Repository: A Typological Guide to America's Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure
Repository: A Typological Guide to America's Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure launched on June 28, 002012 at Proteus Gowanus as part of the gallery's programming related to Future Migrations.
PROJECT OVERVIEW:
Our nation’s high-level nuclear waste has nowhere to go. And yet, it’s always going somewhere, either under its own power or in a vibrant assemblage with other things such as water, air, soil, bacteria or human commerce. Repository graphically depicts this material reality through a deck of 42 cards. They are designed to help you spot and identify today’s temporary solutions for the storage of radioactive waste as you pass by them on the highway, or as they pass by you.
The cards chronicle “temporary” infrastructures designed (or simply used) to contain nuclear waste until more enduring facilities can be researched and constructed. Some of the cards feature structures that take notably unique approaches to storage. Others exemplify common infrastructural forms or approaches that run through multiple facilities, or function as mobile infrastructures for transporting radioactive waste between sites.
As with other smudge projects, we invite users of this deck to expand their capacities to imagine the monumental time spans required to contain and monitor nuclear materials, and to consider the extraordinary challenges that they present to designers, architects and engineers.
Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository was our nation’s best attempt to store and contain high-level waste. In 002010 the site was deemed unsuitable and the project’s funding was eliminated. No permanent storage options are expected to be available for the next 100-300 years. In 002004, the EPA determined that high-level radioactive wastes will remain dangerous to humans for 1 million years. They stipulated that any repository for high level waste will have to meet the unprecedentedly long-term safety goal of 1000 millennia. As of 002011, about 66,000 metric tons of spent fuel were being held at power reactor sites in 33 states. Each year, this amount increases by another 2,000 metric tons.
Order the 42-card deck $10.00 USD + shipping
PRESS:
"Infrastructural Tourism," Places, by Shannon Mattern, July 2013
Archive of Nuclear Harm, 2015
RETAILERS:
Half Letter Press, Chicago, IL
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, Berlin
Center for Land Use Interpretation, 9331 Venice Blvd., Culver City, CA
Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY
Rocky Flats Cold War Museum, Arvada, CO
Related posts on Friends of the Pleistocene (FOP) fopnews.wordpress.com
11.10.11 | Repository: A Typological Guide to America's Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure
03.07.12 | Stranded Fuel: The Casks Stand Alone
06.01.12 | Nowhere to Go: Always Going Somewhere
06.18.12 | Grappling with the Potency
09.11.12 | Repository: Look Only At the Movement
09.22.12 | Along A Thin Potent Line
10.01.12 | And It Moves
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Repository: A Typological Guide to America's Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure is funded in part by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, Architecture Planning & Design Program, 2012 and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 2012