Extracting Uranium’s futures: Nuclear wastes, toxic temporalities, and uncertain decisions

Abstract

Civilian and military uses of nuclear energy have produced a legacy of high-level radioactive wastes posing threats of millennial duration, and their production continues despite the absence of viable disposal solutions. These materials extend the impact of decisions made today into a far distant future, raising difficult questions regarding intergenerational and intragenerational social justice, ethical responsibility, and collective decision-making. This essay critically reviews those challenges using resources from the fields of communication and rhetoric, sociologies and philosophies of temporality and risk, and science and technology studies. The essay argues that modern notions of prediction, control, and decision-making are inadequate for addressing such highly complex phenomena and long temporal durations. Nuclear waste disposal is then examined as an activity that seeks not only to contain material hazards, but also to symbolically purify the system of nuclear production and consumption. The proposed U.S. nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain provides an example in which predictive models, which warrant both epistemic and political authority, are nevertheless insufficient bases for collective decision-making. The essay then considers the situation in the United States, where a new political economy of nuclear waste appears to be emerging, and offers summary conclusions regarding nuclear power and social justice.