Spectres of Seppo: The Afterlives of Finland's Nuclear Waste Experts

Ialenti, Vincent

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3544133

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…3 Nuclear waste repositories require many decades of organizational continuity throughout their R&D, construction, licensing, operations and decommissioning phases (Pescatore and Vári, 2006). These long-term institutional planning horizons have sparked productive debates about intergenerational equity (Shrader-Frechette, 2005), multi-decade budgeting strategies (Saraç-Lesavre, 2016), long-term repository ‘megaproject’ evaluation (Lehtonen, 2015) and the transmission of nuclear waste expertise to successors amidst intergenerational workforce turnover (Ialenti, 2020b). 4 Yet nuclear waste risks entangle with the shallower time horizons of contemporary sociopolitical processes too.…”

Section: Operational Temporalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drum breach: Operational temporalities, error politics and WIPP’s kitty litter nuclear waste accident

Ialenti

2021

Soc Stud Sci

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In February 2014 at the WIPP transuranic waste repository in New Mexico, a drum erupted in fire. It exposed 22 people to radiation, shut down the underground facility for 35 months and cost the United States over a billion dollars. Heat and pressure had built up in the drum due to chemical reactions with an organic kitty litter, Swheat Scoop, which had been mistakenly added to it at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. This article disrupts two prominent narratives: (a) that the accident was induced by a typographical error made after a waste packaging operations supervisor misheard ‘inorganic kitty litter’ as ‘an organic kitty litter’ during a meeting, and (b) that it was induced primarily by ‘mismanagement’ at WIPP, Los Alamos and the DOE’s New Mexico field offices. It does so by exploring how a series of overambitious political initiatives, fraught labor relationships, financialized subcontracting arrangements and US Department of Energy (DOE) performance incentives set the stage for Los Alamos’s notorious error by accelerating US waste packaging, shipping and repository emplacement rates beyond systemic capacity. Attention to operational temporalities shows how an often-overlooked nexus of schedule pressures, political-economic imperatives and regulatory breakdowns converged to modulate nuclear waste management workflows and, ultimately, trigger a radiological accident.

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Section: Operational Temporalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drum breach: Operational temporalities, error politics and WIPP’s kitty litter nuclear waste accident

Ialenti

2021

Soc Stud Sci

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“…In this arrival on the shore, different temporalities intersect: human life history; geological formation; the half-life of radioactive material. To grasp what is happening in the present requires thinking about times that reach into the past, and fan out well into the futurea point which Ialenti (2020) The potash-rich product of this kelp burning (a major Orkney industry from 1722 onward) had lucrative uses in the glass and soap industries; but the choking flames from the burning enraged the Nuckelavee and threw him into a fury which he took out on the islanders in the form of plague. Thinking about the radioactive seaweed, we're reminded of the story and its horror as it resonates with more recent nuclear anxieties: what washes up on the shore as economic opportunity and choking poison, opportunity and destruction.…”

Section: Generations Of Stromnessians Learned To Swim At the Tender T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Time Horizon: Intersections of Deep Time and Biographical Time on the West Shore, Stromness, Orkney

et al. 2021

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What is the significance of a human life in relation to the timespan of the geological processes that shape and reshape the terrain under our feet? Here, we ask how we might think on a planetary scale while being grounded in the everyday, tracing the relationship between biographical time and geological formation. Examining social relationships through the materiality of sandstone, uranium, and concrete, this paper presents a collaborative deep time practice, realised through the iterative process of walking, reading and inscribing a specific site, the West Shore of Stromness, Orkney.

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“…The very term 'model' has referred to an extraordinarily wide range of methods and entities, including a wide diversity of computer models in use in the energy field (Silvast et al 2020). Individual models have intricate development stories that are tied to the lives of their developers (Ialenti 2020). This paper understands computer models in a generic way: as simplified bounded representations of aspects of energy systems.…”

Section: Framework: the Enactment Of Esi In Computer Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Energy systems integration as research practice

Silvast

Abram

Copeland

2021

Technology Analysis & Strategic Management

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This article adopts frameworks and methods from Science and Technology Studies for examining Energy Systems Integration (ESI). ESI, the integrated operation and planning of multiple energy supplies and demands, can contribute to improvements in energy reliability, security and flexibility, and therefore facilitate a transition to a low carbon economy. The article examines UK research towards integrated computer models of energy system 'vectors'. The research is based on fieldwork and participation in a large ESI research project in the UK, drawing on interviews, workshops and observations. We highlight three main contributions to the studies on ESI and STS research of modelling. First, ESI researchers are aware of the social, economic and political context of their work, though many of these contexts are difficult to incorporate in any useful modelling process. Second, issues that touch on both science and policy around energy systems were the motivation for ESI researchers yet were also underemphasised in project work. Third, we develop unique mixed ethnographic methods to study ESI and that enable researchers to build relations of trust with research participants that contribute to the discussion of sensitive topics such as the politics and ethics of energy modelling approaches.

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Spectres of Seppo: The Afterlives of Finland's Nuclear Waste Experts

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Drum breach: Operational temporalities, error politics and WIPP’s kitty litter nuclear waste accident

Drum breach: Operational temporalities, error politics and WIPP’s kitty litter nuclear waste accident

Time Horizon: Intersections of Deep Time and Biographical Time on the West Shore, Stromness, Orkney

Energy systems integration as research practice

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