@article{Domesticating:6509,
      recid = {6509},
      author = {Palazzo, Stephanie L.},
      title = {Domesticating Uncertainty: The Nuclear Afterlives of Three  Mile Island},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2023-06},
      abstract = {“Domesticating Uncertainty: The Nuclear Afterlives of  Three Mile Island” analyzes the rise and fall of the  nuclear industry in the US as it is typified through the  life cycle of Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant (TMI).  In 1979, TMI was the site of America’s most publicized  civilian nuclear power accident; today, it is facing its  decommissioning, a plant closure that will span sixty  years. Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in  Central Pennsylvania, I document how residents hosting the  midcentury future-building projects of the US nuclear  industry came to feel at home with a domesticated weapon of  war, and their attempts to live safely, even  optimistically, alongside it in its present aftermath.  Rather than interpreting decommissioning or the 1979  accident as bounded events, this project tracks the  “afterlives” of TMI, its ongoing material, social, and  affective impact on my interlocutors’ daily life even as  the plant begins its deconstruction. More than a formal act  of unbuilding then, my research understands nuclear  decommissioning as an ongoing social process with national,  environmental, and bodily consequences that generate  seemingly contradictory affective attachments to industries  that harm. By problematizing plant closure as a realistic  goal, my project demonstrates ethnographically the national  and local scale of the 1979 accident, as well as the  environmental and ethical stakes of the United States’  project to safely decommission roughly 20 plants in the  next half century without long-term waste solutions and  under timelines that will outlive  stakeholders.“Domesticating Uncertainty” argues that it is  not only through modes of containment that people come to  feel safe living in the shadow of an infamous nuclear power  plant. It is also through the inherently  boundary-transgressive process of domestication that  enables people to feel at home with nuclear power’s  strange-making qualities in ways that preempt attention  away from the technology’s instability and uncertainty. The  technoscientific promise of domestication envisions a world  of neat and tidy binaries—war versus peace, the bomb versus  the peaceful atom, the home versus the plant, the domestic  versus the foreign, the local versus the global. But  domestication, as a process that transforms a weapon of war  into a civilian energy source to power the white,  middle-class home, showcases not only the illusion of these  binaries but also Americans’ preoccupation with clinging to  them. 
},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/6509},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.6509},
}