Urban nuclear reactors and the security theatre

Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative

“…Also engaging with the relation between memory and landscape, but in conversation with historical-cultural geographies, della Dora (2013, 696) focuses on ancient Roman and Byzantine understandings of memory as “an embodied practice depending on mental and corporeal attitudes but also one heavily grounded in and interacting with landscape's matter, colours, forms, and with their specificities”. Second, there has also been particular emphasis on non-representational and affective approaches (DeSilvey 2012; Drozdzewski 2018; Jones 2015; Sumartojo 2021). Engagements with affective registers of experience not only affirm an expanded conceptual repertoire accounting for the (re)production and circulation of memory, but also draw attention to certain geographies of negativity such as the way memory can fall apart, be marked by an affective sense of absence, or encounters certain bodily limits (Bissell et al 2021).…”

“…Developing a similar line of thought, research within atomic heritage has recently contributed ways to apprehend the nuclear as a contested techno-political process of categorisation (Ialenti 2022;Rindzevičiūtė, 2019;Storm et al 2019). One implication of this focus on the techno-political has been renewed attention to the political effects of radioactive thingsespecially in relation to nuclear colonialism.…”

“…Over the course of the past four decades or so, the problem of how to communicate memory of nuclear things has been a source of intrigue in the social sciences. Engagements with nuclear semiotics (Sebeok 1984), atomic heritage (Storm, Andersson and Rindzevičiūtė2019), nuclear waste futures (Joyce 2020), nuclear art (Volkmar 2022) and cultures (Carpenter 2016), future consciousness (Högberg et al 2017), toxic waste studies (Kaur 2021), memory studies (Freeman 2016), nuclear landscapes (Pitkanen and Farish 2018), and decolonial approaches to nuclearity (Hecht 2014) directly and indirectly approach the problem of how to think the enduring materialities of nuclear things into the future given the danger these materials can pose to organic life over thousands of years. Part of the reason for this intrigue, perhaps, is the sense that the imperceptible qualities of nuclear materials might offer fresh perspectives on environmental problems (Bickerstaff 2022;Klaubert 2021)especially through deep time perspectives (Bjornerud 2018;Gordon 2021;Ialenti 2020), speculative forms of experience (Engelmann 2022;Keating 2022a), and alternative ontologies of environmental envelopment (Morton 2013;Povinelli 2021).…”