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Deep Time Iterations: Familiarity, Horizons, and Pattern Among Finland’S Nuclear Waste Safety Experts

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Deep Time Iterations: Familiarity, Horizons, and Pattern Among Finland’S Nuclear Waste Safety Experts Deep Time Iterations: Familiarity, Horizons, and Pattern Among Finland’s Nuclear Waste Safety Experts A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Vincent Francis Ialenti Cornell University Department of Anthropology December 2017 © Vincent Francis Ialenti ii Deep Time Iterations: Familiarity, Horizons, and Pattern Among Finland’s Nuclear Waste Safety Experts Vincent Francis Ialenti, PhD Cornell University 2017 This ethnography reconsiders nuclear waste risk’s deep time horizons’ often-sensationalized aesthetics of horror, sublimity, and awe. It does so by tracking how Finland’s nuclear energy and waste experts made visions of distant future Finlands appear more intelligible through mundane corporate, regulatory, financial, and technoscientific practices. Each chapter unpacks how informants iterated and reiterated traces of the very familiar to establish shared grounds of continuity for moving forward in time. Chapter 1 explores how Finland’s energy sector’s “mankala” cooperative corporate form was iterated and reiterated to give shape to political and financial time horizons. Chapter 2 explores how workplace role distinctions between recruit/retiree and junior/senior were iterated and reiterated to reckon nuclear personnel successions’ intergenerational horizons. Chapter 3 explores how input/output and part/whole distinctions were iterated and reiterated to help model distant future worlds in a portfolio of “Safety Case” evidence made to demonstrate the Olkiluoto repository’s safety to Finnish nuclear regulator STUK. Chapter 4 explores how Safety Case experts iterated and reiterated memories of a deceased predecessor figure in everyday engagements with deep time. What emerges are three insights about how futures attain discernible features – insights about the “continuity,” “thinkability,” and “extensibility” of expert thought – that, I argue, can help twenty-first century experts better navigate not only deep time, but also unknown futures of nuclear technologies, planetary environment, and expertise itself. iii Biographical Sketch Vincent Ialenti is a socio-cultural anthropologist who studies how nuclear professionals endow uncertain futures with form. He has been a U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (2011-2016), a Mellon Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities (2015-2016), and a MacArthur Nuclear Waste Solutions Fellow at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs (2017-2018). He holds an MSc in "Law, Anthropology & Society" from the London School of Economics and a BA in “Philosophy, Politics, and Law” from State University of New York at Binghamton. Vincent has written public commentaries for NPR, Forbes, Sapiens, Physics Today, Nautilus, and other outlets. His work has been covered by Huffington Post, Forbes, Nevada Public Radio, Les Affaires, and the Long Now Foundation. At Cornell, Vincent designed and taught a first-year writing seminar called Nuclear Imagination: Technologies & Worlds. He is currently developing a second project on the 2014 drum breach accident at Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the U.S. defense nuclear waste repository in New Mexico. iv Acknowledgements I am fortunate to have had my research supervised by some exceptionally talented scholars who have been indispensable to my intellectual growth. I thank my Cornell committee – Annelise Riles, Mike Lynch, and Hiro Miyazaki – for their tremendous patience, unique generosity, and invaluable advice. I thank Martha Mundy and Alain Pottage for deepening my understanding of law, science, and society. I thank Doug Holmes for helping me see the power of imaginative ethnography. And I thank Allison Macfarlane for broadening my understanding of radioactive waste policy and science and for helping inspire my next research project on U.S. nuclear weapons waste. Anthropology is an interpersonal and collaborative endeavor. Over the years, many colleagues and friends have shaped my thinking through fun conversations, intense debates, fruitful collaborations, and constructive comments on drafts. Their insights have influenced this dissertation greatly. I thank Chloe Ahmann, Anindita Banerjee, Lindsay Bell, Erich Berger, Eeva Berglund, Charis Boke, Craig Campbell, Rebekah Ciribassi, Britt Dahlberg, Bahram Dastmalchi, Matti Eräsaari, Brian Escobar, Magnus Fiskesjö, Danya Glabau, Alexander Gordon, John Wyatt Greenlee, Davydd Greenwood, Kelly Grotke, Karin Gustafsson, Hugh Gusterson, Miia Halme- Tuomisaari, David Hammer, Stephen Hastings-King, Chris Havlin, Nina Honkela, Zach Howlett, Lei Huang, Janne Hukkinen, Richard Irvine, Niklas Jensen-Eriksen, Timo Kaartinen, Timo Kallinen, Marianna Keisalo, Matti Kojo, Janne Korhonen, Lindsay Krall, Markku Kuisma, Maarit Laihonen, Liam Lawson, Amy Levine, Markku Lehtonen, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Antti Leppänen, Tapio Litmanen, Yash Lodha, Eudes Lopes, Austin Lord, Adrienne Mannov, Owen Marshall, Tim McLellan, Mary Mitchell, Cathy Nangini, Zeynep Oguz, Anand Pandian, Steve v Potter, Karen Pinkus, Yannis Ramos, Joel Robbins, Aaron Rosenberg, Johan Munck af Rosenschöld, Josh Reno, Minna Ruckenstein, Sonja Schmid, James Sharrock, Harri Siikala, Antti Silvast, Pamela Smart, Michelle Spektor, Alana Staiti, Annie Tomlinson, Pedro de la Torre, Juha Tuunainen, Katja Uusihakala, Fredrik Vahlund, Jeff Wall, Anna Weichselbraun, Marina Welker, Erick White, Allegra Wrocklage, and Jake Wojtowicz. I am grateful to Lara Houston, Beth Reddy, Stephanie Steinhardt, and Malte Ziewitz for their feedback in a very thought-provoking ethnographic writing group in 2016. I thank Tim Murray and Cornell’s Society for the Humanities’ 2015-2016 fellows for introducing me to so many fresh ways of thinking about time. I thank my students in my Fall 2016 Nuclear Imagination: Technologies & Worlds seminar for their stimulating questions. I thank the Meridian 180 community for the many vibrant and timely conversations we have had online together since 2011 and in person in Okinawa in 2016 and Brussels in 2017. I thank Stefan Helmreich and Elizabeth Povinelli for leading two Masterclasses – on wave form and on geontologies respectively – that have shaped my thinking since I participated in them. This dissertation would not have been possible without the sixty-nine field informants who generously offered me their valuable perspectives and time. When recruiting for this study, I suggested many of them check the boxes on my IRB consent form indicating their preference for anonymity or having their name masked by a pseudonym in my writings. The idea was that confidentiality would encourage frank and personal dialogue while also protecting my informants. I extend my deepest thanks to all the informants I cannot mention by name. The same goes for the few I can: Timo Äikäs, Mick Apted, Hannu Hänninen, Jehki Härkönen, Satu Hassi, Ari Ikonen, Tiina Jalonen, Denis Janin, Juha Kaija, Martti Kalliala, Anna Kontula, Teemu vi Lähtinen, Kaisa-Leena Hutri, Michael Madsen, Lauri Muranen, Markus Olin, Barbara Pastina, Heikki Raiko, Matti Saarnisto, Timothy Schatz, Johan Swahn, and Juhani Vira. I thank Finnish nuclear waste management company Posiva Oy for giving me formal permission to conduct this research in dialogue with their experts. I thank University of Helsinki’s Finnish for Foreigners program for the language training. Special thanks are due to Christa Örn for her generous translation assistance. I thank my parents, Vin and Sharon Ialenti, for their love and support, even and especially when my decisions have led me down atypical paths. I dedicate this dissertation to them. I also thank Joe Abdallah, Eric Budde, Vic Kaigh, Brad Lipitz, Brian Pekkerman, Jake Sullivan, John Wagner, and Rich Zamore for many years of sustaining friendship. My doctoral research was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the U.S. National Science Foundation (#2011129751), a Mellon Graduate Fellowship from Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, and a MacArthur/GWU Predoctoral Fellowship from The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. It was also made possible by a generous package of teaching assistantship, research assistantship, and fellowship support from Cornell University’s Department of Anthropology. vii Abbreviations ANT – Actor-Network Theory (sociological method) ATS – Suomen Atomiteknillinen Seura (Finnish Nuclear Society) BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation BP – BP P.L.C., formerly British Petroleum BSA – Biosphere Assessment (Safety Case model report) BSD – Biosphere Description (Safety Case model report) CLA – Construction License Application CLAB – Sweden’s Central Interim Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel CNN – Cable News Network (U.S. media outlet) CNNC - China National Nuclear Corporation CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility DOE – U.S. Department of Energy DLA – Decommissioning License Application EBS – Engineered Barrier System (safety case expert term for built repository) EDF - Électricité de France EK - Elinkeinoelämän keskusliitto (Confederation for Finnish Industries) ENYGF - European Nuclear Society’s Young Generation Forum (event) EU – European Union GE – General Electric (American multinational conglomerate) GFM – Groundwater Flow Model (Safety Case model) GTK – Geologian tutkimuskeskus (Geological Survey of Finland) HUT – Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) IAEA – International Atomic Energy Agency
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