Temporal Elements: Nuclear Waste, Time-Binding, and Anthropocene Futures

• In Event: Elements: Thinking Our Present Elementally - I

Abstract

Radioactive materials (e.g., residues of nuclear weapons testing) are considered key markers defining the putative Anthropocene epoch. Here two kinds of elements are linked: chemical radioisotopes, and the temporal element named as the Anthropocene. While radiological signatures abruptly mark the beginning of the Anthropocene, their persistence over multi-millennial time periods will extend its duration far into the future with a slowly-decaying presence. Products of the late-modern nuclear enterprise are now elements of society’s naturalized background (explicitly naturalized in discourses of nuclear waste management and radiological protection, as this paper elaborates). They are also ontological conditions of possibility enabling and constraining human and non-human futures. Accordingly, the paper assembles multiple theoretical perspectives to interrupt prevailing notions of temporality, materiality, and technoscience with nuclear waste as its focus. First, Niklas Luhmann’s notion of time-binding helps illuminate how present decisions (and non-decisions) regarding the disposition of nuclear waste link current conditions to those of distant futures. Second, the work of temporalities scholars Barbara Adam and Chris Groves provides a bridge to political questions of transgenerational and trans-species justice. Third, the paper considers the limits of linguistic and mathematical representation (in contexts from systems modeling to artistic and literary imaginaries) to address ontological and epistemological aspects of nuclear waste decision making under conditions of present urgency, future consequentiality, and inevitably incomplete and uncertain knowledge. These perspectives help consider elementally the present, possible futures, and connections between them. The paper’s methodology combines textual and discourse analysis with extended ethnographic engagement in multiple nuclear energy settings.

Author

• William Kinsella, North Carolina State University