The nuclear fuel chain is a complex set of frictions that travel along a line of gnarled perceptibility, weaving in and out of people’s lives at different points in time. This nature makes the net output of the chain questionable in terms of processes and systems built to continue pushing the atomic era. Nuclear States of Being seeks to investigate the nuclear landscape from social, economic, and environmental issues on the ground.

To view into the nuclear world and see what complex ontologies thrive within it will help to expand interest and criticality into the subject matter. I invite people to look at what the future of these infrastructures and environments could look like and to think more critically about the nature of the current nuclear fuel chain.

This piece reimagines the management and maintenance of above ground storage casks. Rather than disregarding or hiding these casks, it proposes an ambitious public artwork that memorializes them and their contents, positioning them in full public view. By placing the cask memorial in populous and globally affluent areas, the burden of environmental and sociological risk becomes more evenly distributed. In doing so, it acknowledges the longevity of these materials and the energy that they have contributed to our societies.  

 The cask form is ubiquitous with holding spent nuclear fuel that is radioactive for a timespan of over 10,000 years. Reimagining it, instead, as a site for memorialization reframes the legacies of each actor involved in the nuclear entanglement. This reframing allows for the histories of the people, communities, ecologies and so on to be placed at the forefront of infrastructural planning around the nuclear fuel chain. It also allows for the spent nuclear fuel to have its own agency and material-semiotic positioning within the nuclear world.

 This proposal resides within a world of nuclear acceptance; where the same form of respect, care, and maintenance is given to nuclear memorialization as with any other memorial or monument. Large plots of land are designated for the cask memorials to be gridded out and placed for onlookers to come pay their respects or wander around curiously. Each memorialized cask is engraved with the specific latitudes and longitudes of locations where the movement of uranium became entangled with other actors along its path towards its final mattering.


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