Material Infrastructures of Transition: The Silmet Plant
Tutor(s): Maroš Krivý
Source: Karel Kravik, Silmet and Sillamäe, c.1999, (karelkravik.blogspot.com).
The Silmet rare metal and rare earth element plant is situated in the north-eastern Estonian town of Sillamäe. Initially developed as a secret Soviet enterprise for uranium processing, its current material focus has been pursued continuously since the 1970s.
Source: Karel Kravik, Sillamäe Radioactive Waste Storage Facility, c.1999, (karelkravik.blogspot.com).
The thesis traces Silmet’s post-Soviet transition through broader forces of economic reorientation, and the digital transformations its output is strategic in sustaining.
Source: ‘The Challenge For Europe’, Centre for Policy Studies (www.cps.org).
Source: Peeter Langovitsi, ‘tiigrihüpe infoühiskonda’ [Tiger’s Leap into the Information Society] Postimees (https://leht.postimees.ee/3603341/peeter-langovitsi-tagasivaade-tiigrihupe-infouhiskonda).
Contextualised within its wider material geographies, emphasis is placed on the plant’s long-standing ties to Kola Peninsula loparite reserves, and brief affiliation to the bastnäsite-rich Mountain Pass Mine, California.
Sources: Map – author / Graptolite Argillite images: See first slide.
Sources: Map – author / Lovozero images: See first slide.
Map: author (data taken from: www.nps.gov) / Mountain Pass Images: See first slide.
These territories are read in dialogue with major transitions underpinning the rare earth industry – whose centre of gravity was shifting in step with Estonia’s reorientation from command to market conditions.
Source: Author’s interpretation of graph from ‘Rare-Earth Elements: Critical Mineral Resources of the United States—Economic and Environmental Geology and Prospects for Future Supply’, USGS (https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1802/o/pp1802o.pdf).
A challenge to readings of infrastructure as an economic instrument, or a medium of information, at the expense of material specificity, the paper foregrounds Karen Barad’s call for ‘sedimenting historiality’, a means to engage the present pasts and futures implicated.
Source: Eric Parsons, The San Bernardino County Sun, 25 May 1997, p.8. (www.newspapers.com).
Source: Cheryl K. Rofer, ‘Averting a Baltic Sea Disaster’, Doomed to Cooperate: US-Russian Lab-to-Lab Cooperation Story (lab2lab.stanford.edu).
Source: Film sill from ‘Half Life: The Story of America’s Last Uranium Mill’, 2016, Director: Justin Clifton (www.grandcanyontrust.org).
