Uranium from Africa and the Power of Nuclear Things (Scholar's Award)

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This project, supported by the NSF Program in Science, Technology & Society, explores the history of African uranium production and its crucial role in shaping conceptions, meanings, and uses of nuclear things in both global and local arenas. In any given year during the last six decades, African ore has supplied 25-50% of the Western world's uranium. This project traces the history of that uranium, focusing on Congo, Gabon, Namibia, Niger, Madagascar, and South Africa. Drawing upon extensive archival research and fieldwork on three continents, the project examines the history of ore production in these sites, and the movement of yellowcake (processed ore) from these mines to destinations in the US, Europe, and Japan. It examines how African uranium mines became nuclear places, the role of African ore in shaping the transnational uranium market, and the culture and practice of work in uranium mines (including issues surrounding radon monitoring and occupational health). This project aims to reshape scholarly perspectives on the "nuclear age" and to suggest new ways of understanding transnational technological networks. It is the first to examine uranium production in Africa, using African sources. Empirically, developing this understanding matters not only because African ore production has accounted for so much of the worldwide uranium trade historically, but also because the continent is currently experiencing its largest uranium boom yet. Conceptually, placing African uranium at the center of nuclear history reveals how the scientific, technological, political, or occupational designation of a material or activity as "nuclear" was often a matter of contention. The stakes of that designation were high, and remain so, with profound consequences for the legal and illegal circulation of uranium and other radioactive materials, for occupational health and compensation, and for the global institutions and treaties governing nuclear systems. This project also contributes to understanding the global place of postcolonial Africa. It shows how an industry with claims to global purview has depended economically, technologically, and politically upon a commodity from particular places in Africa, arguing that the specificity of those places matters. It explores how some Africans--from heads of state to mineworkers--used the technopolitics of nuclear things to make claims in international arenas. Africans were not merely passive subjects of nuclear structures, even when political and social inequalities severely constrained their possibilities for action.