Since this week has been about generally depressing topics such as the exploitation of labor and how our technology is harming if not destroying communities in "less" developed regions, I figured I'd talk about nuclear contamination. It's also fitting since the anniversary for the first nuclear reaction (at our very UChicago, yay!) is coming up this Sunday December 2nd. Overall, I want to just explore the flows of nuclear energy and how it complicates futurity, specifically in Marez's sense and our usage in class discussion.
Sleep Dealer depicts energy flows through invisible neural networks and through the river in Santa Ana. Nuclear energy as well, its contamination, radiation, is invisible. Thinking of the movie's visual portrayal of Memo's neural network as he's connected through nodes to his work, it is something we are shown, but wouldn't normally be able to see. I wonder how such flows would can be visualized for nuclear energy. In Fukushima, the nuclear waste in the containment vessel of reactor 1 is flowing into the ocean through groundwater. How can we begin to imagine that flow of contamination, of spent energy?
The idea of the chemical components used in nuclear plants, in waste specifically, has a half-life beyond anything we can conceive. While strontium and cesium have half-lives of about 30 years, plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years. We are essentially using a technology with effects that last far beyond our conceptions of the future, to a point where we can't even imagine an Earth (When is global warming going to make this planet inhabitable? Will our nuclear waste outlive us?). The question of what to do with nuclear waste is something that challenges our concepts of the future. How do we expect a future and who gets to imagine it?
"The capacity to imagine a future as such within the limits of the here and now ultimately raises creative speculative questions about how material conditions would have to be transformed in order to support widespread expectations of the future" (Marez 11)
I feel like nuclear energy is just another important example of how large and uncontainable climate change is. It's an issue so giant that it's inconceivable in its full form; what single person can know everything about climate change and our anthropocentric contributions to ecological disaster? We can only tackle it piece by piece, step by step. While I find myself lost in the scale of the issue, I take some assurances in the idea that solving/avoiding/surviving climate change is not a burden on the individual, but on the collective. I like to believe that this is something we can face together, rather than something I should feel individual guilt or responsibility for and I feel this can be applied to large corporations and industries, as they hold a large collective responsibility for our future.
Capodici, Vincenzo. "Reassessing the 3.11 Disaster and the Future of Nuclear Power in Japan: An Interview with Former Prime Minister Kan Naoto." Translated by Richard Minear. https://apjjf.org/2016/18/Capodici.html
Marez, Curtis. “Introduction: Farm Workers in the Machine." Farm Worker Futurism.
Information on the half-life of radioactive waste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Classification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBS-3