Draft+Overview_pedlt3

//**Still Under Construction**//

In February of 2013, it was discovered that six tanks holding radioactive wastes was leaking into the ground at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state. These leaking radionuclides represented only the latest in a nearly seventy year legacy of toxic and radioactive contamination at the site, which was founded with the top secret mission of producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Beginning in the eighties, with increasing concerns about the health impacts of the facility on local residents and workers, and accelerating with the release of tens of thousands of classified documents in the 1986 and the end of the cold war a few years later, this site began to take on a new mission—environmental remediation.

This project aims to investigate the politics, history, and ethical reasoning at play in Hanford, one of the largest environmental cleanup efforts in the world. Because of its long and complex history with nuclear technology, an ethnographic approach to Hanford and its connections to larger sociotechnical systems and ethical/political imaginaries can help to generate new perspectives not only on the legacy of the cold war, but issues of environmental justice and intergenerational relation as they relate to nuclear waste and contamination. Hanford, for example, has also served as a low level nuclear waste site and houses high level wastes that would eventually be shipped to a permanent geological repository, when such a controversial facility is sited and constructed.

This remediation effort, which includes a complex governance system involving stakeholder processes, public meetings, federal agencies, American Indian nations, state governments, the environmental movement, and local communities, must make decisions on how thoroughly to clean the site, to what degree restrictions on the possible uses of land far into the future should be relied upon to ensure public health, and whether restrictions on land use should be marked in such a way that they can survive the radical changes possible in the spans of time relevant to radioactive decay. To negotiate these complex issues is to negotiate, either implicitly or explicitly, the ethical obligations to future generations, as well as diverse populations in the present.