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 the mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel program, which reprocessed Cold War weapons plutonium for civilian reactors, nuclear states recast toxic waste as a virtuous resource for stewarding sustainability while obscuring how the production and transport of MOX fuel exacerbated risks of proliferation, carcinogenic contamination, and catastrophic failure. Focusing on the 1999–2000 MOX controversy in Fukushima, when networks in Japan, the UK, France, Chile, Argentina, and other nations coordinated a breakthrough activist victory, I situate this episode within broader global circuits of plutonium trade, state-industry entanglement, and transnational 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, it proposes 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