Topographies of memory and power: Environmental politics, history, and justice at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

This research explores the interconnections between environmental justice, social memory and collective politics as they have been shaped by the excavation of a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Yucca Mountain has been the object of over two decades of intense scientific scrutiny, public protest and political debate over its suitability to bury 77 000 tons of high-level commercial radioactive waste. In 2002, despite the protests of the area's Indigenous owners, the State of Nevada and a diverse network of concerned citizen and environmental groups, President Bush officially wrote into legislation the US Energy Department's recommendation that Yucca Mountain become the nation's first commercial nuclear dumpsite. This case study documents the ways in which grassroots and institutional actors, whose collective visions for the region are grounded in very different conceptions of political economy, environmental history and land-use change, form contested topographies of memory and power. In order to understand how public consent and dissent is constructed over potentially deadly land altering projects such as Yucca Mountain, I examine how different social collectives "act politically" in relation to nuclear development in the US southwest. This research therefore investigates the "narratives" and "scenarios" of environmental in/justice at Yucca Mountain as they play out in the public sphere. Drawing on examples such as atomic touring, public science centers, grassroots nuclear waste policy, land justice, scientific monitoring, art exhibitions, and environmental direct action; this study focuses on how the politics and histories that surround massive land altering projects are represented, embodied and enacted.