Actualidad
Fecha: 20 de febrero de 2025 12:00
Fluid Things: Oil Money in Nuclear Industry in the 1970s
Día y hora: jueves, 20 de febrero de 2025, 12:00 horas
Lugar: Sala de Reuniones del Departamento de Economía. Edificio Los Madroños, 2ª planta (ECON-2026)
Ponente: Jay Sarkar (University of Glasgow)
Título: Fluid Things: Oil Money in Nuclear Industry in the 1970s
Abstract: Fluid Money examines how oil companies entered the uranium mining market as demand for nuclear energy rose, even before the 1973 oil shock. Focusing on new entrants in the uranium business, Gulf Oil, Exxon, and Total, this chapter de-exceptionalizes the nuclear energy industry. There were no “nuclear” companies. Instead, there were monopolistic corporations of capital-intensive commodities that needed and received state support, even while they themselves opposed “big government” and regulation. In the United States, against the backdrop of antitrust Congressional challenges, Indigenous activism, and anti-nuclear protests, several of these companies began to reconstitute themselves offshore, on the one hand, and adopted a rhetoric of corporate social responsibility and environmentalism, on the other. In Europe, companies such as Total gripped resource-rich African countries such as Angola, Mozambique, and Namibia prospecting for uranium, to diversify and maximize their profits.