The life of the by-product in the “Grants uranium district” of northwestern New Mexico

Abstract

In the “Grants uranium district” of northwestern New Mexico, there is a large-scale high-tech operation underway to monitor and cleanup the uranium mine waste and mill tailings from the U.S. Cold War development of nuclear weapons. This dissertation presents an anthropological study of the expertise involved in cleaning up the by-products of such historic production. Though the focus of the study is on the experts who monitor and manage the mine waste and mill tailings, the dissertation considers the different perspectives on policy, planning, design, and engineering surrounding uranium tailings piles. Through this emphasis on multiple perspectives, the study opens up the kind of “explanatory pluralism” prescribed by Evelyn Fox Keller (2002), in which differences in perspective are “not simply a reflection of differences in epistemological cultures but a positive virtue in itself, representing our best chance of coming to terms with the world around us.” The goal of this dissertation is to refine our understanding of the different “stakeholders” involved in cleaning up the mining district, as they deliberate about the possibility of reclaiming abandoned uranium mines, remediating Superfund sites, and restoring the natural and cultural resources of northwestern New Mexico. My thesis is that the possibility of cleaning up the Grants uranium district hinges on the “politics of baselining”—a term I introduce to help articulate my argument about the relationship between three categories of stakeholders. By tracing lines of geochemical evidence through the same groundwater samples, each stakeholder’s model imagines a different geological past prior to mining that can be deemed “natural,” as the background against which to measure the anthropogenic impact of “man-made” piles of uranium tailings.