Articulating Nuclear Waste Futures Organically

• In Event: Ecologies and Material Politics of the Inorganic: Rethinking/Reframing

Abstract

This presentation offers an ethnographic glimpse into the professional lives of scientists and engineers collaborating to render intelligible distant future risks that may beset a radioactive waste repository to be buried deep beneath Olkiluoto, Finland. Recasting quantitative models scaled to geological timescales as legal evidence in the ‘Safety Case’ submitted to Finland’s nuclear regulatory authority as part of an application for a repository construction permit, these experts wove together an ecology of models, data, and scenarios into an elaborate portfolio with the aim of reckoning distant future worlds. In the process, some insiders developed a vague sense that, over the decades, the Safety Case, in its immense epistemological and organizational complexity, acquired something resembling a ‘group intelligence’ transcending any individual expert’s awareness. This, for some, led to a feeling of being but simple ‘ants’ dwelling within the collective logics of a broader collaborative ‘colony’. One expert explained that, while the ‘forest’ of Safety Case models cannot be encompassed in its totality by a single mind, some collaborators were able to comprehend the portfolio ‘from the treetops’ by grasping the details of how the myriad reports wove together (understanding the ‘whole’) while other collaborators were able to comprehend its ‘roots’ by grasping the details of specific subsets of reports (understanding the ‘parts’). Analyzing the organic metaphors tapped to articulate experiences of working on a project aimed at protecting humans from such precarious inorganic wastes, this presentation reflects on renderings of the (in)organic during an age increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene.

Author

• Vincent Francis Ialenti, Cornell University