nuclear power

Stefan Skrimshire considers the ethical question of how to communicate with future human societies in terms of long-term disposal of radioactive fuel. He proposes that the confessional form (as propagated by Saint Augustine and critiqued by Derrida) may become increasingly pertinent to activists, artists, and faith communities making sense of humanity’s ethical commitments in deep time.

Episode 6 of Crosscurrents features talks and short interviews from the Climate Change and Energy Futures workshop. The 2018 workshop imagined futures related to climate change and energy, with attention to the social values that underlie decision-making in a carbon-constrained world.

Nuclear Humanities showcases interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of nuclear harm through a five-day workshop sponsored by Whitman College’s 2016 O’Donnell Endowed Chair in Global Studies.

An unexpected group of activists, consisting of mostly farmers and vintners, occupied the construction site of a nuclear reactor near the German town of Wyhl in 1975.

Shannon Cram explores the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, examining how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. She examines Hanford’s biological vector control program through the fruit fly and discusses how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. She concludes that nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: solve Hanford’s nuclear waste problem.