Waste makes haste: How a campaign to speed up nuclear waste shipments shut down the WIPP long-term repository

Ialenti, Vincent

doi:10.1080/00963402.2018.1486616

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Both accidents were devastating. The continual reappearance of material problems at the Hanford site and more recent accidents such as the one at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico 2 (Ialenti, 2018) serve as indicators of just what a leaking repository can mean in economic, natural and social terms, in the past, present and long into the future. Nonetheless, at the time, and despite the already known consequences of these accidents for neighboring populations and for the biosphere, the problem of nuclear waste was neglected by nuclear institutions and governments.…”

Section: Ocean or Ground?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Living in a Nuclear World

Bensaude‐Vincent¹,

Boudia²,

Satō³

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

List of figures viii Acknowledgments x Introduction: shaping the nuclear order 1 BERNADETTE BENSAUDE-VINCENT, SORAYA BOUDIA AND KYOKO SATO SECTION I Violence and order 21 1 What the bomb has done: victim relief, knowledge and politics 23 KYOKO SATO 2 Optics of exposure 45 JOSEPH MASCO 3 Constructing world order: mobilising tropes of gender, pathology and race to frame US nonproliferation policy 66 JOHN KRIGE 4 The Nuclear Charter: international law, military technology, and the making of strategic trusteeship, 1942-1947 85 M. X. MITCHELL SECTION II Pacifying through control and containment 5 Sharing the "safe" atom?: the International Atomic Energy Agency and nuclear regulation through standardisation ANGELA N. H. CREAGER AND MARIA RENTETZI 6 From military surveillance to citizen counterexpertise: radioactivity monitoring in a nuclear world NESTOR HERRAN 7 Making the accident hypothetical: how can one deal with the potential nuclear disaster? MAËL GOUMRI 8 Governing the nuclear waste problem: nature and technology TANIA NAVARRO RODRÍGUEZ SECTION III Normalising through denial and trivialisation 9 Trivialising life in long-term contaminated areas: the nuclear political laboratory SORAYA BOUDIA 10 Continuing nuclear tests and ending fish inspections: politics, science and the Lucky Dragon Incident in 1954 HIROKO TAKAHASHI 11 The dystopic Pieta: Chernobyl survivors and neoliberalism's lasting judgments KATE BROWN 12 Unfolding time at Fukushima HARRY BERNAS vi Contents SECTION IV Timescaping through memory and future visions 13 Framing a nuclear order of time BERNADETTE BENSAUDE-VINCENT 14 Nuclear dreams and capitalist visions: the peaceful atom in Hiroshima RAN ZWIGENBERG 15 Slow disaster and the challenge of nuclear memory

show abstract

Section: Ocean or Ground?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Living in a Nuclear World

Bensaude‐Vincent¹,

Boudia²,

Satō³

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…With these reward structures in place, incentives to rapidly repackage and ship Area G’s transuranic waste were set. These efforts became known as the 3706 Campaign (Ialenti, 2018; Johns-Hughes et al, 2013).…”

Section: The Spirit Of 3706mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Ialenti

2021

Soc Stud Sci

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

“…But there is strong opposition to the development of nuclear power plants due to the risk of radioactive accidents. Recent examples include: the leak of radioactive materials from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, U.S. (Nelson, Patterson et al 2015, Ialenti 2018; and disaster, such as the Mayapuri radiation accident (Bagla 2010), Fukushima nuclear accident (Holt, Campbell et al 2012, Shigemura, Tanigawa et al 2012 and Chernobyl disaster (Marples 1988, Berger 2010).…”

Section: Nuclear Fission and Fusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Renewable Energy Sources: Traditional and Modern-Age Technologies

Hafezi

Alipour

2021

Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Renewable energy (RE) resources are those energy types that are replaced by natural processes over time. However, the noted definition is not complete. After the Industrial Revolution, the rate of energy resources utilization jumped, and as an example annual per capita energy consumption increased by about 170% during 1750's to 1850's in England (Wrigley 2010). As a result, the definition of a RE resource has evolved to incorporate the replacing period, such that the consumption rate of a RE should be slower than the rate of which nature can replace them, unless the gap can be filled by human activities. Introduction:The primary RE resource embedded non-RE sources, such as oil and minerals, which take millions of years to reform in the earth. Then earth can replace non-RE resources but at a meager pace.The above discussion denotes that even RE sources must be conserved to balance the speed with which humans deplete and nature replaces the lost energy (the process of recharging). The modern world is facing critical challenges to maintain the consumption pace and the recharging process balanced, since: 1-Development, especially from the economic perspective, is closely tied to energy use (Toman and Jemelkova 2003, Carley, Lawrence et al. 2011. Although developed regions have adjusted their dependency on energy use over the past years, the outlook still suggests a net increase in total energy demand for the upcoming decades (IEA 2019, BP 2020, EIA 2020). 2-Population growth leaves the replenishment of RE sources with an increasingly difficult task. This factor is evident in human's increasing footprint, which triggers the next challenge. 3-Environmental concerns and climate change. Climate change is a natural behavior of the earth, but human manipulations stimulate changes at a sweeping pace which endanger different biological species, including humans.Studies and statistics highlight that, during the period since 2010, we have been depleting natural resources about 20% faster than nature can recharge them (Maczulak 2009). That means humans need more than the size of 1.2 earths to support resource consumption at the current pace (Hibbitt 2004). This chapter reviews known RE resources to delineate a comprehensive mind map about RE resources and their variations. The very first RE type: the sun The Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development GoalsThe sun is the mother of industrial era where energy resources, as the energy stored in fossil fuels, originally came from the sun.The use of solar as an emerging energy source began in the industrial era due to the fact fossil fuels originate from the sun. Although humans cannot reproduce the crude oil forming process in an economic manner, they put forward other ways to benefit from the ultimate source of energy, the sun. Nuclear fusion reactions produce electromagnetic radiation wherein hydrogen nuclei bind to form helium, thus, releasing energy. It is informative to know that only one part of 100 total parts forms energy whereas others form the helium. This small share...

show abstract

Waste makes haste: How a campaign to speed up nuclear waste shipments shut down the WIPP long-term repository

Cited by 7 publications

References 2 publications

Living in a Nuclear World

Living in a Nuclear World

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

Renewable Energy Sources: Traditional and Modern-Age Technologies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About