Waste Matters
Nuclear Technopolitics and Futures at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Wipp) in New Mexico
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12901790 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura Considine (0000-0002-6265-3168, University of Leeds, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-25 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Political Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ips/olaf049 |
| OpenAlex | W7130311877 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 34 |
This article makes the case for nuclear weapons waste as an integral part of the US nuclear weapons complex and of international nuclear politics more broadly. Nuclear waste is not simply a by-product or issue of disposal, as assumed in much IR and security literature. Instead, waste creates and maintains socioeconomic drivers and narratives that have a productive power and enable particular nuclear futures. The article develops a three-part argument to support its claims about nuclear weapons waste arguing that: the political and socioeconomic impacts of nuclear weapons waste are deeply important at multiple levels; waste infrastructures are sites of contestation of nuclear futures; and the political dynamics of these impacts are obscured by the dynamics of technopolitics. The article grounds this argument in interviews collected during fieldwork on the US nuclear weapons waste complex in New Mexico, focusing specifically on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the only permanent geologic disposal site for nuclear weapons waste in the United States. The dynamics around this site are in one way uniquely American, and specifically New Mexican, but they also can be used as one starting point to illuminate specific impacts of living in a world of nuclear weapons
Argument (complex analysis · Futures contract · Nuclear power · Nuclear power plant · Nuclear weapon · Politics · Radioactive waste · Socioeconomic status · Nuclear and radioactivity studies · Nuclear Issues and Defense · Risk Perception and Management
Purity and Danger
Nuclear Nuevo México
The Radiance of France
Nuclear Desire
Discard Studies
Sacred Land or National Sacrifice Zone
From Secrecy to Public Containment
Nuclear Legacies
The technopolitics of security
Nuclear Boundaries
Drum breach
Overflow and Containment in the Aftermath of Disaster
Redemption and Nutopia
Political Sociology and the Problem of the International
Where is the Nuclear Waste? Expanding Nuclear Politics
Containing the Atom
The materials of practice
Nuclear memory
Rubbish values
The Ideology of Nuclear Order
Bourdieu and the bomb
Wastelanding
Invention and uninvention in nuclear weapons politics
Sink
A contestation of nuclear ontologies
Desire for the 'worst
Everyday International Relations
Boiling sand, metallic fire
Performing dignity
Infrastructures and Capitalist World Ordering
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |