Projected Futures

The Political Matter of UK Higher Activity Radioactive Waste

Bibliographic Data

ID4140355
AuthorsNicky Gregson (0000-0002-2796-389X, Durham University)
Year2012
Volume44
Issue8
Pages2006-2022
Publication date2012-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/a44600
OpenAlexW2043653884
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited37

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

Abandonment (legal · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Technoscience · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Risk Perception and Management · Law

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