Projected Futures: The Political Matter of UK Higher Activity Radioactive Waste

Nicky Gregson
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Nicky Gregson: Department of Geography, Durham University, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, England

Environment and Planning A, 2012, vol. 44, issue 8, 2006-2022

Abstract: This paper identifies, and works from, the technoconceptual as a site of intervention for a politics of stuff. Its case is radioactive waste: specifically, UK higher activity wastes (HAW) and the policy future of a UK Deep Geological Disposal Facility (DGF). The paper proceeds through three steps. It charts, first, the unravelling of HAW as onto-politics through the democratisation of technoscience, showing that, as the gap between stuff and politics has opened, HAW's future in a DGF has become the preserve of science—technical discourses (currently geology and engineered design). Secondly, it joins with the undone-science traditions of STS (science, technology, and society), to critique existing technoscientific conceptualisations of a DGF and to anticipate a future in which a DGF is abandoned. Third, and in response to abandonment, it proposes a different future for a DGF. This starts from thinking radioactive waste as ‘thing power’ but argues that, for a DGF to be materialised in ways that forge attachments with publics, requires a turn to material culture. More broadly, the paper argues that furthering ontopolitics requires keeping the demos alive to stuff's vitality. This means engaging in political settlements of technoscientific controversies; with old, or established, technologies, and ‘cold’ politics; and in politics as practised.

Keywords: radioactive waste; materiality; deep geological disposal; onto-politics; UK (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:44:y:2012:i:8:p:2006-2022

DOI: 10.1068/a44600

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