Faire avec les Restes de l’Age Nucléaire: Traduire la Formation Salado en une « Solution pour la Nation »

What remains of the nuclear age is not only radioactive waste, but also communities, geographies and geologies. In the city of Carlsbad, New Mexico, a group of local actors has been attempting to make their geological formation, the Salado Formation, eligible and desirable for the disposal of the country’s high-level radioactive waste. Carlsbad already hosts the world's only operational deep geological repository, named the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The facility receives regular shipments of low and medium level military radioactive waste to be confined from the biosphere for the next 10,000 years. The city of Carlsbad “stays with the trouble” in that it has to deal with the remains of the nuclear age. Taking this group of local actors as the object of its analysis, the article makes two contributions. Firstly, through an ethnographic inquiry, it offers a symmetrical and complementary account to existing studies on the siting of risky techno-scientific projects that mainly focus on opposition movements and often neglect actions undertaken by those who support such projects. Secondly, it describes how those actors conceive their becoming as dependent on their ability to remain “nuclear” through the continued disposal of radioactive waste in the depths of the Salado Formation. The article concludes by drawing attention to the anticipation of “slow violences” that may result of the end of nuclear life, without excluding those generated by the persistent, undesirable, toxic and harmful encounters with radioactivity.