Communicating Deep Heritage

The Central Organisation for Radioactive Waste (COVRA) is the only company in the Netherlands who has the licence to treat low, medium and high risk radioactive waste. Established in the Dutch province of Zeeland, at the docks in Vlissingen-Oost, COVRA’s above ground treatment and storage facility accommodates the radioactive waste that is and will be produced over the next 100 years. After the cooling period, the waste will be moved to a deep below ground storage. Communicating the various timescales of radioactive waste is part of COVRA’s strategy to develop trust within the local communities. As presented by Ewoud Verhoef, the deputy director of COVRA and chair of multiple waste organisations in Europe, their treatment site is not intended to blend into the landscape: instead, its presence is deliberately given attention. The design of the HABOG site by artist William Verstraeten draws on the tradition of marking radioactivity with warning signs, but attempts to go even further. Currently painted in glaring orange, the building will be repainted in a lighter color tone every 15 years during the next century, until eventually its bleached walls will indicate the end of the waste cooling period.

Another aesthetic strategy adopted by COVRA draws parallels between nuclear legacy and museum archives. One of their facilities offers storage for artworks from local museums, ensuring the necessary cooling conditions. Comparing the challenges of preserving cultural heritage to those of managing toxic waste may seem a little far fetched, and the transparency of COVRA’s communication is often challenged by the anti-nuclear activist organization LAKA (Documentation and Research Centre on Nuclear Energy). Daniël Meijers, LAKA’s volunteer, has repeatedly raised concerned about the misleading focus on cooling, which then omits the remaining 1,000,000 years afterlife of the toxic waste, and shifts attention from the cause of the problem. Interestingly, LAKA provides its own perspective on the nuclear heritage, holding the enormous National Nuclear Energy Archive: thousands of publications, posters, pamphlets and buttons, spanning from the beginning of cultural anti-nuclear movement in the 80’s until present day. Built up around this extended archive, LAKA has also developed great expertise on the nuclear waste product depleted uranium (DU).

The latency of the nuclear debate in the Netherlands today can be attributed to the continuous postponing of the issue into the far future. While COVRA provides interim solution for waste until the year 2130, it will inevitably face the looming threat of rising sea levels and other consequences of environmental collapse in the next decades. Will it be able to communicate and design with/for such a level of uncertainty? And what kind of strategies for marking contaminated sites are able to address and consider the precarious status of other non-human species?

Marking Radioactivity: The More-Than-Human Perspectives

In 1992, the Sandia National Laboratories for the US Department of Energy engaged in a series of semiotic studies. Inviting artists, designers and architects, the study focused on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and ways to communicate the location of geologically buried waste across thousands of years into the future. Many proposals have moved beyond semiotics of language and signage, and approached land itself as a medium of marking. Commonly known as ‘Landscape of Thorns’ or ‘Spike Field’, the concept by architect Michael Brill took the form of land art, with gargantuan granite thorns poking up from the ground. The jagged and sharp appearance of the landscape would act as a warning to the future human. In his recent book ‘The New Dark Age’, James Bridle describes these proposals as ‘so terrible in form, that other life forms in the future will recognise their location as evil.’ Other proposals by Brill’s team engaged with the inherent qualities of materials used to create the sites — such as the inhospitable surface of dynamited calcite stone (‘Rubble Landscape’) or granite slabs that turned hot from the sun absorption, repelling any living being (‘Black Hole’). Unique in their attempt to surpass human language as medium of communication, these markers still prioritise human cognition and knowledge transfer over other organisms.

Artist Andy Weir also challenges language-based approaches to marking sites, remaining critical of the idea of markers that merely postpone the present issues into the future. Departing from the idea of ‘interscalar vehicle’ (Hecht), Weir’s project aims to connect stories across different sites, scales and bodies with a figure of Pazugoo. The marker is based on Pazuzu, an Assyrian-Babylonian protective demon of contagion, epidemic and dust, that drives away other spirits, or plagues and misfortunes. It’s often depicted as a combination of diverse animal and human parts (the body of a man, the head of a lion, claws of an eagle and two pairs of wings), and Weir’s interpretation of Pazuzu is based on merging open source 3D scans of icons and statues from different museums across the world. Buried together with the nuclear waste, Puzugoo is designed to become a relic for the future, combining diverse historical influences. Weir emphasizes the distributed nature of radioactivity, and proposes ‘mythic fiction as a method for navigating between the immense timescales of nuclear storage and human cognition’.

Biological Citizenship

The role of language is nuclear culture is not limited to definitions and regulations. The work of media theorist Svitlana Matviyenko itself proposes a new vocabulary, useful for developing a less human-centric understanding of radioactivity. Matviyenko conducts on-the-ground research in Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which forms a basis for her upcoming book ‘Citizenship and Contamination: Producing the Accidental Territory’. 33 years after the disaster, the Zone remains highly radioactive and dangerous. As the lifetime of decaying architecture is coming to an end, the physical site of Chernobyl will soon disappear as a reminder (of the disaster), but will always continue its life as a remainder (of soviet technopolitics and failings). The Zone covers parts of modern day Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, producing and holding together a so-called ‘post-human Soviet Union’: an involuntary bond and extension that outlived and will outlive the USSR far into the deep future.

Any territory is a spatial extension of sovereignty. The production of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as a territory was influenced by multiple political factors, from inhabitants who resisted to leave their villages after the disaster, to the officially registered levels of radiation. The engineered border on the map does not actually represent the reality of contamination. Borrowing the term ‘biological citizenship’ from Adriana Petryna, Matviyenko argues that all residents of the Zone, including non-human populations, hold a biological citizenship to the site. This accidental form of citizenship is literally inscribed in matter, and internalised by humans and non-humans. Introduction of new terminology raises questions about its generative potential: could it allow for new ways of relating, or forming alliances between the affected bodies?

Narratives of Contamination

State agencies have always been invested in shaping the narrative around nuclear industry, weather of national ingenuity, success, progress, control, or safety. But the official national narratives often get hijacked, questioned, retold, and re-represented with alternative storylines, eventually shifting the public perception. As Matviyenko explained in her lecture, Pripyat used to be an exemplar Soviet city, a display of ideology and achievements of Soviet engineering, with Chernobyl harnessing nuclear power mainly for peaceful projects. However, way prior to the construction of the Chernobyl power plant, the Soviet Union has already experienced a serious radioactive contamination accident at the Mayak Plutonium Production Plant in 1957. Known as the Kyshtym disaster, it occurred at a nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. The event measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), making it the third-most serious nuclear accident ever recorded. As the radioactive cloud moved towards the north-east into Russia, no contamination occurred in Central Europe (unlike Chernobyl), and so the disaster was officially kept in secrecy until 1976 (18 years after). Only technological advancement of the state was celebrated, and only success stories of nuclear industry then prevailed.

The recent release of HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ series contributed to a 40% increase in disaster tourism to Pripyat (in June 2019). One could say HBO hijacked the Chernobyl event, as Hollywood-like dramatisation of the disaster pushes it almost into the realm of fiction. Most likely, the political relevance of the place will remain ignored, the public attention will fade away just as quickly, and the subject will resume to its dormancy. So how could this ephemeral hype be positively instrumentalized, and used to pose critical questions that may exceed the Netflix binge timescales?

Returning Nature: The Problem of Representation

Researcher Anna Volkmar focuses on the visual representation of post-nuclear landscapes. The mainstream discourse is often centered around romanticised image of the ‘returning nature’ and the new wilderness, with the stories of populations of near extinct animal species returning to the Edenic zones. The almost religious tales offer a narrative solution for humans, coupled with a sense of closure, while the actual reason for ‘thriving nature’ in these places is the absence of humans (and not the presence of radiation). 

The nuclear sites are commonly paired with a greenwashing language of wildlife protection. The Horonobe Underground Research Centre in Japan was built under the reindeer park, and subsequently adopted a cartoon reindeer as their icon, branding the research lab as in coexistence with the reindeer population of Horonobe. As put by Ele Carpenter, this ‘import of nature’ can be said to banalize the nuclear industry, and to ‘cause a political impasse based on instrumentalisation of aesthetics’, normalising the embedded forms of militarism and energy production in our landscapes.

What kind of narratives could designers offer, next to the state-imposed greenwashing or cinematic dramatisation? Anna Volkmar points out that the invisible nature of radiation renders our sense of perception useless, raising peculiar dilemmas for photography and other visual design disciplines. If no physical mutations can be witnessed in the landscape itself, what should the images tell us about such places? Should images literally render visible the harmful effects on bodies, or function as warnings against the past? How could they open new narratives beyond the human understanding? And in the end, are images (and not, for example, sounds) the most effective medium to materialize and communicate the alternative realities of radioactivity?

The Agency of the Designer

So what can a designer do in a field, dominated by highly polarized opinions? One way to answer this is by literally looking at nuclear sites, and their spatial design and organization. In our conversation, Anna Volkmar suggested to radically rethink the role of waste storage buildings as spaces for active ongoing discussions, or even as a new type of (posthuman) institutions, with a goal of communicating knowledge beyond the local communities, and beyond the solely technical rationale. Design can then provide new spaces to think collectively and beyond antagonisms, ensuring particularity of conversations about specific places, specific problems and specific timescales. Perhaps, acknowledging the effects of radiation on other species would form an important part of such an institutional agenda.

Ele Carpenter notes that both scientific research and artistic programming has a tendency to isolate each part of the nuclear industry, preventing an understanding of the connections between colonial roots, economic conditions, contemporary trading, and different aspects of the supply chain. The fragmentation of parts of the cycle plays a vital part in rendering the nuclear economy invisible. There is an urgency for designers to undertake a more holistic approach in mapping the extraction and production, not simply by making the hidden material flows visible, but by connecting seemingly disparate radioactive dots across space and time.

The nuclear deep time has no beginning nor end; it has different implications at different moments, and for different humans and non-human entities. Perhaps new nuclear vocabularies, as well as alternative means of communication, might play a greater role in the field of nuclear culture in the coming years. Providing us with new categories of thinking about radioactivity; eventually finding new entry points into the cartographies of nuclear matter.