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

1. Contaminated Futures: Caring for the Future and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation Pedro de la Torre III 4/26/2013 Experiments in Method delatp@rpi.edu

2. Overview Hanford Nuclear Reservation (WA) began as a plutonium production facility for U.S. nuclear weapons complex during WWII Seventy year legacy of toxic and radioactive contamination, including intentional release of dangerous radionuclides

3. Overview Investigate the politics, history, and ethical reasoning surrounding site Explore environmental and intergenerational justice issues surrounding nuclear waste & contamination

4. Overview Complex stakeholder process involved in governing Hanford cleanup Given the degree of soil and groundwater contamination and the long half-lives of the contaminants, ethical obligations to current and future generations are negotiated implicitly or explicitly in Hanford cleanup

5. Research Problems • How are future imaginaries generated in the present, and how do they affect the politics and governance of nuclear waste and remediation? • How are intergenerational ethics negotiated in debates about environmental remediation and nuclear waste? Overview

6. Ethics: • Obligation? • "Discount?" • Philosophy (e.g., utilitarian) • Basis for Recognition • Specificity • Scale: • Temporal • Geographical • Specificity • Analogies (spaces of experience): • Scale (time and space) • Events • Narratives • References • Continuities: • Technoscientific • Sociocultural • Territorial • Government/political • Ecological • Of Knowledge • Discontinuities: • Technoscientific • Sociocultural • Territorial • Government/political • Ecological • Of Knowledge • Representations: • Subject positioning? (e.g., "generations") • Media (e.g., images, tables, imagined scenarios, etc.) • Rhetorical strategies • Specificity • Stake innoculation • Speaking for or about future generations? • Dissemination • Method (e.g., prediction based on extrapolation of current statistical trends): • Nature of truth claim: • Procedures (e.g., experimentation) • Data • Political/power/governance implications: • Authority • Regulatory/Legal tie-in • What controversies is it implicated in? • How does it connect/challenge dominant discourses/consensuses? • How does it construct the present? • Implicate change of priorities/areas of concern • "Type?" (e.g., security, transition, development, risk, etc.)      Overview So, what is a ‘future Imaginary’ anyway? Connotes formation of ‘mental (& sociocultural) images,’ not ‘unreal’

7. Social Temporalities Overview This work explores the complex relationships between history, memory, the “present,” expectations, and prediction in governance and the making of spaces. This work will interact with at least three key literatures in the social sciences: Social temporalities Environment, Nature, & Risk Subjects: Ethics, Rights, and Representation

8. Environment, Nature, & Risk Overview Writings in this category explore the often dangerous aspects of sociotechnical systems, the distribution of “environmental” risks, the concepts through which “nature” or the “environment” is or should be understood, and the ways that these topics shape various socialities, knowledges, and politics. This work will interact with at least three key literatures in the social sciences: Social temporalities Environment, Nature, & Risk Subjects: Ethics, Rights, and Representation

9. Subjects: Ethics, Rights, and Representation Overview These works explore not only the study of ethical practice and imaginaries, but also the relation between the ethical, political, and legal; the recognition and representation of subjects, particularly “distant” ones; and the recognition of injury, harm, or suffering. This work will interact with at least three key literatures in the social sciences: Social temporalities Environment, Nature, & Risk Subjects: Ethics, Rights, and Representation

10. Continuing problems and controversies over threats that the site presents, including: • Leaking radwaste tanks • Threat of tank explosions • Ecological costs of remediation activities • Pace of cleanup • Vitrification plant • “Downwinders” are still in litigation for compensation, and the link between their exposures and their illnesses is controversial • Current & future remediation efforts Why Study Hanford Now?

11. Context of austerity and “late industrialism” • Broader controversies over nuclear waste & nuclear energy • Widening gap between sustainability discourse, and the intergenerational ethics it implies, and ecological legacies Why Study Hanford Now

12. Study Components Method Field Sites • Ethnography • Semi-structured interviews • Participant observation • Attending events • Purposive & snowball sampling • Richland, WA • Primary site of fieldwork, borders the Hanford Nuclear Reservation • Host to most stakeholder meetings and similar events • Near the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory • Other sites of interests, such as implicated American Indian reservation, relatively close by • Washington, DC • Short visits • Interviews with NGO, Policy, and Regulatory actors • Access to relevant events

13. Study Components Method Texts • Discourse Analysis • Critical discourse analysis • Subject formation • Constructions of time, place, and space • Forms of recognition • Issues of representation • (Counter)hegemonic discourses • Universality, generality, specificity Interview transcripts Official documents Photographs, films, and visual art projects Press releases & speeches Meeting notes & agendas Email lists News reports Museum exhibits & tours Scientific studies

14. Study Components • Attending Hanford Advisory Board Meetings • Semi-structured interviews • Attend meetings of relevant organizations & movements • Examine archives • Hanford site tours • Attend community meetings & events • Attend relevant hearings and events in Washington, DC and beyond • Activities and Questions

15. Study Components Environmental Groups Scientists and Engineers Federal Government Officials First Nations Government Officials & Activists Downwinders & Allies Labor Unions & Related Groups State Government Officials Contractors • Kinds of Subjects

16. Plan of Work Schedule

17. Plan of Work Dissemination

18. About Me I am a first year PhD student at RPI’s Science and Technology Studies Department. Before that, I completed an M.A. in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. My areas of interest include nuclear waste and politics, disaster studies, social theory, and temporality. Email: delatp@rpi.edu Credits & Bio Image credits: stopnewnukes, EMSL, PNNL - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, & idyllopus