The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
Beginning with the inception of fissile material production during the Manhattan Project, U.S. institutions, experts, and local communities have been grappling with the inevitable, expected and hazardous consequence of nuclear weapons and energy programs; high-level radioactive waste. This presentation explores the saga of the Yucca Mountain (Nevada) nuclear waste geological repository, which was launched in 1987 by an act of Congress, and canceled 35 years later, after costing taxpayers $13.5 billion. It traces how a set of financial instruments, a Congressional funding mechanism, and the contested efforts of a group of local actors played out as ways to hold together a nuclear past, present, and futures. The aim is to ask what we can learn about the incapacity of U.S. society, and perhaps others, to act responsibly across time in the face of known environmental and public health risks. The presentation draws on the new book Nuclear Remains: On Temporalities, Responsibilities, and Values (2026).
About the speaker: Başak Saraç-Lesavre is Assistant Professor at Sciences Po Paris's Centre for the Sociology of Organisations. Her research spans Science and Technology Studies, economic sociology, environmental anthropology and discard studies. She previously was a postdoc at the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech and a lecturer and research fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She completed her PhD at École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, which included an appointment as a visiting scholar at Harvard. She is currently pursuing research on nuclear technologies and waste policies, economic valuations of nature, marine pollution, and the uses of depths of the Earth as infrastructure.