Living on with Sellafield: Nuclear infrastructure, slow violence, and the politics of quiescence

Abstract

AbstractCommunities living with nuclear infrastructures have widely been positioned as quiescent and accepting of the risks posed. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in 2008 in the village of Seascale, which neighbours the UK’s Sellafield nuclear site, and on recent thinking on nuclear and toxic geographies, this paper troubles the idea of nuclear quiescence. In doing so, it critically engages with a long tradition of geographical research on nuclear communities, much of which adopts a risk‐perception paradigm, foregrounding the presence (or absence) of localised concern. Within this body of work, interest has centred on the apparent paradox that those spatially exposed are also most quiescent, pointing to the play of economic dependency, risk denial, and familiarity with nuclear infrastructure. This paper addresses the slow violence inherent in living on with nuclear infrastructure: drawn‐out effects and affects of nuclearity on place that are barely visible in the routines of everyday life. I locate these expressions of social and geographic damage in techno‐political relations that obscure the exceptionalism of the nuclear industry. The analysis challenges passive renderings of toxic victimhood by emphasising modes of pragmatic resistance – subtle and contingent ways in which residents challenge the identity and structural relations of being nuclear. I stress the need for geographers to find alternative ways of theorising the unjust relationship between nuclear economies, infrastructures, and places in situations of political‐economic dependency and domination. I argue that policy instruments aimed at securing social justice in nuclear infrastructure planning will need to more fully, and openly, grapple with questions around the socio‐political relations of care that might sustain a ‘good life’ for places that have very long histories and even longer futures with toxicity.