Temporalities, political economies, and marginality in nuclear waste storage in Canada

Keywords: political ecology, nuclear waste storage, marginalization, nuclear landscapes, sociotechnical imaginaries, political economy
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 5

Abstract

Nuclear waste poses unique challenges that transcend everyday temporalities and shape socio-political and economic relations across temporal, spatial and epistemic dimensions. In this paper, I draw from ethnographic research in a nuclear landscape in southwestern Ontario, Canada, to understand how these power relations, materialities, and temporalities, inform public perception and engagement with a federal but locally-embedded ‘community-driven’ process to permanently store Canada’s high nuclear waste. Intervening in debates over the characterization of nuclear landscapes through dependency or partnership, and following calls for path-dependent relational approaches to nuclear waste studies, I highlight the tensions that arise between a cohesive exclusive nuclear community and the broader set of divergent voices of the nuclear landscape in which the nuclear communities are situated. Specifically, the existing local nuclear industry in Bruce County, Ontario, has fostered deep economic, political, and cultural ties creating a sense of exclusive nuclear community with shared future visions of nuclear innovation in which the siting of nuclear waste is a ‘logical’ future step. These come into conflict with the broader nuclear landscape characterized by historic dispossession of Indigenous communities and exclusionary decision-making tied to the local nuclear industry, regional inequalities, and concerns over the justice implications of storing nuclear waste. Such tensions are further contextualized by parallel debates over the permanence of storage, competing scientific paradigms of safety, and competing local sociotechnical imaginaries. Collectively, these differing perspectives shape how the local communities engage in the siting process, forcing a reckoning with the past and future injustices of nuclear waste storage.