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Wild and Scenic Wasteland: Conservation Politics in the Nuclear Wilderness

Nuclear weapons production has created a unique geography of irradiated open space in the United States. 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. 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. 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. Beginning with the Hanford Reach National Monument, I examine how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. Next, I consider how Hanford's biological vector control program addresses the spread of radioactive flora and fauna. 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. 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. I argue that in its doubling, nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: to solve Hanford's nuclear waste problem. Tracy stands on a mound of steaming garbage at the city landfill and tries to get used to the smell. Geiger counter in hand, she moves carefully between rolling hills of trash, feeling the unstable squish of each step on decaying ground. Searching. She steps over a plastic bag that has burst in the middle, spewing chicken bones, oily napkins, and a partially melted spatula. She checks the radiation count—normal—and wishes she could plug her nose. She moves on. 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. With a whoop, she reaches for the bag and calls it in. "Got one," she says over the radio. I imagine this scene as I sit at Tracy's kitchen table, sipping tea and listening to her tell stories about biological vector control. Tracy is a Health Physics Technician (HPT) at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a 586 square mile nuclear weapons complex in southeastern Washington State. 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