There are more than thirty nuclear reactors in the Great Lakes Basin, many of which are on the shores of the lakes: most of them are of the same type and of the same vintage as the Westinghouse cooled-water reactor at Fukushima; they are built close to the lakes in order to use the water to cool their radioactive cores.
This paper emphasizes the necessity of considering the cultural and political histories of the lands and waters of the Great Lakes in terms of the purposes to which the Great Lakes Basin was put by the colonizing powers from the times of Verrazzano, Cartier, and Champlain down to the present. It also underlines the degree to which the political boundaries of nations, provinces and states meander, and cut through geological spaces that know no such divisions.
