Memorializing Decommissioning

A Nuclear Culture Approach to Safety Culture

Abstract

The Indian Point Energy Centre (IPEC), New York’s first ever nuclear power plant owned by Entergy Corporation, is located midway along the Hudson – a river that bears thick histories of colonization and industrialism in the USA. With the Algonquin Incremental Market’s natural gas pipeline intersecting IPEC under its ground, Indian Point (IP) is a complex spatiality of danger. In January 2017, the Riverkeepers signed an agreement with Entergy and New York State calling for the decommissioning of IPEC. The article discusses the findings from a recent sensory ethnographic fieldwork and explicates the nuclearity of a space that is fraught with histories of American national desires. In doing so, the article juxtaposes the material-mnemonic semiotic of the Hudson with that of nuclear decommissioning technologies and advocacy at IP to discuss regimes of perceptibility, memory-making and heritage in American nuclear culture. It traces the
IP’s decommissioning advocacy as an effort to remember, make oddkins and usher a situated technical practice in contrast to demiurgic imaginaries of technofixes and techno-apocalypses that defines practices of nuclear safety culture. The article argues for the need to tweak safety culture with a nuclear culture approach and situates nuclear culture for future research.