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.
The major project outcome of this grant is Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press 2012). The book addresses academic debates in a variety of fields (science and technology studies, African studies, global and transnational history and anthropology). But it is also intended to have a broader impact: it is written in language suitable for an educated lay public, and aims to reach policymakers in the nuclear field as well as in the area of international development. Below I summarize the book’s argument. Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2002, George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" (later specified as the infamous "yellowcake from Niger"). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. Yet that did not admit Niger, or any of Africa’s other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of "nuclear states." Nor did it mean that uranium itself counted as a "nuclear" thing. In Being Nuclear, I explore what it means for something—a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be "nuclear." The book seeks to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. I begin by exploring uranium as a circulating object. How was the uranium market imagined? How were market fantasies related to weapons proliferation? And how did the exclusion of black African leaders from market constructions matter over time? Uranium, I argue, was not born nuclear. In 1957, uranium ore was nuclear enough to give apartheid South Africa, a major supplier of the US and the UK in the early Cold War, a central role in the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency. A decade later, the nuclear industry in the West found that creating markets for reactors – and for uranium itself – would be better served if uranium ore lost its status as "nuclear material," so that yellowcake (the processed form of uranium ore) could be bought and sold without undergoing the international inspections and safeguards that governed the transfer of other nuclear technologies. In the 1970s, one consequence of this denuclearization was that France could counter Niger’s attempt to price its yellowcake as an exceptional nuclear material by arguing that on the contrary, uranium had to be treated and priced like any other market commodity. This framework enabled France to obtained Nigérien uranium at low prices. But it also enabled Niger to sell uranium to Libya, Pakistan and Iraq in the 1970s. Yellowcake from Niger may not have gone to Iraq in 2002, but chances are overwhelming that it did end up in the first Pakistani bomb, and that it would have ended up in a Libyan bomb had Qaddafi managed to have one built. Divesting uranium of nuclearity was risky business. Nor was the nuclearity of mine labor self-evident. The second part of Being Nuclear examines uranium production in African places, focusing on labor and occupational health in the mines. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic field work in Gabon, Madagascar, South Africa, and Namibia, I explore how supposedly universal prescriptions for dealing with radiation hazards played out in different places. Treating mines as nuclear workplaces required instruments and data, national agencies and international organizations, experts and conferences and journals, technological systems and infrastructures and media. When (and where) nuclearity was densely distributed among these elements, it helped to make occupational hazards visible and offered a means of claiming expertise, or compensation, or citizenship. But absent these elements, uranium mining in Madagascar never became nuclear, and the lasting consequences of radiation exposure and contamination there have remained invisible. Nuclearity came late to uranium mines in Gabon and Namibia; today, former mine workers in these countries seek to salvage their future by rendering their pasts in nuclear terms, most notably by trying to establishing links between present illnesses and past exposures in order to obtain treatment and compensation. Rewriting the history of their workplaces is crucial to this epidemiological and political task. The stakes of Africa’s presence and absences from the nuclear world continue to accumulate. There is currently a uranium boom in progress all over the continent, in which mine operators and state officials pit the immediate urgency of "development" against the long-term uncertainties of exposure. The outcomes of these struggles are by no means pre-determined, as people discover -- over and over again -- that the power of nuclear things has a price.
