The Everyday Lives of Energy Transitions PDF

644534
research-article2016
SSS0010.1177/0306312716644534Social Studies of ScienceSmith and Tidwell
Article
Social Studies of Science
The everyday lives of energy

2016, Vol. 46(3) 327–350
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
transitions: Contested sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0306312716644534
sociotechnical imaginaries in sss.sagepub.com
the American West
Jessica M Smith
Liberal Arts and International Studies, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA
Abraham SD Tidwell
School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
Abstract
This article brings together two growing literatures – on sociotechnical imaginaries in science and
technology studies and on resource materialities in anthropology – to explore how two energy-
producing communities in the American West understand the moral salience of energy systems
and the place of labor within them. Studies of energy sociotechnical imaginaries overwhelmingly
focus on the role that state and transnational actors play in shaping perceptions of the ‘good
society’, rather than how these imaginaries inform and are transformed in the lived experience
of everyday people. We illuminate the contested dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries and
their positioning within structures of power that inform visions of moral behavior and social
order. Whereas the role of energy in national imaginaries is grounded almost entirely in the
consumption it enables, examining the everyday ethics of people who live and work in Colorado’s
uranium-rich Western Slope and Wyoming’s coal-rich Powder River Basin reveals an insistence
that ‘good’ energy systems also provide opportunities for dignified and well-paid blue-collar work.
This imaginary, we argue, remains ‘bounded’ at a local scale rather than circulating more widely
to gain national or international traction. Theorizing this boundedness illustrates not only the
contested nature of sociotechnical imaginaries, but also the constraints that material assemblages
and sediments of the past place on imagined futures.
Keywords
energy, labor, materiality, mining, sociotechnical imaginaries
Correspondence:
Jessica M Smith, Liberal Arts and International Studies, Colorado School of Mines, 1500 Illinois Street,
Golden CO 80401, USA.
Email: jmsmith@mines.edu
Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

328 Social Studies of Science 46(3)
In the United States, coal and nuclear energy are frequently counterposed in public
debates about energy futures. These debates chiefly revolve around the environmental
implications of each fuel at both global (e.g. climate change) and local (e.g. drinking
water pollution) scales. Going without critical comment are the strikingly different
visions these energy futures hold for the relationship between energy production, con-
sumption, and human labor. Coal mining stands out in popular culture and academic lit-
erature as a physically excruciating and exploitative way of wresting energy from the
earth, its gritty materiality more easily evoking technologies of the Industrial Revolution
than an era of smart phones. Nonetheless, coal continues to supply between 35 and 40
percent of the US electricity supply. In contrast, the promotion of nuclear energy to
Americans hinges upon the delivery of invisible atoms to consumers by clean, profes-
sional, brainy, and futuristic scientists donning white coats, not blue collars. Yet the pro-
duction of nuclear energy still requires the mining of uranium (notwithstanding gestures
to ‘closed’ fuel cycle reactors, discussed below).
Despite the great differences in the national cultural imaginaries surrounding coal and
nuclear energy, research in two energy-producing communities in the American West –
one dominated by coal and the other by uranium – reveals similar lived experiences and
future hopes among the people who produce and seek to continue producing energy for
the rest of the country. This observation prompts us to consider how people engaged in
energy resource extraction imagine and judge the desirability of particular energy socio-
technical systems.
This work has scholarly significance in advancing the burgeoning literature on socio-
technical imaginaries. Sociotechnical imaginaries are collective visions of a ‘good soci-
ety’ that animate technoscientific policies and practices (Jasanoff, 2015; Jasanoff and
Kim, 2009). With few exceptions, the sociotechnical imaginaries literature analyzes
national understandings of the good society promoted by politicians, policymakers, and
other elites. It thus erases other politics and leaves under-theorized how differently posi-
tioned communities within sociotechnical systems imagine good societies, even if those
communities lack the power to enact them. When analyzing energy systems, we will
show that residents of energy-producing communities privilege particular forms of labor
in their conception of desirable futures. But while non-experts have the capacity to artic-
ulate alternative visions of good societies that challenge the nationally dominant ones,
material infrastructures and the lack of political power to modify them may cause these
to remain localized rather than circulate at broader levels where they could be realized
through policy action. We call these bounded imaginaries. We argue that paying attention
to bounded imaginaries through ethnographic and historical research shows how visions
of a good society are ‘connected with social position and power’, and offers a concrete
illustration of a ‘contested imaginary’ (Hess, 2015: 77).
The American West is a rich case for taking up these points, since the region has played
a crucial if obscured role in the development of both the coal and nuclear industries. Vast
surface mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin have outpaced underground and moun-
taintop removal mining in Appalachia since the mid-1980s, when the Clean Air Act’s
stricter emissions standards made it cheaper for power plants to transport and burn the
Powder River Basin’s low-sulfur, sub-bituminous coal than to retrofit plants. The iconic
image of the pickaxe-toting, headlamp-wearing, underground laborer has been harder to

Smith and Tidwell 329
displace than the coal itself. The industry’s symbolic Appalachian heartland similarly
dominates critical analyses of contemporary coal miners and communities by anthropolo-
gists and sociologists (e.g. McNeil, 2011; Scott, 2010), despite the industry’s westward
shift. In 2014, a dozen Powder River Basin mines produced over 380 million tons of coal,
surpassing the almost 270 million tons of coal produced by nearly 900 mines in Appalachia.
Despite their apparent hugeness, the Wyoming production numbers represent a dramatic
drop from their peak of 426 million tons in 2007, as utilities replace an aging fleet of coal-
fired plants with cleaner-burning natural gas ones. Although rumors of impending lay-offs
circulate throughout the basin, so far none of the mines have closed.
Intermixed throughout this mined landscape of the American West is the history of the
American nuclear weapons and energy projects of the latter half of the 20th century. The
‘Nuclear West’ evokes weapons production sites such as Los Alamos, Sandia, and
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (Gusterson, 1996; Masco, 2006), and the
social and environmental consequences of uranium mining on Native American tribes
(Brugge et al., 2006; Kuletz, 1998). Very little scholarship (Amundson, 2002; Malin,
2015) attends to the lived experiences of uranium miners in the United States’ oldest
uranium mining district in continual production: the ‘West End’ of Montrose County,
Colorado. Between the initiation of the nuclear weapons production process in 1948 and
the termination of federal contracts in 1970, the West End, along with similar uranium
mining communities on the opposite side of the Colorado–Utah border, sold the US
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) some £70 million of processed uranium ore
(Albrethsen and McGinley, 1982). This processed uranium ore, or yellowcake, made up
20 percent of the AEC’s domestic purchases between 1948 and 1970. After the termina-
tion of AEC contracts, the surge in nuclear energy demand brought about by the conver-
gence of 1960s reactors, the restructuring of market regulations, and the 1973 Organization
of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo brought about a second
boom, fueling demand from the West End. This boom would last until the early 1980s,
when the spiraling costs of nuclear plant development, the Uranium Mill Tailings
Radiation Control Act (UMTRCA) of 1978, and the accident at Three Mile Island led to
the closure of all but one of the region’s uranium milling facilities. Since the mid-1980s,
production has been scant at best, with uranium prices dropping to all-time lows. The
West End now consists of a small group of idled mines, facilities under reclamation, and
no local ore processing and shipping facility.
The ethnographic and historical materials presented in the following pages draw from
the two authors’ research in the two sites. In Wyoming, Smith has been conducting eth-
nographic research with miners and their families since 2006, including 22 months of
fieldwork that included onsite research at four active mines (Rolston, 2014). That formal
research built on a lifetime of growing up in the area as the daughter of a mine mechanic
and working in the mines herself as a summer employee.1 The Colorado materials draw
from Tidwell’s (2013) discourse analysis of transcribed public meetings and hearings
concerning Energy Fuel’s radioactive materials license, as well as local newspapers and
a 2012 documentary Uranium Drive-In, which centers on the mill controversy analyzed
here. These meetings, carried out by the Colorado Department of Public Health and
Environment (CDPHE) in 2010 and 2012, provided a site for locals to express both their
hopes and concerns related to the licensing of the mill.

Imagining resources
‘Natural’ resources do not simply exist in the physical world, ready to be put to use, but are
the product of human imagination and activity specific to particular political, economic and
cultural contexts; resources do not exist but become (Bakker and Bridge, 2006; Ferry and
Limbert, 2008; Richardson and Weszkalnys, 2014; Rolston, 2013a). Materials convention-
ally referred to as resources, such as coal or uranium, actually exist in distributed assem-
blages that also include extractive infrastructures (such as mines and mills), everyday
practices, entities such as corporations, and discourses of the market, development, and
nation (Richardson and Weszkalnys, 2014). We propose that sociotechnical imaginaries
also play a crucial role in the ‘processes through which [resources] come into being … and
how such processes can be studied ethnographically’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys, 2014:
6), since resource development is inextricable from the collective visions for a ‘good soci-
ety’ that underpin government policies and market forces that give form to particular kinds
of extractive activities. Our work reveals the linkages between morality and materiality,
between perceptions of what life should be like and the constitution of the natural resources
and the technological systems that make such a life possible.
As currently theorized, sociotechnical imaginaries are ‘collectively held, institution-
ally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared
understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive
of, advances in science and technology’ (Jasanoff, 2015: 6). Because they are ‘imbued
with implicit understandings of what is good or desirable in the social world writ large’
(Jasanoff and Kim, 2009: 122), these imaginaries invoke what the world is and what the
world should be. Sociotechnical imaginaries are different from policy agendas in that
they are less explicit, issue-specific, goal-directed, politically accountable, and instru-
mental; rather, they ‘reside in the reservoir of norms and discourses, metaphors and cul-
tural meanings out of which actors build their policy preferences’ (Jasanoff and Kim,
2009: 123). Like narratives and discourses, they guide interpretation and frame the
boundaries of the thinkable, but sociotechnical imaginaries are always and more specifi-
cally associated with ‘active exercises of state power’ (p. 123). These exercises of power,
such as through the selection of policy priorities, fund allocation, and infrastructure
investment, draw attention to the performative nature of sociotechnical imaginaries.
They enact the world they describe, becoming concretized in ‘material objects, institu-
tions, and practices’ (Strauss, 2006: 325).
Although sociotechnical imaginaries are increasingly invoked by scholars to under-
stand energy systems and transitions (e.g. Eaton et al., 2014; Jasanoff and Kim, 2009,
2013; Levidow and Papaioannou, 2013; Teschner and Paavola, 2013), this research
rarely problematizes the imagining, including asking the crucial question of who does
it. With few exceptions (e.g. Eaton et al., 2014), this literature either reproduces Jasanoff
and Kim’s (2009) original focus on national politicians, policymakers, and institutions, or
looks to the transnational level. Levidow and Papaioannou’s (2013) study of bioenergy in
the European Union is an instructive example, as they emphasize the transnational
institutional framework without acknowledging smaller scale sociotechnical imaginar-
ies and their attendant technological forms of life, such as non-petroleum-based trans-
portation in key states like France (Callon, 2012[1987]). Analyzing sociotechnical

imaginaries on the transnational level without properly examining, for example, the
role of Renault engineers working on electric car battery designs in France, forecloses
the opportunity to investigate how elements of more localized sociotechnical imaginar-
ies do or do not translate into wider scales, thereby illuminating the ‘topographies of
power’ (Jasanoff, 2015: 26) imbued in these sociotechnological systems.
Imaginaries may exist at the national or transnational level and influence policy
action, but our research insists that they are not independent of the complex network of
systems from which they emerge. Jasanoff (2015) acknowledges this point in noting the
importance of the process of extension, or how ‘views and practices originating with
individuals or small groups can acquire governing force across much wider domains than
their original locations and circumstances of production’ (p. 32). While theoretically use-
ful, extension privileges actors with the ability to cast a wide net of influence, leaving
little conceptual space to understand how the circulation of competing or marginalized
sociotechnical imaginaries can be thwarted and fail to gain the kind of foothold neces-
sary for them to become visible on a national scale, as we find for the case of the energy-
producing communities.2
This dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries can be traced to the intellectual history
of the term and its uptake. Jasanoff and Kim (2009) theorize sociotechnical imaginaries
primarily through three theorists who Strauss (2006) identifies as having very different
notions of the ‘imaginary’. For both Anderson (1983) and Taylor (2004), imaginaries are
cultural models ‘shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society’ (Strauss, 2006:
330). Jasanoff and Kim’s original definition also draws on Castoriadis, who emphasizes
‘shared, unifying core assumptions’ with a ‘focus on unity, rather than multiplicity’
(Strauss, 2006: 324). Jasanoff jettisons Castoriadis in recent work, in order to acknowl-
edge that a variety of sociotechnical imaginaries exist in tension with one another within
a single nation. Yet the contributions to and uptake of national imaginaries by ordinary
citizens remain under-theorized, as the analytic tool is calibrated to understand national
policies, institutions, and elites rather than the persons who actually interpret, reproduce,
and reshape them. Power, as embedded in the acts of statecraft that materialize sociotech-
nical imaginaries, is constituted by processes that shape how people experience technosci-
entific change and interpret it as part of the assemblages they inhabit (Fortun and Fortun,
2005: 44). Emphasizing the ‘spatially and temporally wider’ (Jasanoff, 2015: 14) collec-
tivized work of social actors captures the scalability of these visions of the good life. Yet
such an approach deserves a symmetrical analysis of the social and political dynamics that
determine who can speak to what is best for society (Hess, 2015).
Thus, while we do not deny the imbalance of power between policymakers and coal min-
ers, for example, we echo Strauss’ (2006: 339) question: ‘Whose imaginaries are these?’ The
ethnographic and historical research to which we now turn shows that sociotechnical imagi-
naries do not simply exist in the collective cultural ether or in powerful political actors and
institutions, but circulate much more widely as they are criticized, taken up, and reframed by
ordinary people. Specifically, we argue that whereas the dominant national vision of the role
of energy in a ‘good society’ centers on the consumption it enables, the desirable energy
sociotechnical systems envisioned by residents of energy-producing communities also
include opportunities for stable blue-collar employment and social institutions that can serve
as the bedrock for the communities and families they desire.3

‘Enabling everyday progress’: Energy and consumption

In the United States, national public debates and much academic scholarship privilege
energy consumption in the framing of questions and priorities. The focus can be traced
back to at least the 1950s, when the term ‘energy security’ first emerged in policymak-
ing aimed at assuring reliable sources of energy to fuel the growing everyday con-
sumptive practices of the American middle class (Tidwell and Smith, 2015). This
framing of energy as primarily a question of consumption continues in political dis-
course, perhaps best encapsulated by almost sacrosanct appeals to lessen the ‘pain at
the pump’ experienced by gasoline consumers. It also seeps into industry public rela-
tions, as crystallized in ExxonMobil’s 2014 ‘Energy Lives Here’ campaign. A TV com-
mercial entitled ‘Enabling Everyday Progress’ connects a White, upper middle–class
woman, boiling an egg in an upscale kitchen, to the vast, complex technological sys-
tems – pipelines, exploration geology, supertankers, offshore oil platforms, refined
gasoline – that make the supposedly mundane task possible. Implied in the commercial
is that the imagined consumer is both integral to and imbricated in the existence of
these larger technological systems.
Much of the social science literature on energy also turns on questions of consump-
tion. Leslie White’s (1943) use of energy as a measure for societal success stands as
possibly one of the starkest examples in the social science canon of a much more wide-
spread belief that increased energy improves ‘civilization’ by widening the consump-
tive practices available to people. This perspective informs the coal industry’s current
attempts to resuscitate and rebrand itself as ‘Advanced Energy for Life’ that solves the
ills of energy poverty, including illiteracy, underdevelopment, and poor access to health
care.4 This focus on energy consumption is also retained in more nuanced social science
research on energy justice, which advocates greater access to electricity and fuels in
order to promote social and economic development in the Global South (e.g. Sovacool
and Dworkin, 2014).
When production is explicitly considered outside of an energy source’s potential to
meet consumer demands, this attention revolves around the environmental dimensions of
particular energy sources, such as local pollution risks or broader contributions to cli-
mate change. Questions of what kinds of jobs are engendered by energy sociotechnical
systems, for example, play a considerably more minor role. For example, the most com-
prehensive recent volume on anthropology and energy (Strauss et al., 2013) explores
different understandings of energy, the articulation of energy with social and political
systems, and the environmental costs of particular sources, but includes only one chapter
on workers who produce energy.
The most visible energy workers in ongoing US debates about energy are coal miners,
who appear as collateral damage in the transition to greener energy futures. An extreme
strand of self-professed progressive politics links morally preferable labor practices to
the dissolution of big fossil capitalistic systems, such as in Naomi Klein’s recent book
This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate. Her description of work in
Gillette, Wyoming perpetuates the ‘Gillette Syndrome’ stereotype (see Rolston, 2013b)
that creates kind of moral character necessary to commit massive ecological damage:

There is a real sadness to many of these choices [for those working in the fossil fuel industry]:
beneath the bravado of the bar scene are sky-high divorce rates due to prolonged separations
and intense work stress, soaring levels of addiction, and a great many people wishing to be
anywhere but where they are. This kind of disassociation is part of what makes it possible for
decent people to inflict the scale of damage to the land that extreme energy demands. (Klein,
2014: 343–344, emphasis added)
Studying energy systems requires acknowledgement that not all humans engaged in par-
ticular assemblages of energy production and consumption experience and give meaning
to these processes in uniform ways. Energy systems and energy policy are ‘an exercise
in the simultaneous conceptualization and design of diverse social arrangements’ (Miller,
Richter, and O’Leary, 2015: 29–30), spanning technological, economic, political, and
social realms. The diversity of social arrangements within these systems is critical and is
not merely a result of the diversity of the physical scales of the technologies themselves.
Cymene Howe’s (2014) research on a contested wind park on the Mexican Isthmus of
Tehuantepec clearly indicates that, even within a geographically constrained energy sys-
tem oriented to the production of ostensibly green energy, ‘environmentally informed
responses [on local levels] and those that purport to speak on behalf of a global scale are
often conflicted, and their sources of knowledge disparate’ (p. 384). Embracing energy’s
‘ontologically problematic’ (Mitcham and Rolston, 2013) status opens space for research
that, as this study does, blurs the line between the technical and the social and between
the local and the national or global.
Although dominant American visions of a good society see energy as enabling mid-
dle-class consumption, this imaginary does not exhaust or extinguish others, such as
those emerging from energy-producing communities, which remain below the level of
national consciousness. Ethical sensibility is ‘part of the human condition’, embedded in
categories of speech and modes of everyday practice (Lambek, 2010: 1; see also Laidlaw,
2013). The visions of a good society held by residents of the Wyoming coal and Colorado
uranium communities emerge from the residents’ past or current roles as energy produc-
ers, prompting them to critique and reframe the dominant consumption-based American
sociotechnical imaginary about energy. In this framework, good societies are imagined
through the energy assemblages they enable and are enabled by in the world.
Prosperous pasts and stable futures on the Western Slope

Southwestern Colorado constitutes a geographically strategic part of the United States’
‘Atomic West’. From 1947 to 1970 alone, total uranium purchases by the federal AEC
from the region totaled approximately US$3 billion (unadjusted).5 The history of uranium
milling and mining in Western Montrose County, colloquially known as the ‘West End’,
extends as far back as the late 1890s (Shumway, 1970).6 Early operations, prior to the
discovery of fission, provided raw uranium–vanadium bearing ore, known as carnotite,
for the production of purified radium and additives for steel production. After a downturn
in the radium industry during the 1920s, the region focused mainly on vanadium produc-
tion, until during the Second World War mines and mill sites began producing unrefined

uranium for the Manhattan Project. Two mills, one in the Union Carbide company town
of Uravan and the other in Naturita, about ten miles to the south along the San Miguel
River, were operated throughout the war. The Naturita mill would continue to operate
after the war in a limited capacity, eventually shutting down in the late 1950s due to lim-
ited process capacity, outdated technology, and the tapering off of uranium purchases by
the federal agency responsible for weapons development, the AEC (Albrethsen and
McGinley, 1982).
By contrast, Uravan operated continuously from 1949 until the mill and town were
closed in response to mounting environmental damage costs and dropping uranium
prices during the mid-1980s. Residents of Uravan who did not leave the region migrated
south to Naturita and its sister community Nucla, some acquiring employment in a local
coal mine or the Nucla Station coal power plant. Others took service sector jobs in the
tourist communities to the east, especially Telluride, or started small, typically eco-
centric, tourist companies. Still others began farming or ranching. Many older residents
retired. Indeed, almost half the local population is fifty or older, and approximately one-
quarter is sixty or older.
Today the region has some 1500 residents. Its isolation, combined with the lack of
local government services, an aging population, and high poverty rates, has reinforced
the strong sense in the community that mineral extraction, especially uranium, provides
the best pathway for development. Other regional options, especially the tourism path
taken by neighboring communities, fail to capture the same support from community
members. By contrast, a plan to refurbish the local drive-in movie theater, the Uranium
Drive-In, catalyzed a successful crowdfunding campaign, and in doing so become the
eponym for a 2013 documentary outlining the West End’s struggles.
An ongoing controversy in the West End surrounding Piñon Ridge, a proposed new
uranium milling operation that could become the first uranium mill built in the United
States in over thirty years, provides a useful window into how community members
imagine a moral community grounded in energy production. On the heels of a uranium
market upswing after decades of decline, Energy Fuels, a Toronto-based uranium mining
and milling company, announced in July 2007 that it would seek to build Piñon Ridge
(Energy Fuels, 2007). The project drew significant attention, with one journalist in Grand
Junction devoting an entire article to the ‘uranium resurrection’ (Stine, 2011).
Debate over the value of uranium milling (and implicitly mining) formed in a number
of discursive spaces, including a series of public meetings held in 2010 and 2012 by the
CDPHE intended to vet the environmental impacts of the Piñon Ridge project. Of the
140 persons who provided comment during the public engagement process, those
opposed to the mill (52%) cited the environmental impacts of extraction on the region’s
landscapes and life, while those in favor (46%) emphasized uranium milling as a path-
way to building a stable community. The open-ended nature of these events means that
while not all participants identified their professional role, many identified themselves as
community or business leaders in western Colorado. Supporters of Piñon Ridge included
residents of Nucla and Naturita as well as members of the town councils and Chambers
of Commerce, leaders of local mining company organizations, and owners of private
construction or mining businesses. The following section analyzes a few key descrip-
tions of community building from supporters of Piñon Ridge, highlighting how each

builds Nucla and Naturita as a moral community centered on the intersection of particu-
lar types of employment and systems of growth and development.
‘We need the jobs, we need the energy …’

In their public comments, some mill proponents voiced highly nationalistic discourses
about the importance of the mill for energy independence and security. Bob announced
that he stood with the people supporting Piñon Ridge because ‘the United States can and
should achieve energy independence as the highest national priority. Instead, we con-
tinue to rely on countries unfriendly to us to provide those energy resources. We put our
national security at risk’ (CDPHE, 2010b: 101–102). A State House candidate similarly
argued, ‘I urge you to do the right thing for national security, for the economy and
approve this mine’ (p. 68). His slip from mill to mine is significant, pointing to the larger
extractive industry assemblages (including reactivated and new mines) that locals imag-
ined the mill would bring about. Both comments invoke energy security as primarily the
security of uninterrupted consumption of energy by a dispersed network of American
consumers.
Far more people, however, assessed the mill in terms of its benefits to the local com-
munity rather than solely its promise of a continued supply of energy to the country’s
consumers as a whole. Lee pointed to the local economic benefits of producing energy,
noting,
We’ve got a lot of nuclear power plants in the country already … we can just supply it ourselves
and give more people jobs here. And nuclear power is the only thing we got, it’s clean and it’s
cheap and we got it right here. There’s no reason for us not to be mining it right here and supporting
our country instead of sending the money into foreign countries. (CDPHE, 2010a: 25)
William also argued in support of the mill by describing the region as being ‘drastically
short’ of energy and ‘right on the edge’ of blackouts and brownouts in the immediate
future, meaning, ‘We [the West End] need this fuel and we need it now’ (CDPHE,
2010b: 35). Donald also called for Coloradans to supply their own electricity, emphasiz-
ing that
To realistically replace coal today, we need a different supply, a source that can power the
grid 24 hours a day seven days a week year in, year out. I believe the source is nuclear
generation and we in Colorado have both production sites and means of producing the fuel to
do so. (pp. 26–27)
Building on Lee’s characterization of nuclear energy as both clean and cheap, his com-
ment distinguishes nuclear energy from both coal, implicitly marked as being carbon
intensive and environmentally polluting, and renewables, explicitly marked as being
unreliable.
These narratives reframe the national sociotechnical imaginary of energy and the
good society (as one with uninterrupted energy consumption for all) into a very specific
question of a local good society: one in which a group of small towns can take advantage

of their resources to provide energy and promote economic development without harm-
ing the environment. The argument that the future mill is valuable because it puts the
production of local energy hand-in-hand with local jobs was especially clear in Jacque’s
comments. Jacque emphasized the significance of the mill for creating local economic
benefits as well as electricity:
Our power has to come from this area, and we do not have the power in Western Colorado. This
is a serious shortage that we’ve got to address. … We need the jobs, we need the energy, we
need the power to light our lights and keep our refrigerators on. (CDPHE, 2010b: 51–52)
Jacque’s linking of energy consumption and production (i.e. jobs) draws out the other
dominant theme of the meetings: the mill’s direct and indirect jobs serving as the founda-
tion for a stable community, characterized by adequate infrastructure that can provide the
region’s young people with a reason to stay.
Infrastructure and generational continuity

Sociotechnical imaginaries may trade primarily in future-oriented visions for good socie-
ties, but those visions emerge in conversation with communal interpretations of the past.
Behind the public comments envisioning the mill as a guarantor of a stable future was the
prosperity associated with the region’s mining and milling past.7 Echoing the social
arrangements of other company-owned mining towns, Uravan consisted of corporate
offices, family housing, general store, recreational facilities, school, and emergency ser-
vices. These services established a cogent community identity that one former employee
characterized as having a ‘family atmosphere’ (CDPHE, 2010b: 32). Tony characterizes
this process of social organization through self-worth and heritage, concepts employed by
many residents of mining communities:
The cultural heritage parts of what you will give back to us are very important. A community
needs a sense of value and self-worth, and our heritage is mining. Our culture is mining, mining
and milling. That’s who we are and that’s what we do. Don’t take that away from us. (CDPHE,
2010a: 43)
Tony’s comment points to the co-production of energy systems, personal senses of self,
and community. His argument ties community building to uranium production, imagin-
ing a good society as one in which energy production facilitates job creation that can
sustain communities.
The proposed Piñon Ridge mill was also imagined as foundation for secondary jobs
and reinvestment in infrastructure that languished without an active mining/milling
industry. Doylene specifically criticized the local economy for its lack of local services,
as ‘In the [sic] Nucla/Naturita we have one motel, one inn, we have one restaurant, no
bar, and a couple of small grocery stores and couple liquor stores’ (CDPHE, 2010a: 51–
52). She argued that tourism and the mill could coexist. Johnie reiterated Energy Fuel’s
emphasis on schools and the positive effects of uranium jobs in terms of cascading
effects on the local economy, where

every dollar spent here is going to boomerang into 5 to 7 dollars in this area. And I think the
towns of Nucla and Naturita need it for their infrastructure. Their infrastructure is wearing out,
the schools are wearing out. They need the investment in here for those people. (CDPHE,
2010a: 26)
Dale succinctly and poetically reinforced that point, stating, ‘The West End needs the
construction jobs, the mining jobs, the engineering jobs, the plant operator jobs, the truck
driving jobs, and other jobs that will emanate from the construction of the mill’ (CDPHE,
2012c: 1136).
In these remembrances of the past and visions for the future, the distributed infra-
structure associated with mining and milling is imagined to constitute a foundation for
intergenerational continuity. Ayngel, a fourth-generation resident who became a public
face for the mill proponents in the Uranium Drive-In documentary mentioned earlier,
viewed the town’s high school graduation rates as indicative of the decay that had hap-
pened as the mills closed and families moved away. Graduating classes in even the bleak
1980s routinely reached 80 students, she said, whereas the most recent class was merely
a dozen. She accused mill opponents of stunting the town’s economic growth without
offering alternatives, saying,
I want everybody here to know that as they’ve stood up against this [mill], they have also stood
up against the 1,200 people here who want to survive, who want to make it. And these [mill
company representatives] are the only people that have come in and offered us jobs. (CDPHE,
2012a: 284)
Richard similarly hoped that the mill would help younger generations stay in the area
(CDPHE, 2010a: 52):
But with that mill coming in, it’s going to help our town, Naturita and everybody else. And it’s
also going to mean that we’ll get some of these younger kids back, which is what we need. And
it’s going to help with the fire department and emergency services because we’ve got these
young guys to go up and do it. You know, a lot of us guys are getting old.
For mill proponents, tourism – the pathway favored by the wealthier mill opponents –
does not offer that same security. Margo explained,
We have our coal mine. We have our power plants for the time being. We have Waste
Management, which is the dump, and we have our schools. We don’t want to become the next
Gateway. We don’t want to be a resort community ghost town. Because people are only coming
through this town to get to the resorts. (CDPHE, 2012c: 1212–1213, emphasis added)
By repurposing the iconic image of the mining ghost town, she depicts tourism as anti-
thetical to the process of long-term community building.
Adding a distinctly moral imperative to the mill decision, Ayngel, Margo, and other
boosters portrayed communities as entities that ought to live but can perish. Ayngel
forcefully linked economic and physical wellbeing by stating that mill opponents had
kept ‘1200 people from surviving’. She then attributed those same qualities to the

communities, lamenting, ‘I have watched my area die’. In addition to admonishing those

who would turn the community into a ‘ghost’ town, Margo said that she had watched her
community ‘dwindle’ as she ‘watched people leave. We’ve watched entire families dis-
appear. It’s not the community it used to be. It’s very tiny, and we’re suffocating’
(CDPHE, 2012b: 1209–1213). The suffocating she describes as an intentional act of
malice on the part of outsiders who have ‘sat against us to stop us from succeeding’.
These comments link the health of the town to the health of the extractive economy. For
them, uranium mining and milling constitutes a dense sociotechnical assemblage that
extends out from the machinery that turns raw uranium into yellowcake to encompass
schools, government services like emergency management, and small businesses. The
elements of the good society they envision for themselves – intergenerational continuity,
steady jobs, robust social services, and a thriving private sector – are tied together and
made possible by the extraction and processing of uranium. If ‘technological systems
serve on this view a doubly deictic function, pointing back at past cultural achievements
and ahead to promising and attainable futures, or to futures to be shunned and avoided’
(Jasanoff, 2015: 31), so does the actual resource – in this case, uranium – itself.
Meaningful jobs and good communities in the Powder River

Basin
In northeastern Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, the majority of mines and people clus-
ter around the state highway that runs up the middle of the basin. With an estimated
30,000 residents, Gillette is the primary population center, home to the hospital and
most schools and businesses, in addition to the mine employees and their families.
Some miners who work on the southern rim of the basin live in Wright, a small town
whose 1700 residents almost all have a direct tie to the industry. Outside the towns,
ranching families raise cattle and sheep on lands that the first generation of pioneers
homesteaded in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Boundaries between the mining and
ranching communities are perceptible yet permeable for two reasons: years of decreas-
ing returns on the agricultural market have prompted many ranchers to take second jobs
in the mines to keep their operations afloat, and many current miners grew up on farms
and ranches in other states.
The mines that would make the Powder River Basin the country’s largest producer of
coal by the mid-1980s were opened in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, which sent policy-
makers and industry leaders scrambling for domestic sources of energy. In contrast to the
national memory of the 1970s as a time of troubling energy insecurity, vividly captured
in images of gas stations that were closed or surrounded by lines of waiting vehicles,
people in Gillette fondly remember the period for its unprecedented feelings of social
excitement and financial security. The mining jobs that opened up in response to calls for
increased domestic energy production offered mining families the geographic and eco-
nomic security that previously had eluded them. While some of the people who went to
work in the new mines came from local ranching families, and sought more steady
sources of income, many came from towns in the American West and Midwest where
mines had closed, leaving workers without jobs.

Energy security as job security

In the miners’ life histories, job security serves as the foundation for the stable, close-knit
communities they desire. Echoing the residents of Colorado’s Western Slope, the domi-
nant vision of a good society is a community that is a collection of families, served by a
strong system of public institutions (especially schools and hospitals) and flourishing
private businesses, and financially buttressed by highly paid and personally rewarding
skilled jobs. Steve’s work history represents a common trajectory for ranchers-turned-
miners in the region. His family owned ‘a couple hundred acres with some horses, crit-
ters and sheep’ but struggled financially until his father started building houses during
the 1960s oil booms. They eventually sold their property and moved to a cheaper loca-
tion farther out in the country. Steve worked for his father after graduating from high
school, but was eventually lured to the mines by a friend’s brother and the promise of
higher wages and benefits. He received offers at two different companies, and eventually
stayed thirty years working for one of them. Reflecting on his career, he said, ‘I love this.
It’s pretty good money, easy money, and for an older guy, the medical benefits for the
family are great’. Steve spoke with particular fondness about his experience being one of
the original seven workers to start the mine where Smith eventually met him in 2006.
From his perch in the towering dragline, he pointed to the reclaimed land where the origi-
nal pit had been dug and told me that he had the honor of hauling the very first load of
dirt that started the process of creating the entire mine. ‘Everything was new and fun’, he
said: ‘It felt special starting a coal mine. … It’s a special place to us’. He then pointed to
another landmark, saying,
You know that great big overburden stockpile right when you drive in? We built that. That’s
where I learned how to slope with a dozer. Not many people in mining can do that, look and see
something you did 25 years later.
By anchoring memories in particular places that still feature in his working life, he drew
attention to the remarkable job security and satisfaction he enjoyed.
Roy appreciated the mines for offering them job security that had eluded him in his
previous experience with oil and gas. Roy moved to the basin with his brother in the early
1970s, after graduating from high school in the Midwest. They all found work on the oil
patch, but Roy became frustrated because it would ‘get dead and there would be nothing
to do sometimes’. He found work at a mine, where he stayed for two decades, and got
married. He and his wife planned on staying in Gillette at least until their teenage son
graduates from high school. Roy enjoys parenting. He describes his son as being able to
‘eat a book so quick the library can’t keep them’, and said his favorite memory is of him
and his wife reading with their son in bed. They remain close with Roy’s brothers, includ-
ing the one who made the move to Gillette with him. The siblings all stayed in the area
and continue to work in the mining industry as mechanics and equipment operators.
Jerry also sought work in the mines to provide the stability for his wife and sons that
he himself had lacked as the son of an oilfield worker. Jerry’s father’s job had moved
the family around the country until they moved to Gillette during the 1960s oil boom.
He attended college in Colorado and Wyoming for a few years, but never finding a

major that interested him he moved back to Gillette to work in construction and then
mining. He remembered Gillette in the 1960s as a ‘brawling bar fight, muddy, ugly
town with only two paved streets’. But as his father worked his way up, the family
eventually moved out of a trailer into a house. ‘And that’s the way the whole commu-
nity went’, he explained, ‘Gillette is a good community now, with good, talented peo-
ple. I moved here in 1968 kicking and screaming, and I’ve been defending this place
ever since. It’s a great place’. Jerry’s appreciation for Gillette largely stemmed from the
financial stability of work in the industry, especially compared with his father’s itiner-
ant labor in the oil industry and his own experiences being laid off construction sites.
‘It was good work’, he said, ‘It was fun back when you kids were small. Everybody has
to work, of course, and mining was the work to have when you were in Campbell
County. We raised our families and paid for everything with that job’.8 His wife agreed,
saying, ‘It’s just provided a good living for us’. In addition to providing a sturdy foun-
dation for their nuclear family, mining also provided jobs for his siblings who all
decided to stay in Gillette.
The hope of job stability as a foundation for familial and community stability was
especially significant for people with a family history of enduring the booms and busts
that characterize the mining industry. Kelly grew up in Montana as the daughter of a cop-
per mine employee. When the company shut down the mine while she was in college, her
father was transferred to a molybdenum mine in Nevada. She worked in the same depart-
ment as her father for a summer and later tried getting hired on full-time (she described
herself as unsatisfied and uninspired in college), but the company wanted to avoid
encouraging other students to drop out. After working as a waitress in the casino industry
for a few years, she went back to work at the mine full-time when it starting hiring again.
When it shut down in the mid-1980s, she was transferred up to a mine in Gillette.
Reflecting on her twenty years as a coal miner, Kelly recalled the initial thrill of being
able to purchase a new Trans Am sports car, making her a ‘cute chick in a cool car’. But
she most fondly remembers helping to start up the mine that would become one of the
biggest in the country. In describing those years, she said, ‘I really felt like I was making
a contribution’. Her crew had just seven people on it, making it feel like family. One of
her favorite memories seems simple in retrospect, but it was a defining moment in her
career. On a day when they were not hauling coal, her boss asked her to help paint around
the site. She was happy to help out, since there were so few employees and they all wanted
the mine to succeed. After she was finished, she rinsed out her paintbrushes and left them
in a corner of the shop. They were still there when she went to get them the next day:
That was like my little corner. As insignificant as it may sound, it was really kind of a big thing
to me because you know, it was kind of symbol of my participation, of me being there and
actually having some status as employee … we weren’t numbers.
Like Steve, Kelly grounded job satisfaction in seeing that her everyday work practices
were vital to the larger picture of the mining process.
Steve, Roy, Jerry, and Kelly would not have expressed the same love for their jobs if
they did not also feel that they could work safely. Although the history of the coal indus-
try in general is one marred by industrial tragedies (Long, 1989), the Wyoming mines

boast industry-leading safety performance. Since 1983, the year for which federal data
becomes available, the highest incidence rate (including fatalities, non-fatal days lost
cases, and medical treatment cases) per mine in the basin was 4.4 in 1987, with the low-
est being 0.73 in 2008. For all mines east of the Mississippi, in contrast, the highest rate
was 11.74 in 1988 with the lowest being 4.0 in 2011. From 1983 to 2011, the average rate
was 2.14 in the basin and 7.9 in the East.9 Although pressure to produce and work safely
are still sometimes at odds with one another, the miners have developed strategies for
ensuring their own and their coworkers’ safety.
Finally, the miners credit the industry for generating financial windfalls for govern-
ments and communities in addition to individual families. They point to the region’s
state-of-the-art schools, recreation and athletic facilities made possible by the taxes and
royalties paid by the industry. Support for education was a major reason that the mechanic
Al joined many of his peers in praising Gillette for being a
good place to raise a family … there is a tremendous amount of money here and a tremendous
amount of opportunity. The school system is … top-notch. There are great teachers and a lot of
activities to be in. I think it’s one of the most dynamic communities in the state as far as the
quality of people academically and athletically.
The school district offers almost every sport imaginable, along with extra-curricular
activities such as speech and debate. Students pay no fee to participate and enjoy uni-
forms, transportation, meals, and lodging all paid for by the district. On a larger scale, the
state’s budgetary surplus – almost entirely a result of taxes and royalties from extraction
industries – allowed the legislature to create a US$400-million endowment that would
fund scholarships for Wyoming high school graduates to attend community colleges and
the state’s only university in Laramie. This program was inspired by the state’s Permanent
Mineral Trust Fund, which has accumulated over US$6 billion since 1969 through a
1.5-percent tax on mineral extraction. These public services made Gillette a ‘good com-
munity’, to use Jerry’s language. For the miners, producing energy for the country pro-
vided them with economic security that, in turn, enabled them to provide for their families
in one steady location among friends.
Productive basis of moral communities

The nostalgia that pervades these memories of the 1970s and 1980s in part can be traced
to the miners’ current and increasingly precarious position as employees in an industry
experiencing a major downturn. In the summer of 2012, coal’s share of the US electricity
market reached its lowest level in recent history, dropping from one-half to one-third of
all electricity generation. The downturn stemmed from gains in natural gas, which
expanded rapidly as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques increased
production and the industry capitalized on public pressure for cleaner domestic energy
sources. Coal’s position in the domestic electricity market slipped further in 2014 in the
wake of the EPA’s tightened emission standards for power plants. The coal industry and
its supporters interpreted the shift in fortunes as a ‘war on coal’ waged by the Obama
administration and environmental movements.10

In the basin, the smallest mines began cutting production and either laying off employ-
ees or transferring them to the more profitable large mines. One mechanic and his cowork-
ers described the process as ‘feeding the beast’ – the ‘beast’ being the significantly larger,
better known mine. He reported that the company was moving contracts to the larger one
for symbolic as well as financial reasons. Management wanted to ‘pay the bills’ at the large
one, he said, but also ‘keep it looking good … it’s the shining star of the company. They
want to keep its reputation’. A plant technician at the mine that had lost its contracts
described it as being ‘eerie, like a ghost mine’ since production had slowed almost to a
standstill. With fewer contracts to fill, less coal needed to be mined, so the loud heavy
machinery that miners normally drove in circles from the coal face to the plant and back
again was silent. Whereas they used to fill up multiple, mile-long trains of coal every day,
they started feeling lucky to see even a solitary one parked on the tracks outside the silos.
The market downturn prompted miners to reassess their own sense of belonging to the
United States as a whole, as losing one’s way of making a living is ‘also the loss of a
sense of community and one’s place in the world’ (Dudley, 2000: 164). Producing
domestic energy during the crisis of the 1970s framed the miners’ self-understanding as
providers of a necessary – if overlooked – service for the rest of the country. On tours and
in conversations, they explain the scale and significance of their labor by translating the
coal tonnage into hours of electricity use for others. Truck drivers haul 300- to 400-ton
loads of coal from the pit shovels to the processing plant and quantified each load as
providing a certain number of hours of electricity that would enable people around the
country to keep their lights on, to run their computers, and to charge their cell phones. As
the market deteriorated, miners felt spurned by a disparate network of consumers who
seemed to no longer desire nor require their labor. ‘We’ve been out here working for the
past 20, 30 years so that these people in the cities can have their lights and electronics and
all of the other things they need’, said Greg: ‘They were happy to burn our coal and we
arranged our whole lives around these mines. But now they’re putting us out of business
and don’t even care about what happens to us here’.
As much as life without work was unimaginable for people like Jerry, Gillette without
the coal industry seemed equally inconceivable for most residents. One teacher who
otherwise spoke highly about the opportunities for his students to participate in sports
teams at little or no cost also joked about what would happen if the industry ever left. ‘All
these huge houses on the golf course will become abandoned and the stores will close,
but I’ll still be here’, he said: ‘I’ll take them over, be the king of the empty world!’ Jokes
such as these express very real concerns – engendered by the boom and bust nature of the
industry – about the future of the town without the industry, its jobs and tax base.
Imagining their communities turned into ghost towns is all too easy an exercise for resi-
dents of Gillette, as for those in Naturita and Nucla, who routinely drive by the remains
of previously thriving mining and milling communities as they travel along the highways
that traverse both states.
Bounded imaginaries
Weaving through the narratives of people with intimate connections with the uranium
industry in Colorado and the coal industry in Wyoming is the significance of extractive

industries as the foundation for the communities that residents valued and sought to
enact. The good society they imagine is one in which domestic resource extraction does
not simply produce energy for consumers, but also opportunities for blue-collar people
to engage in well-paid work that anchors their sense of self and community within a
larger sociotechnical system. The close-knit, economically stable families and communi-
ties they desire are unimaginable without the interlaced social and physical infrastructure
required to produce energy from local natural resources. If energy is commonly defined
as the ‘capacity to do work’, residents of energy-producing communities argue that
energy systems should also provide humans the capacity to do work – a stark reversal of
the dominant sociotechnical imaginary that values energy in its capacity to free humans
from labor, as we explain below.11
The coal miners and would-be uranium millers have encountered very different pub-
lic uptake of their pleas for relevance in our energy futures. Even in the market downturn,
the Wyoming coal mines remain running, though at lower capacity and with fewer work-
ers. Coal miners are featured in national media coverage of the EPA’s tightened regula-
tions for power plant emissions, with conservative politicians invoking lost jobs to
criticize the Obama administration. In 2014, Republican Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania
offered Obama a lump of coal for Christmas, stating, ‘Coal is our most abundant and
valuable resource. It lights our homes, keeps our electric bills low and puts food on the
table for countless families’ (Miller, 2014). His linking of the resource, distributed infra-
structure, consumers, and producers echoes the sentiments of the Wyoming and Colorado
residents. Hopes for a ‘nuclear renaissance’ in Colorado also remain unfulfilled, but with
very little state or national coverage of Nucla and Naturita’s plight.
The distinct politics of visibility experienced by the two groups extends a much longer
tradition of the visibility of coal labor and the erasure of uranium labor in both national
popular culture and academic research. ‘The image of the militant, class conscious coal
miner has played a powerful role in constituting knowledges of “the working class” and
“working-class struggle”’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 208; see also Long, 1989), and the
popular history of coal miners as the ‘Clark Gables, the Reds of class struggle’ (Campbell,
1984: 97) melded coal and human labor in a tight relationship between the blackened
face of the browbeaten miner and the resource.
Atomic energy, by contrast, is a story of the imagined erasure of labor – not simply
in the production of energy, but of the need for humans to labor at all. Early 20th-
century scientists and engineers, as documented in Spencer Weart’s (2012) book The
Rise of Nuclear Fear, imagined an atomic energy world where humanity would no
longer ‘earn its bread by the sweat of its brow’ (Soddy, 1908, quoted in Weart, 2012).
The imagined atomic weapons of HG Wells’ (1914) The World Set Free is set in a post-
apocalyptic society in which the only labor humans needed to perform was equivalent
to the effort it took to carry a backpack up a mountain (pp. 232–233). AEC Chairman
Lewis Strauss’ 1954 vision of nuclear technology that would result in power ‘too cheap
to meter’ reinforced a laborless energy paradigm as part and parcel of a nuclear energy
future. AEC Chairman David Lilienthal, in his response text to the anti-nuclear move-
ment and Three Mile Island in Atomic Energy: A New Start (1980), articulated the
importance of highly skilled nuclear power plant operators, but the labor of the rest
of the nuclear fuel cycle is made irrelevant by fantasies of a ‘closed’ fuel cycle and

‘Generation IV’ reactors that recycle used nuclear fuel rather than requiring more ura-
nium to be mined and milled.
The erasure of workers to source, extract, and process the raw materials necessary for
atomic energy is thus part of a larger vision of nuclear energy facilitating the ending of
human labor in general. The obfuscation of the nuclear aspects of being, as Gabrielle
Hecht’s (2012) work across the African continent shows, is in many ways central to both
the constitution of a sense of nuclear energy’s transformative (material-cultural) power
and its ability to erase the work and lived experience of those engaged in uranium extrac-
tion and processing. This applies doubly to the United States, where labor outside of the
power plant is antithetical to the constructed American nuclear energy future.
Although the coal and uranium communities have thus far met with different fates, the
identification in both sites of similar, durable, production-based sociotechnical imagi-
naries of energy raises the question of how and why these local visions are not seen at a
broader national level: why does the quality and opportunity of labor remain largely
obscured in debates about energy futures, which focus on energy consumption? The
tenacity of national imaginaries suggests the importance of theorizing bounded imagi-
naries, which are not taken up by people or groups with the authority to shape the public
imagination and material infrastructure. In these cases, the traveling of imaginaries is
stunted or inhibited, limiting their scope to the contexts of their original development.
In our view, bounded imaginaries are manifestations of political power exercised
through flattened assemblages, where the very activity of articulating a particular socio-
technical imaginary necessitates policing and erasing alternative futures and lived expe-
riences from possibility. Colorado’s West Enders can still imagine a future where uranium
mining is a viable industry, but as a cultural whole the possibility of nuclear energy and
the labor of domestic miners in an idyllic future does not exist. Understanding the politi-
cal power of this bounding aids scholars in articulating how particular futures, especially
in a moral economy of imagined energy transitions, create within the same cultural space
both a sense of the ‘good life’ and significant problems of social justice. Attention to
bounded imaginaries and their implications for envisioning desirable energy futures is
lacking in the existing literature, which privileges the process of extension outwards,
precisely because it is difficult to achieve without fine-grained attention to ordinary
people rather than the elites that influence policymaking.
Conclusion
‘Uranium doesn’t scare us’, Ayngel said in her plea for the Piñon Ridge mill approval:
‘My grandmother and my mother, we have all grown up with it. It’s something that we
have learned to live with here, and that’s something we’re willing to live with again’
(CDPHE, 2012a: 284). In a similar vein, Margo defended the intelligence of uranium
boosters against attacks that their support of the mill was due to their own ignorance: ‘We
do know the dangers of mining uranium’, but new regulations would make the process
safer than it was thirty years ago (CDPHE, 2012c: 1210). The ethnographic and historical
materials analyzed in this article suggest that familiarity with coal and uranium and their
associated infrastructures, cultivated through direct work in the industry or kin ties with
industry workers, engenders a production-based sociotechnical imaginary of energy.

Their status as contributing to energy production prompts these residents to reframe the
dominant, consumption-oriented vision of energy in a good society to include quality
blue-collar labor.
Yet the local sociotechnical imaginary that emerges out of the productive space does
not circulate on the national level, where policies are actually made. Energy producers
experience this stunted translation upward as ‘unrequited reciprocity’, a term originally
coined to analyze failed exchanges in gift economies, such as in Melanesia (Kirsch,
2006). When the givers of gifts do not receive a gift in return, they interpret the failed
exchange as a negative statement of their own worth and as a denial of the relationship
(Kirsch, 2006: 80). Industrial workers can also experience unrequited reciprocity, as we
found that rank-and-file energy workers take pride in producing energy for consumers
around the country but are left out of debates about national energy transitions.
Our concept of bounded imaginaries also draws attention to the material constraints
of reimagining sociotechnical imaginaries, extending Richardson and Weszkalnys’
(2014) argument that infrastructures ‘generate and constrain knowledge production
about resources’ (p. 20). Although coal is on its shakiest ground in recent memory, the
Wyoming mines, the associated infrastructure and most jobs are still present. In contrast,
the residents of Nucla and Naturita imagine social systems linked to the mining and mill-
ing of uranium, but without the material assemblage to hold it in place. The case of the
Western Slope raises the problem of what could be called the co-productive nature of
sociotechnical imaginaries. When people invoke a sociotechnical imaginary, they are
invoking an entire material assemblage, the ‘hard stuff of past achievements [such as] the
material infrastructures of roads, power plants, and the security state’ (Jasanoff, 2015:
31). People do not craft visions of a good society out of the cultural ether but take inspira-
tion from the already existing material world, which in turn shapes the potential ‘futures’
they imagine. The elusiveness of the future desired by the Western Slope community
stems from both the physical decay of local extractive infrastructures and the shift in US
nuclear energy policy away from state protection of a national infrastructure for produc-
ing uranium within its borders. The good society, in short, depends as much on what
already exists in the world as it does on what it imagines for the future.
Finally, this article’s focus on bounded imaginaries also concretely illustrates the con-
tested dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries (Hess, 2015). The sociotechnical imagi-
nary of energy is grounded in particular class-based visions of a good life. For people
like the blue-collar families in Wyoming and Colorado, for whom life is ‘unimaginable
without working at something’ (Fricke, 2008: 30), energy systems ought to provide dig-
nified and meaningful opportunities for labor. Their point should be well taken, since
labor will continue to be necessary for even the greenest of energy transitions to adapt to
an anthropocenic age. America’s ‘clean burning natural gas’ still requires ‘disposable
workers’ to risk their lives on the rigs (Ring, 2007). Nuclear still requires people to mine
and mill uranium. Even renewables still require labor, including people to manufacture
and maintain wind turbines, assemble and discard solar panels, and mine the rare earth
elements necessary for both wind and solar technologies. The people whose labor makes
increased energy consumption possible have a crucial and unique perspective on the
ethical dimensions of energy transitions. This perspective challenges the dominant soci-
otechnical imaginary, in which energy serves less to bring about Lewis Mumford’s

(2010[1934]) dream of a society free to pursue more culturally rewarding activities wor-
thy of civilization, and more to celebrate mass consumption disentangled from the peo-
ple who make such ‘energetic’ lives possible.
Acknowledgements
This article benefitted from feedback from audiences at the 2014 Society for Economic
Anthropology conference in Austin and the 2015 Society for Social Studies of Science conference
in Denver. We thank Jennifer Richter for her comments on an early draft of this article, as well as
editor Sergio Sismondo and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their generative feedback and
insightful comments.
Funding
This article benefitted from research support provided to Jessica Smith by the National Science
Foundation (0612829) and National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, and
recommendations expressed here do not necessarily represent those of either institution.
Notes
1. See Rolston (2014) for an expansion of the unique opportunities and challenges of ‘native
ethnography’ and the workplace kinship systems of the Wyoming mines.
2. A useful counterexample here is the work of Gabrielle Hecht in documenting the role of labor in
the French (specifically metropolitan) nuclear industry. Comparing the laborers at the Marcoule
and Chinon sites, Hecht (1997) analyzes how workers’ beliefs and actions influenced and were
influenced by the larger narratives of work and productivity at each respective site.
3. Our approach builds on the use of frame analysis by Eaton et al. (2014) to show how broader
sociotechnical imaginaries can be differently interpreted on local scales. Eaton et al. use the
concept of keying to show how frames can be ‘sharpened’ or ‘flattened’ to reflect more insti-
tutionalized or critical understandings of an issue, respectively. We instead focus on what
Goffman (1981) called footing, or the alignment a person takes up in relation to the frame,
key, and other participants: it is the Wyoming and Colorado residents’ position as energy pro-
ducers that grounds their reframing of the national sociotechnical imaginary beyond energy
enabling consumption to include energy production providing good jobs.
4. See https://www.advancedenergyforlife.com/people-energy
5. This does not include commercial purchases post-Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which
approved such purchases, nor international purchases. Of this, approximately US$223 million
was purchased from Uravan alone, with another US$29 million purchased from the Naturita
mill before it closed in 1958 (Albrethsen and McGinley, 1982).
6. Uranium mining refers to the process of extracting uranium-bearing ore from the earth, either
through underground mining, open pit mining, or in-situ recovery (ISR). Uranium milling is
the series of processes by which uranium ore is separated into uranium oxide (‘yellowcake’),
other compounds, such as the vanadium oxide used in steel production, and waste material
(‘tailings’). In the case of Nucla and Naturita, mining in the region consisted of smaller under-
ground mining operations, most of which sold their ore to the Union Carbide mill in Uravan.
In this way, the Uravan mill served as an obligatory passage point for material to enter the
nuclear fuel cycle, and thus a centralization of regional social activity and capital generation.
7. Although sociotechnical imaginaries are usually studied in their forward-looking dimensions,
Eaton et al. (2014: 253) remind us that these are nonetheless grounded in particular under-
standings of the past.

8. Jerry uses the term ‘you kids’ for two reasons. His own children were the same age as Smith,
who went to school with them. Second, Smith had previously worked at the mine with Jerry
for two summers on small crews in which the people his age came to think about the college
kids as their adopted children.
9. The incidence rate is calculated on the basis of 200,000 hours of employee exposure (equiv-
alent to 100 employees working 2000 hours per year), taking the number of cases times
200,000 and dividing that figure by hours of employee exposure.
10. The extent to which the language of a ‘war on coal’ obscured the more powerful causes of the
market slide was powerfully evoked in a popular Associated Press (AP) article including the
statement, ‘War, after all, demands victims. And in this case, it seems, victims demand a war’
(Smith, 2012). The industry’s shift to mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia and surface
mining in the West cost far more jobs than did federal regulations (McNeil, 2011).
11. As a reviewer of the article astutely noted, it is also likely that the erasure of labor from the
national energy sociotechnical imaginary is due to the invisibility of infrastructural systems in
general, which function as ‘reliable, invisible, socially useful capacities to contain and control
energy’ (Edwards, 2004: 192).
References
Albrethsen H Jr and McGinley FE (1982) Summary history of domestic uranium procurement
under US Atomic Energy Commission contracts. Final report, Report GJBX-220(82), US
Department of Energy, Grand Junction, CO, October.
Amundson MA (2002) Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West.
Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Anderson B (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
Revised ed. New York: Verso.
Bakker K and Bridge G (2006) Material worlds? Resource geographies and the ‘matter of nature’.
Progress in Human Geography 30(1): 5–27.
Brugge D, Benally T and Yazzie-Lewis E (eds) (2006) The Navajo People and Uranium Mining.
Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Callon M (2012[1987]) Society in the making: The study of technology as a tool for socio-
logical analysis. In: Bijker WE, Hughes TP and Pinch TJ (eds) The Social Construction
of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 77–98.
Campbell B (1984) Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties. London: Verso.
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) (2010a) Transcript of public
comments in the matter of proposed Piñon Ridge Mill. Taken at Nucla High School, Nucla, CO,
21 January. Available at: https://www.colorado.gov/cdphedir/hm/Radiation/postapplication
2010docs/100121transcript.pdf (accessed 28 April 2016).
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) (2010b) Transcript of pub-
lic comments in the matter of proposed Piñon Ridge Mill. Taken at the Montrose Pavilion,
Montrose, CO, 17 February. Available at: https://www.colorado.gov/cdphedir/hm/Radiation/
postapplication2010docs/100217transcript.pdf (accessed 28 April 2016).
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) (2012a) Reporter’s transcript
of hearing, volume II: The application of energy fuels resources, Inc. for a radioactive materi-
als license for the Piñon Ridge Uranium Mill, Nucla, CO, 7 November. Available at: https://
www.scribd.com/collections/4024783/Pinon-Ridge-Uranium-Mill-Hearing-Transcripts
(accessed 28 April 2016).
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) (2012b) Reporter’s transcript of
hearing, volume V: The application of energy fuels resources, Inc. for a radioactive materials

license for the Piñon Ridge Uranium Mill. 10 November. Available at: https://www.scribd.
com/collections/4024783/Pinon-Ridge-Uranium-Mill-Hearing-Transcripts (accessed 28 April
2016).
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) (2012c) Reporter’s transcript
of hearing, volume VI: The application of energy fuels resources, Inc. for a radioactive mate-
rials license for the Piñon Ridge Uranium Mill. 12 November. Available at: https://www.
scribd.com/collections/4024783/Pinon-Ridge-Uranium-Mill-Hearing-Transcripts (accessed
28 April 2016).
Dudley KM (2000) Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Eaton WM, Gasteyer SP and Busch L (2014) Bioenergy futures: Framing sociotechnical
Imaginaries in local places. Rural Sociology 79(2): 227–256.
Edwards PN (2004) Infrastructure and modernity: Force, time, and social organization in the his-
tory of sociotechnical systems. In: Misa TJ, Brey P and Feenberg A (eds) Modernity and
Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 185–225.
Energy Fuels (2007) Energy fuels to construct the ‘Piñon Ridge’ uranium mill: First uranium
mill to be built in the US in 25 years. Available at: http://recycle4colorado.ipower.com/
EnergyFuels/preap/07docs/070717pr.pdf (accessed 28 April 2016).
Ferry EE and Limbert ME (eds) (2008) Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and Their
Temporalities. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.
Fortun K and Fortun M (2005) Scientific imaginaries and ethical plateaus in contemporary U.S.
toxicology. American Anthropologist 107(1): 43–54.
Fricke T (2008) Working selves, moral selves: Crafting the good person in the Northern Plains. In:
Rudd E and Descartes L (eds) The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American
Middle Class: Reports from the Field. New York: Lexington Books, 17–39.
Gibson-Graham JK (2006) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of
Political Economy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Goffman E (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gusterson H (1996) Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Hecht G (1997) Enacting cultural identity: Risk and ritual in the French nuclear workplace. Journal
of Contemporary History 32(4): 483–507.
Hecht G (2012) Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Hess D (2015) Publics as threats? Integrating science and technology studies and social movement
studies. Science as Culture 24(1): 69–82.
Howe C (2014) Anthropocenic ecoauthority: The winds of Oaxaca. Anthropological Quarterly
87(2): 381–404.
Jasanoff S (2015) Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. In:
Jasanoff S and Kim SH (eds) Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the
Fabrication of Power. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1–33.
Jasanoff S and Kim S-H (2009) Containing the atom: Sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear
power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva 47(2): 119–146.
Jasanoff S and Kim S-H (2013) Sociotechnical imaginaries and national energy policies. Science
as Culture 22(2): 189–196.
Kirsch S (2006) Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental
Relations in New Guinea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Klein N (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon &
Schuster.

Kuletz VL (1998) The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West. New
York: Routledge.
Laidlaw J (2013) Ethics. In: Boddy J and Lambek M (eds) A Companion to the Anthropology of
Religion. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 171–188.
Lambek M (ed.) (2010) Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Levidow L and Papaioannou T (2013) State imaginaries of the public good: Shaping UK innova-
tion priorities for bioenergy. Environmental Science & Policy 30: 36–49.
Long P (1989) Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry. New
York: Paragon House.
McNeil BT (2011) Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight against Big
Coal. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Malin SA (2015) The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Masco J (2006) The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Miller CA, Richter J and O’Leary J (2015) Socio-energy systems design: A policy framework for
energy transitions. Energy Research & Social Science 6: 29–40.
Miller J (2014) GOP congressman offers Obama a lump of coal for Christmas. CBS News, 20
December. Available at: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gop-congressman-offers-obama-a-
lump-of-coal-for-christmas/ (accessed 22 January 2015).
Mitcham C and Rolston JS (2013) Energy constraints. Science and Engineering Ethics 19(2):
313–319.
Mumford L (2010[1934]) Technics and Civilization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Richardson T and Weszkalnys G (2014) Introduction: Resource materialities. Anthropological
Quarterly 87(1): 5–30.
Ring R (2007) Disposable workers of the oil and gas fields. High Country News, 2 April. Available
at: http://www.hcn.org/issues/343/16915 (accessed 22 March 2016).
Rolston JS (2013a) The politics of pits and the materiality of mine labor: Making natural resources
in the American West. American Anthropologist 115(4): 582–594.
Rolston JS (2013b) Specters of syndromes and the everyday lives of Wyoming energy workers.
In: Strauss S, Rupp S and Love T (eds) Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies.
San Francisco, CA: Left Coast Press, 582–594.
Rolston JS (2014) Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the
American West. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Scott RR (2010) Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian
Coalfields. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Shumway GL (1970) A history of the uranium industry on the Colorado Plateau. Dissertation,
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
Smith V (2012) ‘War on coal’ label obscures battlefield realities. The Big Story, 20 October.
Available at: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/war-coal-label-obscures-battlefield-realities
(accessed 13 March 2014).
Sovacool BK and Dworkin MH (2014) Global Energy Justice: Problems, Principles and
Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stine P (2011) Uranium resurrection. The Daily Sentinel, 21 February. Available at: http://www.
gjsentinel.com/special_sections/articles/uranium_resurrection/ (accessed 22 January 2015).
Strauss C (2006) The imaginary. Anthropological Theory 6(3): 322–344.
Strauss S, Rupp S and Love T (eds) (2013) Cultures of Energy: Power, Practices, Technologies.
Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Taylor C (2004) Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Teschner N and Paavola J (2013) Discourses of abundance: Transitions in Israel’s energy regime.
Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 15(3): 447–466.
Tidwell ASD (2013) The new nuclear west: Uranium milling as community on Colorado’s Western
Slope. Master’s Thesis, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO.
Tidwell ASD and Smith JM (2015) Morals, materials, and technoscience: The energy security
imaginary in the United States. Science, Technology & Human Values 40(5): 687–711.
Weart SR (2012) The Rise of Nuclear Fear. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wells HG (1914) The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind. London: Macmillan and Co, Limited.
White LA (1943) Energy and the evolution of culture. American Anthropologist 45(3): 335–356.
Author biographies
Jessica M Smith is an assistant professor in the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies at
the Colorado School of Mines. She is an anthropologist who specializes in the sociocultural
dynamics of extractive and energy industries, with a focus on corporate social responsibility, social
justice, labor, and gender, and the experiences of low-income and first-generation students in engi-
neering education.
Abraham SD Tidwell is a doctoral student in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and
Technology Program at Arizona State University. He is an engineer and sociologist of energy
transitions, who focuses on the political economy of transitioning to renewable energy in the State
of Hawaii, linking lived experience to larger macro-political changes.

The Everyday Lives of Energy Transitions PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Everyday Lives of Energy Transitions PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

644534

Social Studies of Science

The everyday lives of energy

the American West

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

‘Enabling everyday progress’: Energy and consumption

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Prosperous pasts and stable futures on the Western Slope

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

‘We need the jobs, we need the energy …’

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Infrastructure and generational continuity

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

communities, lamenting, ‘I have watched my area die’. In addition to admonishing those

Meaningful jobs and good communities in the Powder River

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Energy security as job security

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Productive basis of moral communities

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

Downloaded from sss.sagepub.com by guest on June 21, 2016

You might also like