Jennifer Clapp examines the nature of international trade in toxic waste and the roles of multinational corporations and environmental NGOs. Waste transfer has become a routine practice for firms in industrialized countries and poor countries accept these imports but struggle to manage the materials safely. She argues that governments have failed to recognize the voices of protest.

Covering the crater of a 1977 nuclear test, the “Cactus Dome” contains 84,000 cubic meters of radioactive soil.

Shannon Cram explores the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, examining how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. She examines Hanford’s biological vector control program through the fruit fly and discusses how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. She concludes that nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: solve Hanford’s nuclear waste problem.

The paper “Evaluating the ‘Ethical Matrix’ as a Radioactive Waste Management Deliberative Decision-Support Tool” by Matthew Cotton outlines the strengths and limitations of the matrix as well as a framework for the development of alternative tools to better satisfy the needs of ethical assessment in radioactive waste management decision-making processes.

This film examines the limitations and contradictions of finding safe places for nuclear waste storage.