Nuclear Remains: For a Speculative Empirical Approach

Abstract

Nuclear remains concern the materiality of spent radioactive substances and, at the very same time, a question of the abstractions used to think about nuclear materials into the future. As a question of matter, the existence of long-lived radioactive uranium and plutonium deposits means contemplating forms of materiality that often remain harmful to organic life for at least 100,000 years. Countries such as Sweden, Finland, the UK, the USA, and France are now beginning the process of developing so-called permanent underground storage facilities for long-lived nuclear waste, raising the question of how to communicate memory of these storage sites into the distant future. Fields as diverse as nuclear semiotics, future literacy, decolonial approaches to nuclearity, and environmental semiosis together consider how to communicate nuclear waste sites in ways that are no longer founded on human onto-epistemological frames. As long-lived nuclear waste increases in volume into the twenty-first century, nuclear remains emerge today as a problem of how to develop alternative abstractions of thought capable of thinking and communicating radioactive matter into futures far exceeding human life. Pushing back against common sense understandings of the future, in this chapter I develop the relationship between nuclear remains and speculative empiricism as an approach to thinking nuclear waste futures more openly in terms of the contingencies of future events. Speculative empiricism is notable for this task because it provides a way to consider the creation of abstractions as central to apprehending the open possibilities of singular future events.