Always just over the horizon: Reprocessing and the perpetually promised future

Abstract

After the collapse of nuclear commercial reprocessing ventures in the 1970s in the U.S., reprocessing became a policy taboo; yet in the following decades, it repeatedly resurfaced and receded—returning as promise, as policy, as horizon. This paper asks why reprocessing endures in expert and governmental imaginaries despite sustained consensus regarding unfavorable economics, environmental liabilities, and proliferation risks. It argues that reprocessing persists not as an effective backend solution but as a speculative remainder: an infrastructure and imaginary whose institutional life was never conclusively closed and whose promissory futures remain suspended, available for reactivation whenever waste, scarcity, or sovereignty demands technical redemption. Through paired case studies of West Valley, New York—the nation’s only operating commercial reprocessing plant (1966–1972), subsequently converted by the 1980 West Valley Demonstration Project into a federally managed cleanup—and Barnwell, South Carolina—a fully constructed facility stranded by the post-1974 nonproliferation turn, evolving nuclear safeguards, and waste-solidification requirements—the essay traces a migration of purpose from mid-century abundance (fuel extension, breeder futures, a “closed” cycle) to later rationales of waste mitigation, energy security, and, most recently, climate policy. Methodologically, this paper reads reprocessing as speculative infrastructure, drawing on STS scholarship on co-production, sociotechnical imaginaries, anticipatory governance, and the “politics of impossibility” that renders long-lived harm administratively manageable while deferring resolution. The historiographical intervention is twofold: first, to reposition reprocessing from a marginal cautionary tale to a central device through which the U.S. nuclear enterprise sustains legitimacy—a placeholder that promises eventual closure of waste and fuel constraints while enabling continued front-end expansion; second, to reconceptualize energy history as governance by deferral and remainder rather than a linear arc of innovation and obsolescence, wherein breakdown yields repurposing and policy displacement rather than decommissioning. Seen in this light, the Ford–Carter moratoria, Reagan-era revivalism, the Bush-era Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, and twenty-first-century “advanced recycling” campaigns appear as cyclical reanimations that attach new vocabularies to an unresolved core, keeping the future—deliberately—just over the horizon.