"Radioactive Waste and Its Keepers: Managing the West Valley Demonstration Project"

This paper explores the West Valley Demonstration Project, an operation focusing on the cleanup and containment of radioactive waste at the former site of a commercial spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant and two radioactive waste disposal areas, located in West Valley, New York. In 1976, after six years of operation, Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc. notified New York State that it was exiting the reprocessing business and would surrender the facilities to the state. At that time, the reprocessing facility encompassed 750 spent fuel assemblies that had not been reprocessed, 600,000 gallons of liquid high-level radioactive waste stored in two steel tanks, the highly contaminated Main Plant Process Building, and almost three million cubic feet of radioactive waste buried in the two disposal areas - which was left abandoned, in place. In 1980, the West Valley Demonstration Project Act was passed by Congress, launching the federal and state cleanup project that is ongoing today.
Drawing on archival material produced through bureaucratic and regulatory processes, this paper investigates the history, operations, and remediation of the West Valley site, in order to understand what is meant by radioactive waste management: what processes contribute to management, what constitutes being effectively managed, and how classification—of hazardous or nonhazardous, clean or contaminated, waste or surplus—plays into these processes, especially when considering the lengthy life and slow deterioration of radioactive waste. The unique persistence and suffusion of radioactive contamination trouble our efforts to get rid of it—to isolate, contain, clean up, immunize against, or otherwise manage pollutants—and the question of what to do with these nuclear materials is a pressing and unresolved one. How does that management work, when waste remains, when toxicities remain? What can we learn from the history and documentation of that management?