Becoming Jane: The making and unmaking of Hanford’s nuclear body

Abstract

This article examines the politics of permissible exposure in American nuclear remediation. At its heart is Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the nation’s largest and most expensive nuclear cleanup effort. According to Superfund regulation, nuclear landscapes are considered remediated once acceptable carcinogenic risk levels have been met. The challenge of remediation, then, is to measure and manage the conditions of carcinogenic encounter—titrating environmental contamination with human activity to achieve the appropriate balance of permissible dose. In this article, I follow the genesis and development of “Jane,” a future human designed for life in post-cleanup Hanford. Jane embodies a distinct set of regulated movements and activities, each specifically calculated to ensure legal compliance within the terms of acceptable risk. In tracing Jane’s genealogy, I examine the history of radiogenic science and the official making of nuclear safety. Next, I discuss the efforts of two local Native American tribes to craft their own future human template, a standardized indigenous body designed for use in Hanford’s remediation planning. Rejected by federal regulators, the indigenous body is framed as Jane’s constitutive outside, remediation’s unthinkable subject. As such, I consider how cleanup efforts seek to reconstitute life itself—formalizing a new baseline from which to evaluate the boundaries and biologies of post-nuclear existence.