Repository: A Typological Guide to America's Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure
PROJECT OVEVIEW:
Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository was our nation’s best attempt to store and contain high-level waste. In 2010 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 2004, the EPA determined that high-level radioactive wastes will remain dangerous to humans for 1 million years and any facility built will have to meet the extremely long-term safety goal of 1000 millennia.
As of 2011, 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.
Repository will catalog a sampling of “temporary” infrastructures designed (or simply used) to contain nuclear waste until more enduring facilities can be sufficiently researched and constructed. It will invite audiences to expand their capacities to imagine the relatively short life spans—of both humans and existing infrastructures—in relation to the very long spans of time that nuclear materials require containment.
The finished work will include two graphic typologies: a poster and a set of cards. The poster will analyze 15-20 buildings and structures designed to temporarily contain nuclear waste, such as dry casks, cooling pools, storage tanks and vitrification facilities. Structures will be chosen for inclusion if they “exemplify” common infrastructural forms or traits that run across multiple facilities, or if they offer notably unique approaches to storage.The cards will consider mobile infrastructures designed to transport radioactive waste between sites. It will take the form of a card set. The card set will be designed to be “activated” by users as they travel along U.S. interstates and highways. With cards in hand, users will be able to “spot” and identify mobile nuclear storage infrastructures as they flow throughout the country. Each card will include notable visual information unique to each structure (size, color, shape) as well as route information and type of waste transported. The cards will be modeled after WWII spotter cards.
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Related posts on Friends of the Pleistocene (FOP) fopnews.wordpress.com
11.10.11 Introduction to the project
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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