Paper short abstract:

An exploration of projects of technologically-mediated burial—long term geological storage of radioactive waste and soil carbon sequestration.

Paper long abstract:

While scholarly consideration of the underground has tended to focus primarily on resource and mineral extraction, in recent years subsurface strata have increasingly been presented as promising sites for the remediation of a range of persistent environment issues. Proposals for the deep geological storage of radioactive waste and the re-injection of liquefied carbon dioxide in disused mining wells presents a cornucopian vision of the underground as a site for technologically-mediated burial. Closer to the surface, technologies designed to increase the concentration and stability of carbon sequestered in soil are situated at the interface between notions of the sustainable intensification of agricultural productivity and the deployment of 'negative emission' techniques designed to "achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century" (Article 4.1 COP21). Focusing on the proposed burial of radioactive waste and the development of a range of soil carbon sequestration projects, this paper explores the ways in which the subsurface is made both visible and invisible through the assemblage of scientific and technological projections, the creation of systems of commensuration that enable financial exchange between above- and below-ground and the circulation of participatory and regulatory imaginaries in the speculative governance of the subsurface. I conclude by commenting on the temporal horizons of these projects whereby notions of the long-term geological stability of the underground are set against images of the social and political dynamism of the above-ground.