Başak Saraç-Lesavre, The University of Manchester
In the United States, so far, existing reactors have produced approximately 83,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, stored at more than 70 sites in 34 U.S. states. Currently, 96 still operating power plants annually generate about 2,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel. In 2010, the Obama Administration abandoned the long-planned and contested Yucca Mountain deep geological repository project, once established by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act Amended of 1987 as the only candidate site to be investigated to contain the country’s high-level waste for a million years. In the absence of an operational repository and due to the presence of an increasing number of reactors entering the decommissioning phase, with nothing but spent nuclear fuel to be stored at reactor sites, private industrial actors have been increasingly seeking alternative options to manage spent nuclear fuel. This is well-illustrated in the proposed private consolidated interim storage facilities proposed by two consortia. The site proposed by Interim Storage Partners, a joint venture between Waste Control Specialists and Orano, in Andrews county, Texas, and the HI-STORE, that Holtec International wants to build in partnership with the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, New Mexico. Interim storage facilities are conceived of dry cask storage systems. These systems rely on surrounding spent nuclear fuel by inert gas inside a container called a cask. These casks are typically steel cylinders that are either welded or bolted closed. Each cylinder is surrounded by additional steel, concrete, or other material to provide radiation shielding. I contend that dry cask storage facilities provoke peculiar ‘container economies’ and do not simply make the exceptionally long-term responsibilities associated with nuclear waste object of economic transactions. As Jens Beckert suggests while a contract-based economic transaction, a priori, reduces the scope of agents’ choices allowing them to behave predictably by creating expectations regarding the action of the other in situations of uncertainty (Beckert, 1996), it also transforms risks and responsibilities into products and makes them transferable and circulable between economic actors involving a time frame that integrates the concerns of neoliberal economy, while setting aside long-term risks and uncertainties. In this paper, I propose, historically and materially tracing what I call the ‘containerization’ of spent nuclear fuel, which involves its transformation into mobile objects that can both circulate and be subject to new forms of economic transactions, namely, as ‘assets’ and ‘sources of rentiership’ (Birch and Muniesa, 2020). I conclude by highlighting what this tells us about the moral economies of the future (Davies, 2017).
