![]() ![]() By materially and discursively delimiting the edges between exposure and safety, toxicity graduates different conditions for different lives all inhabiting a shared planet. 8 Chemical residues inhabit mobile and unpredictable geometries that inevitably undermine Modernist principles of formal autonomy and rationality. The toxic artifacts left behind by twentieth century nuclear industry exhibit a grim epistemological and spatial indeterminacy that static architectural forms simply cannot contain. The entire incident illustrates toxicity’s troubling relationship to space: contaminants evade enclosure by leaching through air, water, soil, plants, and animals, ricocheting through the environment for millennia. To stay safe, one only needed to “carry their food in closed containers,” and “not leave fruit, cookies, or other unwrapped food out in bowls or on tables.” 7įor government contractors, the flies themselves were less alarming than the way they breached the border between contaminated and uncontaminated zones, and in the process raised doubt about the efficacy of borders as such. In an October 12 memo titled “CONTAMINATION SPREAD QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS,” management attempted to allay workers’ concerns by explaining that “ contamination outside of a control zone is of concern because it isn’t supposed to happen… any contamination outside of controlled radiation areas is unacceptable.” 6 Workers were advised that direct contact with strontium-90 at levels present in the fruit flies amounts to the same level of radiation as a dental X-ray. 5 In internal communications between management and workers at the nuclear facility, toxic exposure was cast as a product of the nuclear facility’s physical borders rather than a threat to human or ecological health. Substances containing unstable nuclei became toxic only once they leached into adjacent spaces and spilled over thresholds. The official response to the spread of radioisotopes throughout the Columbia River Basin emphasized the breakdown of a supposedly healthy distribution of chemicals across a regional topography of militarized borders. Courtesy of Robert Del Tredici/the Atomic Photographers Guild. ![]() Robert Del Tredici, Madonna of the Glove Box, 1993. The public-private cleanup effort that followed the incident deployed insecticide “spot treatments” at contaminated sites throughout the region, installed a tent-like physical barrier around waste pits where flies might have laid their eggs, and enclosed the nuclear complex within a “2.5 hectare (6.2–acre) radiological buffer area (RBA).” 3 The contamination was considered neutralized only after 106 workers’ urine and feces tested negative for bioaccumulated radiation and 210 tons of garbage were moved from the municipal dump to “low-level burial grounds” at the nuclear compound. Radioactive isotopes leaked out of the plutonium plant’s policed borders and segregated waste management systems through the bodies of entomological hosts that flew over fences, burrowed in garbage, and nested in human homes. When the eggs hatched, swarms of irradiated flies found their way into the food and clothing of plant personnel, who then carried traces of radiation back home. Three weeks later, officials determined that toxic material had spread after fruit flies laid eggs in concrete vats of nuclear waste. ![]() Then, contamination seeped beyond the trailer: first in spit out chewing tobacco, then on a worker’s dirty laundry, and eventually inside homes and garbage bins up to eighty miles from the nuclear facility. Further investigation turned up “specks” of radiation darting through the air. Geiger counts shot up near a light switch, a piece of silverware, and a cutting board. 1 The incident began when health monitors recorded a bizarre spattering of the radioactive isotope, strontium-90, in a mobile office trailer. On October 1, 1998, subcontractors with the US Department of Energy set up a “situation room” in downtown Richland, Washington, to monitor a mysterious breach at the Hanford Nuclear Reserve.
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