The (Un)Making of the “Grants Uranium District”: The Technopolitical Life of the Byproduct in Northwestern New Mexico

• In Event: STS Underground: Responsible and Sustainable Mining

Abstract

During the second half of the twentieth century, New Mexico served as the primary production site for the U.S. Cold War project of stockpiling nuclear weapons. From 1948 to 2002, the “Grants uranium district” first sourced the uranium ore necessary for building one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals; after 1971, it became a national source for nuclear energy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, uranium mining had ceased in New Mexico, leaving a legacy of environmental health impacts from the mine waste left onsite. In addition to airborne and gamma radiation, the contamination of groundwater in this arid region poses serious biophysical, sociocultural, technoscientific, and political-economic problems. Characterized broadly in terms of ecological “sacrifice zones," the history of uranium mining and milling constitutes profound cases of environmental injustice and environmental racism, as well as deeper impositions of settler colonialism. The “Grants uranium district” encompasses parts of Acoma and Laguna Pueblos, the Navajo Nation, as well as Hispano and Anglo settler communities. In this paper, I describe my ethnographic and archival research on the problem of mine waste and the ways diversely situated social actors attend to the processes by which uranium tailings and other harmful byproducts cascade into the high-desert ecology of northwestern New Mexico. My central argument is critical of the promise that technology will ultimately usher in a benevolent future; instead, technology becomes entangled with politics of difference through nature and culture in processes of environmental monitoring and cleanup.

Author

• Thomas De Pree, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute