On Toxicity and Nuclear Cleanup

An Interview with Shannon Cram, author of Unmaking the Bomb
Shannon Cram

 

Reckoning with cleanup’s structural inequalities means attending to the meaning and making of reasonable harm. It means asking whose body and whose future cleanup imagines—whose life cleanup makes possible. 

Shannon Cram is an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. She was the recipient of the Simpson Center’s First Books Summer Faculty Fellowship in 2021. Her book, Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility (University of California Press, 2023), explores embodied politics of nuclear waste remediation by focusing on the decommissioned Hanford nuclear site. She was awarded the 2024 Ludwik Fleck prize, which recognizes an outstanding book in science and technology studies.   

The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

Yasaman Naraghi: Would you start broadly by telling us about your scholarly work?

Shannon Cram: My PhD is in geography, with a focus in science and technology studies. My research is about the social life of science, by which I mean the ways that science and technology are situated in history, power, and daily relationships, how we embody these social relations in and through science and technology. Right now, I'm teaching a class called Politics of Science. We spent the whole first day using toxicity as an example of what it means for science and technology to shift power. I had students define the word “toxic.” And immediately complexities surfaced around the relationship between toxicity and harm. 

YN: So how do your students react to that? I assume, some folks might come into a space understanding toxicity as sharply defined, but through relations, it becomes so much more nuanced and complicated, even destabilized.

SC: Exactly. At first, students defined toxic as causing harm that can be seen, something that happens immediately and visibly—you are exposed to something and then bam, you're sick right away—when the reality is often more complicated. It’s helpful to recognize the preconceived notions that are held within the term, and then to have to think about how you would initiate policy, regulation, or protections around forms of toxicity that are more chronic, uneven, and less visible. How to navigate the ambiguities of environmental illness, and to do so in a socially just way.

YN: Since we are on the topic of toxicity, would you mind telling me about how you came to focus on Hanford?

SC: I came to Hanford by accident. I'm originally from Seattle but I was living in California. I was here visiting a friend, and I said, if I could find a job in one day, I could stay in Seattle. I was walking up and down University Way and there were fliers for an environmental job, canvasing for an initiative about Hanford. So I applied and, since I had a bachelor's degree, they made me a field manager. I helped with organizing, trained people to canvass, and spent months going door to door across the state of Washington, talking to people about Hanford. Honestly, I wasn't initially drawn to the topic. When you canvass, it's very rote, you memorize a paragraph and you're supposed to say it word for word at every door. But when the campaign was over and I left for grad school, I couldn't stop thinking about this place. I took the Hanford tour, which at the time, they only did about twice a year. I walked into the B reactor, the first place to make plutonium at an industrial scale, and I started to cry. I was so struck by how much this room had changed the world. I was early in my graduate studies at that point, and I went home and changed my research topic to Hanford. Afterwards, I found out that my grandfather had worked there, so he and I started reading books together about nuclear things. I ended up interviewing him for my dissertation.

YN: Your book is so important because it sheds light on one of the biggest, if not the biggest, nuclear waste sites, which just happens to be in our state of Washington. And through your research, you complicate the notion of cleanup. Would you briefly describe the questions and topics your book takes up and how you arrived at them?

SC: The book is basically an engagement with my own questions that came up doing both research and advocacy around the Hanford cleanup. It starts with my discomfort with the advocacy story that I've been telling for most of my adult life: There's a contaminated place, which is Hanford. It's hazardous to human health and the environment. We need to clean it up. I, of course, believe in that story. I care about it. And yet as a scholar thinking about the power-laden nature of categories and how they inform everyday life, things like cleanup, hazard, health, safety, and contamination require so much situating that I felt uncomfortable about the story’s lack of context. Especially because Hanford will actually never be cleaned up, if by clean we mean free of its waste. Also because clean as a policy category doesn't mean uncontaminated, it means an acceptable risk of cancer. And since basically the whole time I was in graduate school, either me or someone in my family was going through cancer treatment, that acceptable risk of cancer felt even more embodied and significant to me. 

I wrote the book to investigate what it means to advocate for cleanup, given all this situated complexity. I continue to be a strong advocate for cleanup and work with community organizations that teach about it and I was on the Hanford Advisory Board for ten years thinking about policy. I wanted to inhabit that tension of advocating for remediation when there is some structural violence built into its very categories. In the book, you follow me around as I try to reckon with that. For me, reckoning with cleanup’s structural inequalities means attending to the meaning and making of reasonable harm. It means asking whose body and whose future cleanup imagines—whose life cleanup makes possible. 

YN: I was so profoundly moved by how personal your book is and how well your personal experiences complemented your research. As a scholar and a researcher, why was it important to bring in the personal into this topic? Especially since as an academic scholar, the first book, the tenure book is not usually structured like this.

SC: I'm so glad that it moved you. I want people to feel the book. I wrote this book three times all the way through. The first time was mostly just my dissertation. And then the second time, I was trying to just write a regular tenure book or a less personal, let's say, tenure book, and I couldn't. The second draft was only personal. And that was not a tenure book. So then I set all that second draft aside and started again from scratch, and this is the book that came out, which ended up being a blend of the two. I'm glad it is, because this third version reflects the strangeness of living through cancer treatment while simultaneously engaging in policy conversations about cleanup’s acceptable risk of cancer. We're talking about embodied politics and, as a feminist scholar, situating myself in the research is important to me. I love it when books do that. I have a little piece of paper on the corkboard by my desk that says, “write the book you want to read.” And any time I'd start to feel a little nervous that this wasn't an academic enough book or the style was not right, I would look at that and say, I don't care, I'm going to read it! I'm happy that I ultimately just let the book become itself in that way.

YN: Earlier you mentioned how cleanup doesn't necessarily mean “to cleanup.” It's not to eradicate the waste, but to contain it based on some sort of definition of “reasonable harm.” Your narrative of remediation highlights this constant oscillation between the impacted individual – the actual body – and the abstractions of impact. Why does the project of remediation that is based on reasonable harm rely so much on abstractions and statistical people?

SC: I think that the book really plays with the logics of abstraction and in fact, how abstracting the body is what makes cleanup possible through the frame of risk. I am intellectually interested in that tension between individual lived experiences of exposure and abstract statistical imaginations of exposure—and how that tension becomes definitional to cleanup.It applies beyond the nuclear too. 

I actually did a training at Argonne National Laboratory to learn how to calculate acceptable risk from an agency perspective. I looked specifically at the everyday details that are imagined in agency models. In that training, our teacher said, “how clean is clean? Clean enough to fulfill the regulatory requirements.” I was interested in how the computer program that I was learning to use created an image of a life in relation to contamination in such detailed ways: imagining how much that abstract body breathes per minute, whether or not they wash their vegetables before they eat, whose body that is. And then, whose life is being preserved and made possible through these calculations? I thought about how two of the Hanford area indigenous tribes that have treaty rights to use the site in perpetuity have created exposure scenarios that could inform cleanup, but those scenarios are often not selected by the cleanup agencies. The power dynamics of imagining Hanford’s future land use, which determines how much cleanup needs to happen in particular spaces is so important. And it's a moment where we can make decisions about whose life is being made possible through cleanup, and potentially have a more socially just outcome.

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