Paper short abstract:

Conceiving of nuclear waste repositories as post-allegedly-post-carbon infrastructures, and engaging with concerns about a loss of the sacred in the Anthropocene, I compare Dutch and English examples of caring for nuclear waste that constitute both denials and expressions of human - Gaia relations.

Paper long abstract:

In the debate on the so-called energy transition, nuclear options have made a surprising return as an alleged* low-carbon solution. Having emerged as a source of energy before anxieties about climate change and concerns about Gaia came to the fore, nuclear power is not literally post-carbon but has become embroiled and appropriated in energy transition discourse as an alternative for more straightforwardly carbon-intensive energy sources. I discuss a particular kind of infrastructure that is intimately associated with nuclear materialities but smoothed over in nuclear energy politics, namely nuclear waste repositories, facilities for (temporary) storage of a variety of nuclear 'waste products'. Dutch cultural historian Gerard Rooijakkers (2016) has made analogies between the care bestowed on nuclear waste and that extended to sacred relics—both examples of cultural practices of safekeeping, he argues, that are closely related to moral identities that human societies seek to portray. Conceiving of nuclear waste repositories as post-allegedly-post-carbon infrastructures, and complicating Rooijakkers' provocation with concerns about a loss of the sacred in the Anthropocene, I argue that these facilities may constitute both denials and expressions of human - Gaia relations that are differently shaped by national, historical, and aesthetic concerns. My ethnographic case studies are the Low Level Waste Repository Ltd and the Sellafield Ltd on-site Calder Landfill Extension Segregated Area (CLESA) in West Cumbria, England, and COVRA, the Central Organisation for Radioactive Waste in the Netherlands.

* alleged, because the front-end of nuclear power generation is considered by nuclear power sceptics to be carbon-intensive