TOXIC ENCOUNTERS / RADIOACTIVE AFTERLIVES: NUCLEAR PROTEST, SOVEREIGNTY, KINSHIP, AND FRICTION IN RURAL AMERICA

In 1980, the United States Congress passed what former Senator Ben Nelson would affirm as “perhaps the most absurd piece of legislation ever crafted” – the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act of 1980. The LLRWPA shifted the burden of responsibility for dealing with nuclear waste storage to the states, encouraging them to form interstate compacts. The act is a failure on at least one account: states built zero new storage facilities. The Central Interstate Compact chose a small rural county as the host site for a new facility. While administrators assumed the county would be compliant, residents quickly mobilized, often under the threat of violence, against the state apparatus(es) that would “dump” waste in the community. This ethnography explores the relationship between the state nuclear regime and community encounters with toxic waste to explore how communities make sense of and enact lively relations amidst ecological threats. Even though this “nuke dump” was never completed, the community in-fighting over the perceived benefits or harms of the facility induced a state of social-ecological fallout that structures the affective and geographic shape of community life to this day. Environmentally, the danger of nuclear waste lives on unceasingly and this county’s encounter against a transnational corporation and interstate coalition embodies the precarity and struggle environmental justice movements face. By exploring the administrative practices of nuclear waste storage facility siting, environmental kinship, and community protest as a performative and aesthetic practice, this dissertation intervenes in broader arguments surrounding neoliberal practices of nuclear administration, state biopower, and environmental justice. The key questions that guide this work are: How does the nuclear regime exploit the political and geographic disadvantages of communities? How does engaging with the successful tactics used by a majority poor white community contribute to our understanding of the connection between race, economics, and environmental justice? How do environmental protest and performance re-orient us to the material and temporal life of toxic matter and the afterlives of community fallout that live on in its wake?