The computer, it has been argued, inspired a wave of post-war 'imaginary futures', from ecstatic fantasies of time and space travel to fears of mankind's extinction. Yet, prior technological developments were similarly animated by fantasies and anxieties about the transformation of human capacities. Here Iain Boal brings three critical histories of modernity's futuramas firmly back down to earth

On March 26 a Financial Times 'Lex' columnist wrote:
"Happily for nuclear power, there are new bogeymen in town.  Flatulent cows and coal fires are heating up the planet, while autocratic regimes seem to control most of the fossil fuel reserves.  As democratic Canada and Australia sit on plenty of uranium, and nuclear power generation is relatively clean once the plants are up and running, the industry seems set to make a comeback. [...] Russia announced this month that it expects to build as many as 42 new domestic reactors by 2030, compared with the 31 it is running now.  Its nuclear holding company, Rosatom, created in another fit of state-led industrial reorganisation, hopes to export another 60.  Some of these will go to China, which has 11 reactors in operation and five in construction.  The plan is to increase Chinese nuclear generation capacity fivefold by 2020, and then triple that by 2030.  In the US, plans for 30 new plants have been announced, and several developed countries are eyeing the replacement of similar reactors.
   So a burst of activity similar to the 1980s, when building work on half of the world's 438 nuclear power stations began, seems likely over the next two decades..."
    All of which makes now seem like a good moment to return to this 1986  article from German Wildcat (http://www.wildcat-www.de/), which argues that nuclear expansion was never just an 'energy' question: rather it has always played a key role in the restructuring (i.e. casualization, contracting-out, 'precarization', as it's now known) of labour on a  geographical and technological basis.  The article gives a concrete account of how this worked and how it was resisted last time round in Europe.  The analysis of work in a construction boom based on outsourced casual labour is obviously pertinent right now; as for state-initiated, privately implemented nuclear projects, it looks like the implications could be seen soon on a much bigger scale in Russia and China.