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Short abstract:

The paper explores the tensions between the performative technological act of free releasing nuclear waste as recycling material and the refusal of landfills in Germany to take up this type of waste, who argue that it can't be trusted to be safe and therefore revalued.

Long abstract:

Very low-level nuclear waste represents over 95% of all the waste resulting from nuclear decommissioning. The industry often uses this as an argument for cost-efficiency, or even profitability, since this type of waste can be sold back into the recycling circuit as conventional waste. However, in order to get to the point of free release, the material has to go through the process of free measurement. This is a legally strictly regulated, as well as practically dangerous and very labor intensive process meant to assure that the waste material is not above a certain level of radioactivity. However, evidence from Germany, which is currently engaged in a nation-wide nuclear decommissioning project, shows that very low-level nuclear waste is not actually free even after free measurement and release, since both public and private landfills refuse to take up any waste coming from nuclear power plants.

Analytically, I explore the performative production of the scientific category ‘non-nuclear’ through an intricate set of actors, ranging from legal authorities, private engineering consulting firms, energy utilities, up to workers that actually clean the contaminated materials in preparation for free release. This I contrast to administrators of landfills, who simply refuse to take up the resulting waste, arguing that nobody will want to re-use it, and their sites will become outsourced nuclear waste repositories. Consequently, the free measured waste can’t actually be released, and it stays on the site of the former power plants.