Strange Eons: Nuclear Waste, the Human Interference Task Force, and the Ethics of Applied Imagination (2024)

Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, 2010

Handbook of the Anthropocene, 2023

Nuclear waste epitomizes the Anthropocene. Scientific discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s ushered in the atomic age. The onset of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy production in the 1940s and 1950s then created a uniquely human problem with planetary implications. Today, 33 countries operate 442 nuclear power reactors, and nine countries possess nearly 13,000 nuclear arms. The result is high-level waste that is dangerously radioactive for millennia to come. Yet, there has never been a permanent waste solution in place. Technically feasible longterm nuclear waste storage options exist, but nearly all governments prefer riskier interim plans hidden from public view and debate. This chapter considers the likelihood of societies addressing the contentious environmental and economic politics of deep geological repositories; and it asks, how long will obfuscation of the risks of this unique Anthropocene challenge continue?

Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies

The burial of radioactive waste in deep geological repositories has gradually imposed itself since the 1980s in various countries. Considered more stable, safe, and responsible than storage above ground, this solution is seen as a way of keeping the waste out of human reach, and of freeing oneself of the obligation to monitor repositories. However, it soon became clear that the idea of relying on the relative stability of deep geological repositories for the safe disposal of nuclear waste to remove it from the ‘all too human’ risks associated with history’s turbulences, has produced new uncertainties, and raised new questions, given the multi-millennial time scales involved. This article presents a study of the strategies adopted by the actors in charge of radioactive waste management in the face of the temporal constraints imposed by the length of their radioactive life. More specifically, it is intended to question the representations of temporality that allow the designers of the...

Derrida Today 2018

Now we are at the edge of a nuclear conflagration, perhaps a few words about what vast opportunity we missed because of our blind insistence in ignoring any possibility of powers greater than the human will at work in shaping the destiny of the world. This essay, companion to my The Meaning of the Bomb as World Destroyer, (see https://www.academia.edu/35453625/The_Meaning_of_the_Bomb_as_World_Destroyer_2014_) tells the inner story of nuclear power, i.e. the story of our first encounters with the soul aspect or inward meaning of nuclear power and how a future possibility for us and the world was thwarted by our sheer stubbornness in privileging power and control over all else. We have missed that opportunity and now our destiny has become our fate. Instead of transformation of life on Earth we face instead utter destruction of everything.

Nuclear histories are global yet worryingly incomplete. Linking a plutonium refinery in Washington, a uranium mine in Saskatchewan, a tsunami at f*ckushima, a nuclear bomb test site in Rajasthan, a reactor ‘accident’ at Chernobyl, a shipping accident in the English Channel, and a president-to-prime-minister confrontation over the US-Canada frontier, these quasi-autobiographical essays prove the importance of public archives, personal files with fragments, oral histories, and private recollections. This is the social history, business history, environmental history, labour history, scientific and technological history, and indigenous history of the twentieth century. Hiding in Plain Sight offers everyone an entry to the irregularities of our ‘disorderly nuclear world’, and offers other researchers crucial insights to what richness lies within.

New narratives of toxic contamination are expanding and challenging our ethnographic sensibilities. In confronting the contamination left behind from the Cold War period, a range of disciplinary approaches, methods, and writing styles is necessary. Ethnography plays a crucial role here, but it cannot fly solo in these sorts of projects. In this review essay, I compare three books from authors belonging to distinct scholarly traditions, each one dealing with complicated cases of radioactive contamination that began in the Cold War era and that demand rethinking in the contemporary one. Anthropologists have much to learn from approaches pursued in other disciplines, particularly if the end goal is a more holistic portrait of contamination and toxicity.

Environmental communication yearbook, 2005

Geoethics, 2014

Flux, 2022

“Is this the birth of a universe?”

HIS4936 Pro-Seminar in History senior thesis in fulfillment of the State University System of Florida Capstone Experience (CPST), Communication & Critical Thinking Pillar (SMCC), Human Historical Context and Process (HHCP), Major Works and Major Issues (EMWP), and State Communication Requirement (6ACM) for graduating History majors.

Baltic Worlds, 2021

Dissertation

Archaeology is the study of the past and its remains in the present. It is relevant to the long-term preservation of records, knowledge and memory, e.g. regarding final repositories of nuclear waste, in two ways. Firstly, future archaeology may promise the recovery of lost information, knowledge and meaning of remains of the past. Secondly, present-day archaeology can offer lessons about how future societies will make sense of remains of the past.Archaeology is always situated in a larger social and cultural context and the information, knowledge and meaning it generates is necessarily of its own present. Archaeological knowledge reflects contemporary perceptions of past and future; these perceptions change over time. Indeed, we cannot assume that in the future there will be any archaeology at all. We think, therefore, that future societies will want, and need, to make their own decisions about sites associated with nuclear waste, based on their own perceptions of past and future. To facilitate this process in the long term we need to engage each present, keeping safe options open.In this text we elaborate on these issues from our perspective as archaeologists (see also Holtorf and Högberg, 2013; 2014a; 2014b; and forthcoming).

American Ethnologist, 2022

In April 2018 four drums of depleted uranium sludge burst open at a US Department of Energy facility at Idaho National Laboratory. This echoed a previous incident in 2014, when a drum erupted with fire and spewed radionuclides at a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico. Such "drum breach" accidents have been characterized in official reports as "isolated events," and as "self-initiated" and "spontaneous." Yet these descriptions misrepresent a temporal tension at the heart of their causation: during the Cold War, nuclear weapons production created latent socioecological hazards that, decades later, too often manifest during waste cleanup. This tends to result from 21st-century scheduling pressures, fraught labor relationships, and neoliberal subcontracting arrangements. Thus, if we examine the temporal form taken by US nuclear technopolitics, we can recast drum breach accidents not as stand-alone events, but as outcomes of systemic incentives to speed up waste-cleanup projects beyond their organizational capacity without commensurately expanding their safety or oversight mechanisms. [nuclear waste, technopolitics, accidents, neoliberalism, temporality, security, Idaho, United States]

My paper today has come out of a research interest in the causation and expression of what is often referred to in the popular media as " blight " ; urban abandonment and the dereliction of structures and sites, often built within living memory. It also engages with another major research interest, being the archaeology of radioactivity, its significance and diagnosticity in the archaeological record. I have recently completed a chapter on the latter topic for a forthcoming volume on Australian Contemporary Archaeology entitled 'The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off', which is due for print next year via CSP. My doctoral research concerns a multi-scalar analysis of episodes of settlement decline and abandonment in the 20 th century, with particular reference toward the relationship that materiality and ideology share in the creation of the archaeological landscape. I am interested in sites of varying sizes and forms, however all are either completely abandoned or in a state of marked decline. The sites which constitute the dataset vary in physical size, but all are either wholly abandoned or suffer quantifiable settlement decline (a value this research states as being at least 30% of the total site area, or a population decrease of at least 30% during the 20 th century). These sites are the Heygate estate in Southwark, South London, the atomograd of Pripyat within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Ukraine, and the city of Detroit Michigan, USA. Today I will be discussing the second of the three in the broader context of the Exclusion Zone itself, the surviving archaeology within the zone and the ways in which Chernobyl has impacted the region, both physically and psychologically. I would like to preface the field material by stating that I adhere to a definition of our discipline wherein archaeology constitutes the evidential product of human interaction with the material. In this sense human archaeology refers to anything with a material expression