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.
Boiling sand, metallic fire IALENTI, VINCENT
American ethnologist,
08/2022, Letnik:
49, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
ABSTRACT
In April 2018 four drums of depleted uranium sludge burst open at a US Department of Energy facility at Idaho National Laboratory. This echoed a previous incident in 2014, when a drum ...erupted with fire and spewed radionuclides at a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico. Such “drum breach” accidents have been characterized in official reports as “isolated events,” and as “self‐initiated” and “spontaneous.” Yet these descriptions misrepresent a temporal tension at the heart of their causation: during the Cold War, nuclear weapons production created latent socioecological hazards that, decades later, too often manifest during waste cleanup. This tends to result from 21st‐century scheduling pressures, fraught labor relationships, and neoliberal subcontracting arrangements. Thus, if we examine the
temporal form
taken by US nuclear technopolitics, we can recast drum breach accidents not as stand‐alone events, but as outcomes of systemic incentives to speed up waste‐cleanup projects beyond their organizational capacity without commensurately expanding their safety or oversight mechanisms.
nuclear waste
,
technopolitics
,
accidents
,
neoliberalism
,
temporality
,
security
,
Idaho
,
United States
Boiling sand, metallic fire IALENTI, VINCENT
American ethnologist,
August 2022, Letnik:
49, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
ABSTRACT
In April 2018 four drums of depleted uranium sludge burst open at a US Department of Energy facility at Idaho National Laboratory. This echoed a previous incident in 2014, when a drum ...erupted with fire and spewed radionuclides at a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico. Such “drum breach” accidents have been characterized in official reports as “isolated events,” and as “self‐initiated” and “spontaneous.” Yet these descriptions misrepresent a temporal tension at the heart of their causation: during the Cold War, nuclear weapons production created latent socioecological hazards that, decades later, too often manifest during waste cleanup. This tends to result from 21st‐century scheduling pressures, fraught labor relationships, and neoliberal subcontracting arrangements. Thus, if we examine the temporal form taken by US nuclear technopolitics, we can recast drum breach accidents not as stand‐alone events, but as outcomes of systemic incentives to speed up waste‐cleanup projects beyond their organizational capacity without commensurately expanding their safety or oversight mechanisms. nuclear waste, technopolitics, accidents, neoliberalism, temporality, security, Idaho, United States
This article examines how Finland's nuclear waste repository safety assessment experts summoned memories of Seppo: a deceased colleague whose ‘spectre’ was said to still ‘haunt’ their workplace. ...First, it tracks how Seppo appeared in predecessor parables: cautionary tales told about his death, which conveyed value judgements about how experts ought to act, engage, and aspire. Second, it explores how Seppo's long‐time ‘right‐hand man’ Gustav still felt haunted by his colleague's affective intensities, scientific vision, and sharp tongue. This led Gustav to prod his workmates to reconsider how they modelled Finland's ecosystems many millennia into the future. Studying this ethnographically revealed how traces of Seppo's past life infused living experts with emotions, opened them to alternative futures, and spurred them to rethink their professional values. This article concludes by introducing expert afterlives as a temporal, epistemic, and affective nexus that can shape how technocratic projects are organized and how expert knowledge is made.
Abstrait
Les fantômes de Seppo : l'autre vie des experts en déchets nucléaires finlandais
Résumé
L'article examine la manière dont les spécialistes en sûreté d'un dépôt de déchets nucléaires finlandais évoquent le souvenir de Seppo, un collègue décédé dont le « fantôme » hanterait encore leur lieu de travail. Pour commencer, il décrit comment Seppo apparaît dans des paraboles du prédécesseur : des récits de mise en garde parlent de sa mort, portant un jugement de valeur sur la façon dont les experts devraient agir, s'engager et à quoi ils doivent aspirer. Deuxièmement, il explore comment Gustav, qui a longtemps été le « bras droit » de Seppo, s'est senti hanté par l'intensité affective, la vision scientifique et la langue acérée de son collègue, au point qu'il s'est mis à inciter ses collègues à réexaminer la façon dont ils transformaient les écosystèmes finlandais pour les milliers d'années à venir. L’étude ethnographique de ces récits a révélé comment les traces de la vie passée de Seppo suscitaient des émotions parmi les experts vivants, les ouvraient à d'autres futurs possibles et les incitaient à repenser leurs valeurs professionnelles. Pour finir, l'article introduit la notion de rémanence des experts comme un croisement temporel, épistémique et affectif qui peut influer sur l'organisation des projets technocratiques et sur la constitution du savoir expert.
Drawing on 32 months of interview-based ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines Finland's "mankala" nuclear energy companies through the lens of anthropological theories of corporate form. ...Mankalas are limited liability companies run like zero-profit cooperatives that bring together consortia of Finnish corporations and municipal energy providers to purchase, finance, and share the output of jointly owned energy-generation facilities. They have long been associated with "uniquely Finnish" modes of trust, cooperation, societal cohesion, and transparency. In recent years, however, political-economic uncertainties have destabilized Finland's mankala circuit, impacting how, whether, and when mankalas Teollisuuden Voima Oyj and Fennovoima have pursued new reactor projects. This has impacted reactor technology suppliers abroad, including France's Areva, Germany's E.On, and Russia's Rosatom. With that in view, this paper explores whether anthropological analysis of Finland's mankala corporate form can inspire new strategies for institutional innovation and reactor project financing for nuclear energy organizations. To chart out avenues for collaboration between anthropologists and nuclear energy practitioners, it concludes by proposing three pathways through which anthropological sensibilities could inform institutional decision making. I term these pathways holism, tracking and translation.
What happened, in the years leading up to Valentine's Day 2014, that made a canister of nuclear waste burst open and spew out fire underground at a US facility for the long-term disposal of ...radioactive military waste? According to one widely publicized scenario, a simple run-of-the-mill typo led to organic kitty litter mistakenly being used to soak up liquid in the drum instead of another kind of absorbent material. This ultimately led to a chemical chain reaction that made heat and pressure build up in the drum, causing it to erupt. But was that "simple" clerical error symptomatic of a much deeper, system-wide problem - involving a US Energy Department plan to rush the pace of nuclear waste disposal? What were the political, social, and financial elements involved in making Los Alamos' waste drum #68,660 erupt that February night? What can be done to prevent similar accidents - which can have price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars or more - from happening again in the future? A cultural anthropologist spent 10 weeks onsite after the event, logging 43 interviews and trying to answer these questions. Here is what he found.
Adjudicating Deep Time Ialenti, Vincent F
Science & technology studies (Tampere, Finland),
01/2014, Letnik:
27, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper draws upon perspectives on legal personhood, expert knowledge practices, and social relations influential in STS and anthropology to revisit the legal procedural framing of the United ...States’ now-defunct high-level nuclear waste repository project at Yucca Mountain. Specifically, it examines how this project reinvented both (a) conventional figures of legal personhood as what is called a ‘reasonably maximally exposed individual’ and (b) legal adjudication’s familiar ‘rule-facts-judge’ template as a frame for establishing the repository licensing regime’s delegation of roles, responsibilities, and duties in response to its unique regulatory horizons that extended millennia into the future. Unpacking the implications of these familiar legal figures being brought to bear on historically unprecedented ‘deep’ timescales, this paper concludes by offering alternative lines of inquiry for interdisciplinary analysis of nuclear energy and its associated waste products.
This ethnography reconsiders nuclear waste risk’s deep time horizons’ often-sensationalized aesthetics of horror, sublimity, and awe. It does so by tracking how Finland’s nuclear energy and waste ...experts made visions of distant future Finlands appear more intelligible through mundane corporate, regulatory, financial, and technoscientific practices. Each chapter unpacks how informants iterated and reiterated traces of the very familiar to establish shared grounds of continuity for moving forward in time. Chapter 1 explores how Finland’s energy sector’s “mankala” cooperative corporate form was iterated and reiterated to give shape to political and financial time horizons. Chapter 2 explores how workplace role distinctions between recruit/retiree and junior/senior were iterated and reiterated to reckon nuclear personnel successions’ intergenerational horizons. Chapter 3 explores how input/output and part/whole distinctions were iterated and reiterated to help model distant future worlds in a portfolio of “Safety Case” evidence made to demonstrate the Olkiluoto repository’s safety to Finnish nuclear regulator STUK. Chapter 4 explores how Safety Case experts iterated and reiterated memories of a deceased predecessor figure in everyday engagements with deep time. What emerges are three insights about how futures attain discernible features—insights about the “continuity,” “thinkability,” and “extensibility” of expert thought—that, I argue, can help twenty-first century experts better navigate not only deep time, but also unknown futures of nuclear technologies, planetary environment, and expertise itself.
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