Marginalization and challenge: The production of knowledge and landscape in Canadian nuclear waste management policy making.

摘要

Aboriginal peoples have recently become politically significant in Canadian nuclear fuel waste (NFW) management policy making. Their newfound significance comes on the heels of an important challenge to the knowledge and authority of the nuclear industry with respect to its plans for NFW lead by a number of public groups and Aboriginal peoples from across Canada, including the Serpent River First Nation. This dissertation examines the relationships between the discourses of the Serpent River First Nation (SRFN) about their experiences of the nuclear fuel chain and the discourses of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) about the management of NFW. Two trends are found to characterize these relationships: marginalization and challenge. The discourses of the NWMO marginalize the SRFN, excluding their experiences of the nuclear fuel chain, radioactivity, and the effects of nuclear industries from the policy making process. The discourses of the SRFN challenge the claims of the NWMO about the effects of nuclear wastes and radioactivity, as well as about the safe and beneficial development of the nuclear fuel chain. I identify discourses of "modern risk" and "citizenship" found in the work of the NWMO as instrumental for maintaining the nuclear industry's control over the production of knowledge about NFW and its effects and subjugating the knowledge of the SRFN. I also identify discourses of identity, oppression, and "situated knowledge" as important challenges to the content, method and premises of the claims of the nuclear industry about the management of NFW. While I conclude that the NWMO's discourses of risk and citizenship constitute a colonial politics of exclusion, I note that their discourses are contingent on the exclusion of the experiences of the SRFN with the fuel chain. For their accounts to be coherent, the NWMO need to maintain a strategic silence on the overwhelming implication Aboriginal peoples, as a category, in the nuclear fuel chain.