My dissertation focuses on the state campaigns to gain access to the mineral wealth of China's westernmost province of Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This approach helps reveal the important connections that exist between natural resources and the expansion of the state. The early twentieth century German economist Erich Zimmerman once argued that the earth's minerals only become "resources" through socio-political processes that pinpoint, extract and transport them, noting that "natural resources are not, they become." In a similar way, frontiers too are in the process of "becoming, " and in the case of Xinjiang, the transformation of minerals into natural resources paralleled the transformation of this imperial frontier into a component part of the modern Chinese nation-state. My work finds that the campaigns to pinpoint, extract, and control the distribution of mineral wealth led to extensive mapping of the province, helped attract necessary capital for large- scale infrastructural projects, and served as a high wage incentive for destitute settlers from eastern and central China to migrate to this border region. Focusing on the links between state power and natural resource extraction in Xinjiang, my dissertation recasts the narrative of state building in China's west. The integration of Xinjiang into the Chinese nation-state was not simply the product of military conquest or Han Chinese ethno-cultural subjugation as many Western scholars have suggested, nor was it merely the outcome of a triumphal Chinese manifest destiny as asserted in the Chinese language scholarship. Instead, state building in this region long squeezed uncomfortably between China and Russia (later the Soviet Union) was a far more complex process, as various actors battled for control of Xinjiang's rich natural resources. Chinese leaders including Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kai-shek and later Mao Zedong all struggled to stake a claim to Xinjiang's mineral wealth in the face of competing claims from the Soviet Union and an assortment of provincial governors not particularly inclined to kowtow to Beijing, Nanjing or to Moscow

At Yucca Mountain, Nevada-the proposed location for a national high-level nuclear waste repository-radionuclides, if released from breached waste storage canisters, could make their way down through the unsaturated zone (where the repository would be located) into the underlying groundwater and eventually back to the biosphere (i.e., where they could adversely affect human health). The compliance boundary, 18 km south of the proposed repository, is defined as the location where a human being using groundwater would be maximally exposed to radionuclides outside of an exclusion zone set around the repository. It is thus important to predict how these radionuclides would be transported by the groundwater flow, and to predict both the concentration of and the rate at which any leaked radionuclides would arrive at the compliance boundary.We recently conducted a study of groundwater flux in the saturated zone through the Crater Flat Group, in a wellbore 15 km south of the proposed repository. The Crater Flat Group, a sequence of ash-flow tuff formations, is laterally extensive beneath the footprint of the proposed repository. Because of its intense fracturing and high permeabilities, the Bullfrog tuff is the primary unit within the Crater Flat Group through which radionuclides would be transported, as indicated by groundwater models. In a new wellbore, NC-EWDP-24PB, we conducted flowing electrical conductivity logging (FEC), an open-wellbore logging technique, to identify flowing fractures prior to wellbore completion. While the FEC logs have identified transmissive zones, quantitative interpretation of the FEC results was difficult because differences in hydraulic heads in different flowing intervals created significant intraborehole fluid flow. The well was subsequently backfilled and completed with a distributed thermal perturbation sensor (DTPS), which introduces a thermal pulse to the wellbore and uses the thermal transient to estimate groundwater flux.Corroborating

From time immemorial groups of Cree Indians from the interior woodland regions travelled down the lowland rivers to the coast of James Bay every spring. They came to feast on fresh geese and to socialize with others who also came to intercept the migrating flocks. The Indians travelled down the rivers as families or groups of families, while the inland regions they left behind held shared hunting areas rather than carefully defined and defended individual or group hunting lands. Thus they were generally peaceful people, establishing kinship and friendship networks throughout the James Bay region. They lived simply with few material goods. A wigwam suited the housing needs of their nomadic lifestyle. They spent the goose hunting seasons near the shores of James Bay, on the flight path of the birds. Summers were spent along the rivers at the best fishing spots. In winter they moved into the woodlands in search of fuel, food, and protection from the elements. Fur bearing animals provided both food and clothing for the harsh winter months. The environment was fickle. Drought, floods, excessive cold or heat, and disease often disrupted the normal food supplies, bringing starving conditions to the people who relied on them. It was, however, a way of life that lasted for many thousands of years. Granted a charter from the British parliament in 1670, the Hudson's Bay Company was given a monopolistic right to trade furs in the lands draining into Hudson and James Bays, an area it named Rupert's Land. By a single stroke of the pen many thousands of miles distant, a way of life was altered permanently by forces in many ways beyond the control of the Native inhabitants of the fur-rich lands.