![]() She tells me about the atomic tumbleweeds that drink contaminated groundwater and then roll away with their toxic burden, and the radioactive mice and rabbits who spread Cesium-laced 3 droppings across vast areas of the site. ![]() With a wink and a reference to Spiderman, she recalls the black widow she found living in a high-level nuclear waste tank, and the day she realized that contaminated coyote urine was to blame for Hanford's radioactive telephone poles. Hanford's living environment, dynamic and mobile, regularly carries contamination beyond controlled territory, necessitating a multi-million dollar biological vector control program in the service of radioactive pest management.ĭuring her 23 years at Hanford, Tracy has often been assigned vector control duty. However, the scale and ubiquity of Hanford's toxicity disrupt the rigid boundaries that HPTs so faithfully enforce. Workers, for example, must be “released” by an HPT before they can leave radioactive space, shedding protective gear like toxic skin in preparation for their return to the “uncontaminated” world. ![]() At Hanford, Health Physics Technicians are charged with containing nuclear materials, ensuring that contamination does not move beyond “controlled” 2 areas of the site. They survey land, equipment, and people for elevated levels of radioactivity, patrolling the official boundary between safe and unsafe exposure. Department of Energy (DOE), Hanford is currently engaged in the largest and most expensive environmental remediation project in human history-struggling to contain the material byproducts of weapons manufacture.Īlso known as Radiological Control Technicians, HPTs like Tracy are the border guards of nuclear industry. Once the heart of American plutonium production, Hanford is now the nation's most contaminated nuclear site, laced with more than 450 billion gallons of liquid nuclear waste. Tracy is a Health Physics Technician (HPT) at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a 586 square mile nuclear weapons complex in southeastern Washington State. I imagine this scene as I sit at Tracy's kitchen table, sipping tea and listening to her tell stories about biological vector control. With a whoop, she reaches for the bag and calls it in. Finally, beneath a rusting three legged chair she finds it: a garbage bag containing rotten food and elevated levels of Strontium 90-the signature of radioactive fruit flies. She checks the radiation count-normal-and wishes she could plug her nose. She steps over a plastic bag that has burst in the middle, spewing chicken bones, oily napkins, and a partially melted spatula. Geiger counter in hand, she moves carefully between rolling hills of trash, feeling the unstable squish of each step on decaying ground. Tracy stands on a mound of steaming garbage at the city landfill and tries to get used to the smell. Department of Energy cannot: to solve Hanford's nuclear waste problem. I argue that in its doubling, nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Finally, by examining the dual production of nature as both untouched wilderness and biological vector, I consider how this slippage between pure and polluted has been employed in the service of nuclear industry. Looking specifically at one of the site's most notorious offenders (the fruit fly), I discuss how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. Next, I consider how Hanford's biological vector control program addresses the spread of radioactive flora and fauna. Beginning with the Hanford Reach National Monument, I examine how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. How can these environments simultaneously embody ruin and redemption, and what work does this constitutive contradiction do? In this article, I explore the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State's Hanford Nuclear Reservation. However, these areas are also home to contaminated biota that migrate beyond refuge boundaries, inspiring biological vector control campaigns that frame nuclear nature as a threat that must be contained. In recent years, many of these landscapes have been re-classified as national wildlife refuges in an attempt to transform the nation's atomic sacrifice zones into spaces of environmental salvation. Nuclear weapons production has created a unique geography of irradiated open space in the United States.
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