The Cold War left hot legacies. Tons of Plutonium, aquifers polluted with mercury from tritium production, test areas with all kinds of legacy pollution (including anthropogenic minerals like Trinitite and Kharitonchik), abandoned Uranium mines and their overburden heaps, radioactive tailing ponds with aging dams in tectonically active areas, mines who need pumping so not to pollute groundwaters, the list goes on and on. legacy sites will need to be managed and monitored for centuries, some for millennia. This lecture presents some cases of legacy sites and discusses their combined socio-technical risk patterns. The limits of manageability will also be discussed from the viewpoint of an environmental historian.
Verena Winiwarter is an environmental historian. She held professorial positions in this area at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt and at BOKU Vienna and now chairs the commission for interdisciplinary ecological studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where she is a full member.
Der Eintritt ist frei. Die Veranstaltung findet auf Englisch statt.