Emerging+Narratives_pedlt3



The first image (1)—taken at the 1954 annual “Atomic Frontier Days” celebration—features a man in a protective suit within inflated plastic facing a “old west” settler couple. The float is painted with the words “where the old west meets the new,” and on either side of the wooden fence we find present, in the form of tiles, and the past, in the form of sagebrush and dirt. This scene was created by General Electric to celebrate the 10 th  anniversary of the 1  st  reactor at Hanford coming online. Of course, the old west portrayed roughly a century old, and like the new, new west, it was based upon the expulsion of its residents to reservations, causing years of warfare.

Were this float to drive down the streets of Richland now, it would have quite a different meaning. These annual events, some have argued, put Richland’s nuclear present in the context of its past, positioning residents as pioneers of a new technology. (2) Like the settlers that had displaced the American Indian nations in the region a century earlier, they were engaged in a national project that, expanded American power and their hopes for prosperity. Both projects were deeply flawed and violent, but also imbued with the accumulate weight of ethnocentric common sense. They were, at least for white Americans, easy to celebrate. The kinds of nuclear fear that, for example, Joe Masco explores were only then beginning to percolate into the public technoimaginary. —one of the first films linking radiation, mutation, and horror, was released the same year (2006).

By the 1980s, this float could never be seen the same way again, especially in this region. Local communities noticed a myriad of health problems, particularly concerning thyroids, and strongly suspected that it had something to do with their secretive neighbors. After a freedom of information request, they discovered that GE’s portrayal of the coming of the “new west” was very timely. Tens of thousands of curies of iodine 131, xenon-133, and other dangerous isotopes had been released—much of it intentionally—in the six years prior to the event. Many already received doses that, decades later, would be at issue in lawsuits and scientific studies attempting to link these exposures to specific illnesses. This was, I suppose, another new west. These revelations, along with legacies of the environmental movement, and the connection of apocalypse, horrible illnesses, and nuclear weapons, meant that development could no longer simply be taken as somewhere between heroic and mundanely and uncontroversially good, even as Richland remained economically dependen on the site.

As the Berlin Wall, and with it the guiding rationales behind the cold war nuclear complex, were dismantled (or, in the latter case, restructured), Hanford could change too. From Plutonium swords, the work of this atomic frontier became making environmental ploughshares. Remediation became the primary mission of the site, and instead of extending the secrecy of the old new west, the DOE set up various mechanisms to bring in “stakeholders” and organize public meetings to help govern the site.



The second image, taken only a year ago, depicts this newest, new west, although in a way that suggests a hi-tech restoration the irretrievable landscape of the early 19 th  century. The image depicts Jane Jones, a technician for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, planting Lupinus, one of the many plants that will be repopulated in the “sagebrush” landscape of the site, which will also be culled of invasive weeds like Yellow Starthistle. (3) The Umatilla confederation, with funding from the DoE, has built greenhouses and other resources to conduct experiments on how best to reintroduce native plants.

[Still under construction, especially about the latest west I began to write about…]

(1) [] (2) For related images, and a “remix,” see: [] (3) []