Abstract

Waste in Transit: Transport Technologies, Environments, and Anti-Nuclear Protest

Fenced off by security zones, nuclear installations tend to be depicted as isolated from their surroundings, marking a distinct nuclear territory. Yet, nuclear material entering and leaving a power plant not only disrupts the containment of the nuclear territory but also extends the same. Exemplifying environmental risks, societal injustices, and military entanglements of civil nuclear programmes, spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste in transit became targets of anti-nuclear protests. This paper investigates how during the 1980s anti-nuclear protests instrumentalised transportation technologies and infrastructures in their campaigns against nuclear energy and weapons, and how these protests have influenced and shaped how nuclear waste was transported.

By conceptualising waste in transit as extended nuclear territory, I will show how a dependency on non-nuclear infrastructure made the nuclear surprisingly vulnerable to external forces with long-term implications on spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste policies.