ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Moral Nuclear Alchemy: Global Circuits and Transnational Resistance to the Greenwashing of Plutonium

• In Event: Nuclear History as Global History: Current Debates and New Perspectives 2

English Abstract

This paper traces the global history of plutonium “recycling” as a moral and political technology of legitimation, and the transnational movements that sought to expose its contradictions. Through mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel programs, nuclear states and utilities recast separated plutonium, whether recovered from civilian spent fuel or declared surplus from weapons programs, as a virtuous resource for energy production and waste stewardship. In doing so, they obscured how the production and transport of MOX fuel intensified concerns over proliferation, radiotoxic contamination, transport hazards, and the heightened stakes of reactor accidents involving plutonium-bearing fuel. This paper focuses on the transnational MOX controversy and its aftermath in 1999–2002, when networks linking Japan, the UK, France, Ireland, and en-route states in Latin America and the Pacific transformed a technical fuel-cycle policy into a visible transnational dispute. I situate this episode within broader global circuits of plutonium trade and state-industry entanglement, as well as environmental activism. The paper argues that resistance to these state-led campaigns of moral nuclear alchemy prefigures today’s Fukushima wastewater controversy, where similar claims of technological care and environmental management continue to obscure enduring inequities in exposure and accountability. By connecting these episodes, the paper points toward a global moral history of the nuclear age, one that foregrounds the counter-publics and solidarities that contest the greenwashing of the nuclear project.

Author

• Nan Kim, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee