and publicly accessible outputs.

How the project will support the NDA mission

In response toPriority Area E9, this project has the specific aim of creating social and knowledge-based understanding to inform guidelines for future heritage decision making across the NDA Estate. As stated under E9: ‘There is a lack of research on the heritage value of the nuclear industry in the UK. There is a risk that losses may occur during decommissioning through a failure to recognise the value of what is there.’Building

on SCHOFIELD’s prior experience in heritage policy and management related to contested and contemporary heritage, and his previous collaboration with JENKINS at CERN, the project will use a combination of site visits and archival research todefine social and knowledge-based values that will:
1) contribute to informed decisions about the future of the nuclear estate, by helping to identify which sites, buildings or infrastructure should be preserved in situ and by record and which can be adaptively reused;
2) promote and enhance public (including local) understanding of the significance of the UK’s nuclear heritage; and
3) help to establish how sustainable or publicly acceptable various decommissioning solutions might be.

The project aligns closely with SCHOFIELD’s previous work on the military estate where the same risks existed, that vital aspects of heritage could be considered to lack or hold negative value and, as a result, be needlessly destroyed without record. This danger is…