Financializing Nuclear Waste Security: Private Equity and Contractor Consolidation in America’s Defense Industrial Complex

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - III

Abstract

At the WIPP military waste repository in New Mexico in 2014, a nuclear waste drum burst open, exposed twenty-two workers to radiation, closed the facility for nearly thirty-five months, and cost the U.S. defense industrial complex upwards of one billion dollars. Personnel working for private subcontractor EnergySolutions had improperly packaged the drum with organic kitty litter. That same year, a worker fell to his death at an EnergySolutions radioactive waste facility in Tennessee. In 2011, EnergySolutions was fined for illegally burying nuclear waste in Utah that exceeded state radiological safety limits. This talk asks whether these incidents – and the environmental justice, national security, and worker insecurity issues they raised – can be linked, systemically, to productivity pressures, profit motives, and cost-cutting incentivized by EnergySolutions’ corporate-financial structure. Through corporate consolidation, EnergySolutions – owned by private equity firm Energy Capital Partners – has, over the past decade, expanded to over forty states, Canada, and Japan. A Citigroup-led consortium of banks financed one buyout. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley advised another. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice blocked EnergySolutions from acquiring competitor WCS on antitrust grounds. In 2018, private equity firm J.F. Lehman acquired WCS. Drawing on over fifty ethnographic interviews among U.S. nuclear waste insiders – plus STS and anthropological work on neoliberalism, military technoscience, and toxic materials security – this talk examines if and how the rapid expansion of private-equity-backed nuclear cleanup companies is reconfiguring the safety cultures, workforce conditions, and regulatory compliance of an increasingly financialized U.S. defense nuclear waste management regime.

Author

• Vincent Ialenti, George Washington University