Nuclear Waste and Deep Time Friday 3 November 2017, 16:00-17:00hrs Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2017 This workshop comes as part of the Nuclear Waste Weeks at the Enviromental Humanities Center at the VU, Amsterdam and aims to bring together PhD students from various disciplines that share a common intereset in nuclear waste and/or […]
Read More »
When reflecting on these intertwined day-to-day, multi-decade, centurial, and multi-millennial horizons of nuclear waste risk all at the same time, a different set of sensibilities emerges. Namely, it becomes evident how relatively short-term events like unanticipated deaths, retirements of key experts, obsolescence of information storage technologies, and surprise career-changes can potentially shake nuclear waste management projects’ stabilities.
South Australia’s Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission has recommended the state investigate an international storage site for intermediate and high-level (spent fuel) nuclear waste.
Communicating invisible threats is an area of interest in discard studies because it requires distilling and articulating the ideas that matter most in our concepts of contamination and harm. I asked Yuko some questions about the background and choices behind the images for the Radiation Monitoring Project.
This is where the creative process foundational to science, fixing, and hacking come together. Rather than making more of the same, whether it’s in science or technology, the scientists, artists, and engineers at GOSH push boundaries, exceed norms, and open up possibilities. Trash is one avenue towards that goal.
A new article by Anna Stanley in Antipode, “Wasted Life: Labour, Liveliness, and the Production of Value” investigates the link between the uranium extractive industry and Dne environmental health in terms of a powerful calculus that creates wastage and invisibility.
Many of the points made in the article can be made about contamination concerns for other types of waste, and particularly how industrial narratives complicate what “the commons” is, what it is for, and how it works. Here, wastelands become productive lands undergirding development of what is already valued at a local level.
Galison argues that the categories of wastelands and wilderness are far from dichotomous; that their relation is far more intriguing (and disturbing) than a binary of purity and corruption. Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity – for reasons of sanctification or despoilment – alters a central feature of the human self, presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible questions about who we are when land can be classified, forever, as not for us humans
In this special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, authors reflect on how, when and why art has been used to articulate destruction over the past decades. Their essays are a glimpse into the topics that were recently discussed at the 2013 Doomsday Clock Symposium in Washington, DC.
Shiloh R. Krupar’s new book, Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste, with University of Minnesota Press, was released this summer. It is about the remaking of the world via the externalities–or wastes–of war, from residues from the production of chemical weapons to nuclear radiation.
