Living on with Sellafield: Nuclear infrastructure, slow violence, and the politics of quiescence

Abstract

Communities living with nuclear infrastructures have widely been positioned as quiescent and accepting of the risks posed. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in 2008 in the village of Seascale, which neighbours the UK’s Sellafield nuclear site, and on recent thinking on nuclear and toxic geographies, this paper troubles the idea of nuclear quiescence. In doing so, it critically engages with a long tradition of geographical research on nuclear communities, much of which adopts a risk‐perception paradigm, foregrounding the presence (or absence) of localised concern. Within this body of work, interest has centred on the apparent paradox that those spatially exposed are also most quiescent, pointing to the play of economic dependency, risk denial, and familiarity with nuclear infrastructure. This paper addresses the slow violence inherent in living on with nuclear infrastructure: drawn‐out effects and affects of nuclearity on place that are barely visible in the routines of everyday life. I locate these expressions of social and geographic damage in techno‐political relations that obscure the exceptionalism of the nuclear industry. The analysis challenges passive renderings of toxic victimhood by emphasising modes of pragmatic resistance – subtle and contingent ways in which residents challenge the identity and structural relations of being nuclear. I stress the need for geographers to find alternative ways of theorising the unjust relationship between nuclear economies, infrastructures, and places in situations of political‐economic dependency and domination. I argue that policy instruments aimed at securing social justice in nuclear infrastructure planning will need to more fully, and openly, grapple with questions around the socio‐political relations of care that might sustain a ‘good life’ for places that have very long histories and even longer futures with toxicity.

Biosocial borders: Affective debilitation and resilience among women living in a violently bordered favela

“…Fernanda's biophysiological profile offers a powerful empirical counter‐narrative to any assumption that living in a situation of ‘chronic’ violence (Pearce, 2007), ‘slow’ violence (Bickerstaff, 2022), or ‘enduring’ violence (Jones, 2023) might necessarily result in a deadening of affective response. Despite undergoing various deeply traumatic experiences, she embodies the border in ways that sustain active engagement in community work.…”

Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative

“…Likewise, Davies (2013, 127) develops something of nuclear memory via interview and photographic methods engaging with those working in the Chernobyl exclusion zone in highlighting the strange similarly between ‘memory’ and the ‘nuclear’ that are both “simultaneously vivid and intangible”, and express something of the “unseen and lived reality of everyday life”. Focussing on Sellafield in the UK, Bickerstaff (2022, 967) articulates a sense of the intangible by calling for ethnographic writings that “work through these drawn-out timescapes, the invisibilities and affects of slow violence” of nuclear industries (see also Kalshoven 2022). Intersecting questions of the intangible and difficult-to-detect aspects of memory production, Voyles’ (2015, 202) research into the enduring colonial politics of uranium mining in Navajo land in the United States bears witness to the way “competing and echoing histories of violence, as well as about histories of the complex personhood of community life” take shape in relation to nuclear industries and the dispossession of land.…”

“…Engagements with nuclear semiotics (Sebeok 1984), atomic heritage (Storm, Andersson and Rindzevičiūtė2019), nuclear waste futures (Joyce 2020), nuclear art (Volkmar 2022) and cultures (Carpenter 2016), future consciousness (Högberg et al 2017), toxic waste studies (Kaur 2021), memory studies (Freeman 2016), nuclear landscapes (Pitkanen and Farish 2018), and decolonial approaches to nuclearity (Hecht 2014) directly and indirectly approach the problem of how to think the enduring materialities of nuclear things into the future given the danger these materials can pose to organic life over thousands of years. Part of the reason for this intrigue, perhaps, is the sense that the imperceptible qualities of nuclear materials might offer fresh perspectives on environmental problems (Bickerstaff 2022;Klaubert 2021)especially through deep time perspectives (Bjornerud 2018;Gordon 2021;Ialenti 2020), speculative forms of experience (Engelmann 2022;Keating 2022a), and alternative ontologies of environmental envelopment (Morton 2013;Povinelli 2021). In the case of nuclear waste, transferring knowledge and information about these materials into the future requires alternative techniques of thought capable of thinking with the 100,000 year time horizon that spent nuclear fuel is deemed dangerous to organic life 1a time horizon wherein contemporary language systems are ineffectual, and where the existence of the 'human' is in doubt.…”

Care for Transactions

“…Political ecology, for instance, presents multiple opportunities for exchange between disciplines, between the global North and South, and between academia and activism. Taken broadly, it approaches natures as produced by political, economic, historical and cultural processes, and has proved remarkable in its depth and growing breadth (e.g., Bickerstaff, 2022; Bond et al, 2020; Bryant & Goodman, 2004; Connolly, 2020; Cseke, 2022; Davies, 2021; Faria et al, 2021; Gandy, 2022; Hope, 2021; Staddon, 2009). As these cited articles illustrate, Transactions already provides space to develop political‐ecological scholarship in ways that simultaneously extend and shift thinking and research in Geography.…”