Atomic heritage: Examining materiality, colonialism, and the speculative time of nuclear legacies
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18 conference report
Artwork by Laurence Mellinger.
Atomic heritage:
Examining materiality, colonialism, and
the speculative time of nuclear legacies
f nuclear matter is not merely a Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia,
Atomic Heritage, a 4-day matter of concern for the techni- Japan, certain Pacific Islands, France,
conference on June 15–18, cal sciences, but one that requires the UK, Sweden, the USA, and Germany
2021 at Linköping University, interdisciplinary forms of heritage to name but a few. The conference was
Sweden. The conference expertise, how to handle nuclear mat- wide-reaching in a disciplinary sense,
was organized as part of the ter in ways that keep these heritage too: the papers presented in Atomic Heri-
Atomic Heritage research processes open to future possibilities for tage spanned engagements with nuclear
project. Project partners: thinking-differently? If nuclear materi- waste storage, nuclear semiotics, artistic
Anna Storm, Florence Fröhlig, als are the subject of contested forms and aesthetic practices with nuclear
Tatiana Kasperski, Eglė of techno-political categorization,1 then materials, nuclear-contaminated water
Rindzevičiūtė and affiliate what techniques of heritage and memory and food, Soviet history and politics, and
Andrei Stsiapanau. Funding: preservation are best equipped to deal the role of slavery and forced labour in
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, with nuclear waste? In addressing these nuclear industries. In what follows I will
grants no F20-0009 and questions, Atomic Heritage consisted selectively suggest how particular topics
P16-0684:1. of four organising themes: 1) Bodies, gained expression in certain papers
Communities, Heritage; 2) Waste and across these four days by focussing on:
Radiation; 3) Infrastructural Heritage (1) non-human materiality, (2) nuclear
and Politics; and 4) The Global Atom. colonialism and de-colonialization, (3)
An international group of speakers speculative thinking and temporalities,
discussed the legacies and geographies and (4) heritage and the archive. I con-
of nuclear cultures in sites ranging from clude by reflecting on how these themes
conference report 19
intervene in the wider critical questions research3 since it concerns all manner
and stakes of social scientific engage- of material things capable of emitting
Nuclear colonialism and
ments with nuclear heritage processes. radiation that stubbornly exceed human de-colonialization
temporalities and capacities for sense. Intersecting notions of material-
Non-human materiality Attention to the non-human qualities ity and the non-human, a number of
The first day of paper sessions rever- of nuclear matter also appeared through papers drew attention to the politics
berated with the keynote address by the discussion of so-called “legacy of nuclear colonialism and processes
Kate Brown on “The Great Chernobyl waste”. Legacy waste is a term popula- of de-colonisation. Specifically, certain
Acceleration” from the evening before. rised by certain nation states in the mid contributors drew attention to the role
These reverberations were manifold, to late 20th century to distinguish (1) nu- of colonial and de-colonialising power
but perhaps felt most directly with the clear waste produced during early weap- relations in structuring material realities
return of the Soviet train car in Eglė ons testing from (2) initial developments for those living around nuclear power
Rindzevičiūtė’s powerful account of the of nuclear energy production whose plants and in the aftermath of nuclear
movement of bodies across Soviet Russia method of disposal is either unknown or weapons testing (for example Virginija
in the management of its atomic gulags. unplanned.4 As Paul Josephson’s paper Januškevičiūtė; Linara Dovydaitytė; Eglė
As Rindzevičiūtė explained, despite its observed, legacy waste is notable in Rindzevičiūtė). Lis Kayser, for instance,
significance to the histories of focussed on nuclear colonialism
nuclear power in the 20th century, in the French Polynesian Tahiti
the movement of bodies on trains “NOT ALL THAT REMAINS and Hao wherein the contempo-
heading to the east of Soviet Russia rary presence of colonial power
for the purposes of forced labour OF ATOMIC HERITAGES is detectable through the material
is quite often difficult to evidence REVOLVES AROUND THE traces of certain infrastructures
and is thus too often overlooked. and household artefacts. llona
In Brown’s opening address, the
TECHNO-POLITICAL Jurkonyte, likewise, contributed to
mobilities of a refrigerated train CATEGORIES OF WASTE de-colonisation debates by calling
cart filled with meat contaminated
from the Chernobyl accident was
AND LEGACY WASTE.” for renewed practices of “unlearn-
ing” colonial power through a
used to tell a story about the logis- critical reading of the way nuclear
tical confusion surrounding the manage- discourses around waste management cultures are today produced through
ment of this famous event: here, the because it is often ignored or treated as popular images and semiotics represent-
train cart shifted around the Soviet state categorically different to other kinds of ing the Marshall Islands. This line of de-
for a number of weeks before it eventu- nuclear waste produced today. As Petra colonialising critique was also detectable
ally returned, with seemingly nowhere Tjitske Kalshoven noted in the context of in Robert Jacobs’ reminder that, despite
else to go, back to the contaminated Cumbria, UK, legacy waste also directs a recent enthusiasm for nuclear power
Chernobyl zone. For both Rindzevičiūtė thought to the social and cultural lega- from certain environmental activists,
and Brown, the technology of the train cies produced by the enduring life of nuclear energy infrastructures must be
cart is thus figured as an industrial de- nuclear matter in certain communities. understood foremost as a “redemptive
vice for moving those bodies that are no In both cases, attending to legacy waste technology” of continuing geopolitical
longer deemed to matter. Indeed, as Mel- might be understood as a process of and colonial importance to the US in the
anie Arndt acknowledged in discussion what Bruno Latour5 refers to as the way aftermath of second world war.
of Brown’s keynote paper, to focus on that the categorisation of matter, and
the effects of nuclear power and waste therefore the mobility and possibilities Speculative thinking
on the movement of bodies is at once a of what matter can do, is produced as a and temporalities
techno-political question of the material- political “matter of concern”. A number of contributors drew atten-
ity of matter.2 In engaging with the ma- Clearly, however, not all that remains tion, both directly and indirectly, to
teriality of nuclear legacies, a question of atomic heritages revolves around the speculative aesthetics and modes
emerges of how one might become more the techno-political categories of waste of thinking nuclear environments (for
attentive to the way nuclear matter offers and legacy waste. As Andrei Stsiapanau example, Valentinas Klimašauskas).
a certain political revaluation of modes argued in thinking with the relationship Speculative thinking, understood briefly
of thinking and writing about nuclear between nuclear matter and categorisa- as an attention to pluriversal forms of
histories and environments. Insofar as it tion, it also concerns the materiality of experience besides the human subject,6
might unsettle anthropocentric accounts clay as a “geomedium” through which was directly developed by Aleksandra
of nuclear legacies, non-human mate- certain Soviet practices of nuclear waste Brylska’s discussion of the need to pay
riality in this sense offers an important disposal became actionable and justifi- attention to differing forms of nuclear
conceptual frame for atomic heritage able. temporality. Using the uncanny aesthet-
20 conference report Artwork by Laurence Mellinger. ics of Chernobyl’s “Red” Forest, investigating often incomplete So- which appears frozen in time to the viet medical records documenting human observer due to radioactivi- radiation exposure. Elsewhere, and ty killing-off much of the insect and linking to Achim Klüppelberg’s dis- microbial life,7 speculative think- cussion of the enduring geopolitical ing appears here through the way importance of infrastructural heri- alternative non-human durations of tage emanating from Soviet Russia, temporality are required to think Marcos Buser surveyed how recent the “deep time” (100,000 years+) Linara Dovydaitytė. nuclear infrastructure projects in after which nuclear matter might Switzerland draw on a mixture of become safe to organic life. Speculative lative approaches to atomic heritage biodesigned landscapes, nuclear semiot- thinking of this sort was also detectable, highlighted the need to expand how the ics, and education practices as method albeit indirectly, in terms of specula- social sciences recollect and take notice for long-term memory communication of tive propositions including the way Per of nuclear legacies across temporalities geological repositories for nuclear waste. Högselius anticipated a future fifth stage and environmental durations that are Jacob Darwin, meanwhile, focussed on of “nuclear power phase-out” driven and often irreducible to the phenomenal the scale of the body as an archive to accelerated by climate change. Intersect- experience of the human subject. understand and reconstruct understand- ing this line of thinking about the future ings of radiation exposure through the of nuclear power, speculations were also Heritage & the archive manifestation of thyroid cancers. What notable in Elise Alloin’s arts practice, A number of papers attended to critical became notable through this theme is which confronts the way bodily gestures debates between history, heritage and how atomic heritage process not only can help dramatize the performative the archive. Susanne Bauer argued for concern the preservation of memory and spaces of nuclear decommissioning. a “less purified” sense of the nuclear archives but also the political process Whilst diverse in scope, these specu- archive by drawing on her research through which certain records might be-
conference report 21
come lost or purposely left out. Florence way that different stories about former attending to a single incident of nuclear
Fröhlig, for example, used the decom- nuclear colonial territories take shape? contamination, but of a continuing ac-
missioning of the Fessenheim nuclear And how might marginalised voices in celeration of radioactivity in certain en-
plant in the Alsace region to explore research gain expression and authority vironments. Such accelerations include
what might be lost of this Franco-Ger- in these accounts of atomic heritage? those environmental and bodily health
man cultural and political relationship Forth, and finally, concerns the effects that are not only very much part
when the plant closes. separation between the “technical” and of present-day politics, but also include
“historical and cultural” developed by those effects that will only be acknowl-
Conclusion edged and discernible in the
Reflecting across the diversity of coming decades. There is thus a
the different papers making up “NUCLEAR HERITAGE certain humility to be gained in
Atomic Heritage, and certainly by attending to the politics of atomic
no means attempting to provide a
PROCESSES OFTEN heritage, which tends to appear
simple summary of synopsis of all CONCERN SUBJECTS AND as an impossible yet resolutely
the different ideas populating the
event, there are various critical
BODIES AT THE PERIPHERY necessary task of accounting for
all manner of nuclear effects both
questions that emerged both dur- OF SOCIETY.” human and non-human. ≈
ing and in the aftermath of these
presentations. Here I indicate several the conference.8 What is implied in the
Thomas Keating
points of critical concern. bifurcation of the “technical” from the Postdoctoral researcher at Tema Technology
First includes whether there tends to “historical and cultural”? If the technical and Social Change at Linköping University
be a slippage in referring to the histori- becomes associated with the scientific,
cal events of making nuclear “weapons” to what extent does this reproduce
and of nuclear “power”. Indeed, what certain kinds of orderings of knowl-
dangers are there, that the social and edge and the subordination of arts and
technological legacies of these differing humanities expertise to the scientific in
projects become flattened? At the level nuclear waste discourses? One response
of colonial and de-colonisation studies, to these questions, noted at the end of
what differences are worth attending to the conference by Jonas Žukauskas, is references
in thinking how colonialism continues to to think the cultural-technical: to reject
1 “Atomic Heritage Project description.”
shape different nuclear power and weap- the implied separation of the techni-
Atomic Heritage (2018). Available at: https://
on technologies and nuclear cultures? cal as merely scientific, and of heritage
atomicheritage.wordpress.com/project-
Second concerns the need to generate processes as “non-technical” that risks description/ Accessed November 8, 2021.
scholarly attention to both the presence creating certain kinds of reductive 2 S. Whatmore, “Materialist returns: practising
and absence of legacy waste and the as- value of heritage expertise vis-à-vis the cultural geography in and for a more-than-
sociated deferral of waste management scientific. human world.” Cultural geographies, Vol. 13,
responsibility to the future. How might In sum, and as Anna Storm acknow- no. 4 (2006): 600—609.
one draw attention not only to the cat- ledged in the final address of the con- 3 See also A. Storm, “When We Have Left the
egory of legacy waste in nuclear waste ference, nuclear heritage processes Nuclear Territories” In: Deterritorializing
management literature and policy docu- often concern subjects and bodies at the Future Harrison, eds., R., & C. Sterling
(Chicago: Open Humanities Press, 2019),
ments, but also to the way legacy waste the periphery of society — be this those
318—343.
is wilfully made absent in literature and forced to construct nuclear power plants
4 T. Kasperski, “From Legacy to Heritage: The
documents concerning how nuclear for the Soviet state in the 20th century,
Changing Political and Symbolic Status of
waste repositories that are currently to the Pacific Island communities living
Military Nuclear Waste in Russia”, Cahiers du
envisaged, managed, and designed? in the aftermath of weapons testing, Monde Russe, Vol. 60 no. 2—3 (2019): 517—538.
Third concerns the notion of reflex- or communities such as the Sami who 5 B. Latour, Politics of Nature. (Cambridge, MA:
ivity and positionality in researching live with the fallout of nuclear weapons Harvard University Press, 2004).
nuclear colonialism. Indeed, there is a following the cold war weapons rush. 6 See D. Debaise, Speculative Empiricism:
danger that questions of researcher re- There is a politics, therefore, in paying Revisiting Whitehead, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
flexivity and positionality become back- attention to how the legacies of nuclear University Press, 2017).
grounded when, instead, they might be materials have differing effects on bodies 7 See also K. Brown, Manual for survival: A
at the forefront of research concerning across space and time. As an outcome Chernobyl guide to the future. (London:
nuclear colonialism. How do differing of differing spatio-temporal durations, Penguin UK, 2019).
ontologies and epistemologies between and as Brown9 argues, understanding 8 Atomic Heritage, 2018.
researcher and researched inform the nuclear heritage might not only be about 9 Brown, 2019.
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