A Fishy Tale of the Nuclear Power Plant Never Built in Estonia: An Envirotechnical History of Energy, Fish, Land and Water Resources Planning at Lake Võrtsjärv

One of the most mysterious stories in Estonian energy history revolves around the planning of a nuclear power plant (NPP) at Lake Võrtsjärv between 1967–1972. Despite the absence of planning documents in the energy archives and the impracticality of an NPP given Estonia’s abundant oil-shale energy production, the story, though sounding fishy, is well established in media and oral sources. In a regime where open confrontation with the central government was risky, alternative resources in the envirotechnical system of the NPP, such as water, fish and land, were mobilised to protect the lake. By utilising envirotechnical systems as a method to locate alternative sources, we have traced the negotiations within the central planning processes of inland fisheries and water resources. As ecosystemic nature protection strengthened, scientists managed to defer the NPP and reorganise the entire fisheries industry at Lake Võrtsjärv, recovering the populations of valuable fish. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .