Contaminated Futures: Caring for the Future and
the Hanford Nuclear Reservation Nuclear
Reservation
Pedro de la Torre III
4/26/2013
Experiments in Method
delatp@rpi.edu
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
Overview
 Investigate the
politics, history, and
ethical reasoning
surrounding site
 Explore
environmental and
intergenerational
justice issues
surrounding nuclear
waste &
contamination
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
Overview
Research Problems
1. How are future imaginaries
generated in the present, and
how do they affect the politics
and governance of nuclear waste
and remediation?
2. How are intergenerational
ethics negotiated in debates
about environmental
remediation and nuclear waste?

Overview
So, what is a ‘future
Imaginary’ anyway?
 Connotes formation


of ‘mental (&
sociocultural)
images,’ not ‘unreal’


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:

Technoscientifi
c

Sociocultural

Territorial

Government/p
olitical

Ecological

Of Knowledge
Discontinuities:

Technoscientifi
c

Sociocultural
Territorial
Government/p
olitical

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.,
experimentatio
n)

Data







Political/power/go
vernance
implications:

Authority

Regulatory/Leg
al tie-in

What
controversies is
it implicated
in?

How does it
connect/challe
nge dominant
discourses/con
sensuses?
How does it
construct the
present?

Implicate
change of
priorities/areas
of concern
"Type?" (e.g.,
security, transition,
development, risk,
etc.)
Social Temporalities
Overview
This work will interact
with at least three key
literatures in the social
sciences:
This work explores the complex relationships
between history, memory, the “present,”
expectations, and prediction in governance and the
making of spaces.
•
•
 Social temporalities
 Environment,
Nature, & Risk
•
•
•
•
 Subjects: Ethics,
Rights, and
Representation
•
•
•
•
•
Adam M. Hedgecoe, Erik Fisher, Cynthia Selin, and David H. Guston. 2007.
“Anticipatory Governance of Nanotechnology: Foresight, Engagement, and
Integration.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J.
Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, third edition,
979–1000. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Anderson, B, and P Adey. 2012. “Future Geographies.” Environment and Planning A 44
(7): 1529–1535.
Bender, J, and David E. Wellbery, ed. 1991. Chronotypes: The Construction of Time.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2003. “Building a Marker of Nuclear Warning.” In Monuments
and Memory, Made and Unmade, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, 183–
204. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comaroff, John L. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Studies in the
Ethnographic Imagination. Boulder: Westview Press.
Dalsgaard, Steffen. 2012. “Fieldwork or ‘event-Work’?” In Anthropological
Temporalities: Methods and Ontology of Multi-Temporal Ethnography. San Francisco,
CA.
Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Fortun, Kim. 2000. “Remebering Bhopal, Re-figuring Liability.” Interventions 2 (2):
187–198.
Guyer, Jane I. 2007. “Prophecy and the Near Future :” 34 (3): 409–421.
doi:10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409.American.
Hedgecoe, Adam M., and Paul A. Martin. 2007. “Genomics, STS, and the Making of
Sociotechnical Futures.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by
Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, third
edition, 818–839. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the past: power and the production of history.
Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.
 Environment, Nature, & Risk
Overview
This work will interact
with at least three key
literatures in the social
sciences:
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.
•
•
•
 Social temporalities
 Environment,
Nature, & Risk
 Subjects: Ethics,
Rights, and
Representation
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke
University Press Books.
Dunlap, Riley E., and Fredrick H. Buttel, ed. 2002. Sociological Theory and the
Environment: Classical Foundations, Contemporary Insights. Lanham, Md: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
Fortun, Kim. 2001. Advocacy After Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global
Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gusterson, Hugh. 2000. “How Not to Construct a Radioactive Waste Incinerator.”
Science, Technology & Human Values 25 (3) (July): 332–351.
Hanson, RD. 2001. “Half Lives of Reagan’s Indian Policy: Marketing Nuclear Waste to
American Indians.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25 (1): 21–44.
Hecht, Gabrielle. 2012. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade.
Cambridge: MIT press.
Mascarenhas, Michael. 2012. “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and
Urban Development in Southern Ontario, Canada.”
Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold
War New Mexico. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Murphy, Michelle. 2008. “Chemical Regimes of Living.” Environmental History 13 (4):
695–703.
———. 2011. “Time in the Data of Cholera.”
Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life exposed: biological citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton
[N.J.]: Princeton University Press.
Smith, N. 2008. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space.
3rd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Subjects: Ethics, Rights, and Representation
Overview
This work will interact
with at least three key
literatures in the social
sciences:
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.
•
•
 Social temporalities
 Environment,
Nature, & Risk
•
•
•
•
 Subjects: Ethics,
Rights, and
Representation
•
•
•
•
•
Adam M. Hedgecoe, Erik Fisher, Cynthia Selin, and David H. Guston. 2007.
“Anticipatory Governance of Nanotechnology: Foresight, Engagement, and
Integration.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J.
Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, third edition,
979–1000. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Anderson, B, and P Adey. 2012. “Future Geographies.” Environment and Planning A 44
(7): 1529–1535.
Bender, J, and David E. Wellbery, ed. 1991. Chronotypes: The Construction of Time.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2003. “Building a Marker of Nuclear Warning.” In Monuments
and Memory, Made and Unmade, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, 183–
204. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comaroff, John L. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Studies in the
Ethnographic Imagination. Boulder: Westview Press.
Dalsgaard, Steffen. 2012. “Fieldwork or ‘event-Work’?” In Anthropological
Temporalities: Methods and Ontology of Multi-Temporal Ethnography. San Francisco,
CA.
Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Fortun, Kim. 2000. “Remebering Bhopal, Re-figuring Liability.” Interventions 2 (2):
187–198.
Guyer, Jane I. 2007. “Prophecy and the Near Future :” 34 (3): 409–421.
doi:10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409.American.
Hedgecoe, Adam M., and Paul A. Martin. 2007. “Genomics, STS, and the Making of
Sociotechnical Futures.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by
Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, third
edition, 818–839. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the past: power and the production of history.
Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press.
Study Components
Methods
 Ethnography
 Semi-structured
interviews
 Participant observation
 Attending events
 Purposive & snowball
sampling
 Discourse Analysis
Field Sites
 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
Study Components
Activities and Questions
 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
Study Components
Kinds of Subjects
 Environmental Groups  Downwinders & Allies
 Scientists and
 Labor Unions &
Engineers
 Federal Government
Officials
 First Nations
Government Officials
& Activists
Related Groups
 State Government
Officials
 Contractors
 Continuing problems and controversies





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?
over threats that the site presents,
including:
 Context of austerity and “late
Why Study Hanford Now
industrialism”
 Broader controversies over nuclear
waste & nuclear energy
 Widening gap between sustainability
discourse, and the intergenerational
ethics it implies, and ecological legacies
Plan of Work
Schedule
When
What
Current /
Ongoing
Basic research and project design
Summer 2013
Transcription, grant applications, basic research
Early June
Preliminary field site visit to Richland & regional sites of interests
July/August
Interviews in Washington, DC
Spring 2014
Dissertation Proposal
Fall 2014 –
Summer 2015
Fieldwork
Fall 2015 Spring 2016
Dissertation writing / defense
Plan of Work
Dissemination
Academic
Community
General
Public
Research
Subjects
Journal articles
Magazine / blog
articles
Conferences
Book
Interviews
Internal presentations
Conferences
Events (e.g., Hanford
photo and/or visual
arts show)
Participation in
campaigns & events
Image credits: stopnewnukes, EMSL, PNNL - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, &
idyllopus
Credits & Bio
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