Contribution short abstract:

Frackquakes near the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the Permian Basin problematize assurances of geological stability and thresholds of containment needed for nuclear waste management and policy. This paper approaches a prefigurative and incomplete politics of fracture at imperceptible scales.

Contribution long abstract:

Nuclear waste containment theories, policies, and public perception depend on technoscientific certainties about geological composition. But frackquakes near the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the Permian Basin problematize assurances of stability and separability. Moreover, disagreements among geologists, waste disposal specialists, the fossil fuel industry, and government agencies create vague or obfuscated data about what’s happening underground. As ordinary people attune to massive sinkholes, radioactive leakage, methane emissions and frackquakes at the surface, they question calculable thresholds of waste, exposure and pollution that delimit safety in proximity to waste.

This opens questions about the role of sensing and sensing technologies at imperceptible scales and durations. Descriptions of sensation challenge technoscientific forms of seismic and infrasonic monitoring that distinguish among frackquakes, nuclear activity, seismic prospecting, acoustic shadows or cloud cover, showing how uneven practices and technologies of seismic and infrasonic monitoring intensify affects of living in a sacrifice zone.

Situated in a context of nuclear colonialism in the American West, this paper approaches a politics of listening with fractures. Drawing on sonic and sensory ethnographic research, it focuses on how imperceptibility is central to ongoing projects of energy extractivism. It suggests that tremors complicate assumptions of separability that determine calculable thresholds of waste or containment, as well as who or what matters at imperceptible scales. Ultimately, it argues that sensation problematizes both event and perception, and offers the felt zone as a concept for a prefigurative and incomplete politics of fracture.