Ontologies of Waste

How do materials discarded as waste become resources? How do the technopolitics of time and space shape such ontological shifts? I consider such questions in relation to the history of radioactive excess in Africa. Three examples of ontological instability illuminate the consequences of colliding time scales, spatial politics, and material inequalities for the production of toxic citizenships. The first concerns a 1.7 billion year old "natural nuclear reactor" in Gabon, discovered when a French mining company sent depleted uranium to a Soviet enrichment plant. Because the depleted ore wasn’t usable in human‐made reactors, the company viewed it as waste. The site became significant for international geology, enabling scientists to study the distant past in order to model a distant future of buried nuclear waste. For Gabonese residents concerned with the present, however, another question arose: did the region’s chronic infertility result from age‐old radioactive excess... and not witchcraft, as previously thought? The second example concerns rocks cast aside over a century of South African gold mining: mountains of capitalist waste that mark the Witwatersrand landscape. Starting in 1952, some of these tailings piles were themselves mined in order to extract newly valuable uranium, long present in the same ore matrix. Waste piles low in uranium remained ontologically (though not ecologically) stable. When tests revealed harmful radiation levels, the mining industry denied that these tailings were nuclear waste, insisting that radioactive gas quickly dispersed into the atmosphere. This non‐nuclearity enabled the postApartheid state to resettle former shack dwellers in housing built alongside these toxic generators. Resettled refugees of Apartheid thus share the fate of uranium mining communities in Gabon and Niger. My third example concerns these communities, where radioactive debris – especially scrap metal and gravel – was scavenged and repurposed to build radon‐filled houses and fashion food and water containers.