Waste Matters: Nuclear Technopolitics and Futures at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico

Abstract 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.