Poster+Abstract


 * Contaminated Futures: Caring for the Future and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation **

The Hanford nuclear reservation, a former plutonium production site and current nuclear waste site, is one of the most contaminated sites in North America, and is currently undergoing one of the largest environmental remediation efforts ever undertaken. This effort poses the technologically and scientifically difficult challenge of “cleaning” millions of tons of soil, water, and industrial facilities. Hanford also presents a complex sociopolitical challenge, however, that involves negotiating both the troubling legacies of the past—including the history of intentional releases of Iodine-131 and other radionuclides during the cold war and U.S.-American Indian relations in the region—and the urgencies of the present—including large cuts in government funding. It also involves very different anticipations of the future. Given the long half-lives of many of the contaminants at Hanford, long-term anticipation and imagination is implicit in much of technoscientific, sociocultural, and political activity that surrounds this site, and understanding how these different “futures” shape nuclear waste sites is the central concern of this project. It will pay particular attention to how various conceptions of intergenerational ethics or justice are formed and mobilized, implicitly and explicitly, by the subjects of this study.

This investigation will take the form of an ethnographic fieldwork in Richland, WA and the surrounding region, along with interviews with experts and other relevant actors around the country. I plan to engage “stakeholders,” scientists, engineers, activists, and policymakers involved with remediation efforts at Hanford in conversations about they see the past and future of the site affecting the present situation at Hanford, and their work in particular. I will also rely on the analysis of documents and other information produced by government agencies and other important actors, participant observation at key meetings and events, and comparative analyses, for which other waste sites such as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and Sellafield in the U.K. will likely be particularly important.

This project will attempt to use insights gained from an ethnography of the Hanford nuclear reservation to attempt to understand not only the long term implications of remediation efforts, but also the implications of different ways of thinking (or not-thinking) in the “long-term” about the environmental legacy that is being left to posterity. In a context of continuing environmental devastation on local, regional, and global scales, ethnographies of both environmental remediation and intergenerational consciousness will be crucial to building a critical understanding—and a critical politics—of the future.