Paper short abstract:

This project looks at the haphazard shutting down of the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant to explore what is meant by decommissioning, by the state; how decommissioning is produced; and how these processes work together as an attempt to encapsulate toxicities and toxicants and standardize them.

Paper long abstract:

This project explores the decommissioning of nuclear power plants: specifically, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), a permanently closed plant in Southern California, abutting the beach, surrounded by people surfing and sunning, and which, today, functions as an indefinite storage site for spent nuclear fuel. What efforts enact this lengthy process of decommissioning - of dismantling, decontaminating, shutting down? What is shutting down, when waste remains, when toxicities remain? And how do we live alongside San Onofre in the interim, and after? Drawing on literatures in discard studies and other studies of waste and purification, this project investigates decommissioning as a partial, nonlinear, incomplete, and provisional process, and it examines the way the site of SONGS is transformed by its current and prior uses. This project follows SONGS’s recurrent safety issues, its embattled initial and continuing shutdowns, the kittens that were born outside of Unit 1, even - in order to understand what is meant by decommissioning, by the state, and how it is produced - its environmental processes and temporalities, its bureaucratic and regulatory frustrations, and its remnants.