Boiling sand, metallic fire

Abstract

In April 2018 four drums of depleted uranium sludge burst open at a US Department of Energy facility at Idaho National Laboratory. This echoed a previous incident in 2014, when a drum erupted with fire and spewed radionuclides at a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico. Such “drum breach” accidents have been characterized in official reports as “isolated events,” and as “self‐initiated” and “spontaneous.” Yet these descriptions misrepresent a temporal tension at the heart of their causation: during the Cold War, nuclear weapons production created latent socioecological hazards that, decades later, too often manifest during waste cleanup. This tends to result from 21st‐century scheduling pressures, fraught labor relationships, and neoliberal subcontracting arrangements. Thus, if we examine the temporal form taken by US nuclear technopolitics, we can recast drum breach accidents not as stand‐alone events, but as outcomes of systemic incentives to speed up waste‐cleanup projects beyond their organizational capacity without commensurately expanding their safety or oversight mechanisms. [nuclear waste, technopolitics, accidents, neoliberalism, temporality, security, Idaho, United States]

Geology as Unconforming Infrastructure For the Hosting of Nuclear Waste

“…Povinelli (1995), and Raffles (2020). 17 See, for example, Gusterson (1998), Hecht (1998, Ialenti (2020Ialenti ( , 2022, Irvine (2014Irvine ( , 2020, Masco (2006), McBrien (2016, and Saraç-Lesavre (2020). 18 Kelly (2012) offers a vivid example of the ambivalence of the hosting relation, which arose during her research on scientific experimentation on malaria in rural Tanzania.…”

“…Deep time is a geological and ultimately cosmological concept that scholars of nuclear technologies routinely deploy to draw attention to the exceptionally enduring vitality of radioactive matter (Hecht 2012(Hecht , 2018Ialenti 2020Ialenti , 2022Irvine 2014Irvine , 2020Morton 2013). Geologists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists immerse themselves in the study of deep time as they explore both the origins and the demise of planets, stars, and universes.…”

Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative

“…Developing a similar line of thought, research within atomic heritage has recently contributed ways to apprehend the nuclear as a contested techno-political process of categorisation (Ialenti 2022; Rindzevičiūtė, 2019; Storm et al 2019). One implication of this focus on the techno-political has been renewed attention to the political effects of radioactive things – especially in relation to nuclear colonialism.…”