Abstract
This chapter provides an outline of current practices surrounding the production and disposal of nuclear energy in the context of conceptions of responsibility premised on continuity and resemblance. We argue that the use of nuclear fission as a viable alternative to fossil fuels depends on the responsible disposal of nuclear wastes and that, therefore, the maintenance of intergenerational infrastructures is central to the project of responsible nuclear energy use. We argue that there are technical and conceptual limitations on the viability of such a project. These limitations have to do with the capacity of scientists in the present to ground the predictions necessary to pursue effective intergenerational policy as well as with the conceptual shortfalls of such a view of responsibility in general.
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Notes
- 1.
Plato (1924, 65).
- 2.
See, for instance, the following articles, all published over the summer of 2023: Sergei Karaganov, “A Difficult but Necessary Decision,” Russia in Global Affairs, June 13, 2023. https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/a-difficult-but-necessary-decision/; Oussama Aamari, “Russian FM Renews Nuclear War Threat to Western Powers,” August 19, 2023. https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/08/357163/russian-fm-renews-nuclear-war-threat-to-western-powers; Web Desk, “Lavrov says Russia’s nuclear arsenal a reminder for West,” The News, August 19, 2023. https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/1101716-lavrov-says-russias-nuclear-arsenal-a-reminder-for-west; Stephen J. Cimbala and Lawrence J. Korn, “Karaganov’s case for Russian nuclear preemption: responsible strategizing or dangerous delusion,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 21, 2023. https://thebulletin.org/2023/08/karaganovs-case-for-russian-nuclear-preemption-responsible-strategizing-or-dangerous-delusion/; AP News “Poland’s leader says Russia’s moving tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, shifting regional security,” August 22, 2023. https://apnews.com/article/poland-belarus-portugal-nuclear-weapons-russia-ff3ce6cfc7880cf5b6f9b5901b07c2b4
- 3.
See Naas (2018), wherein the survival of the narrative of nuclear Armageddon is taken up alongside a careful reading of the survival of a text authored by Jacques Derrida, whose work will begin to intersect with our own in the following chapters.
- 4.
See Shuster, Simon, “Ukraine is Preparing for Russia to Sabotage Europe’s Biggest Nuclear Plant,” Time Magainze, August 1, 2023. https://time.com/6300397/ukraine-fears-russia-sabotage-nuclear-plant-zaporizhzhia/
- 5.
Tom Ambrose, Martin Belam, and Helen Sullivan, “Russia-Ukraine war: Zaporizhzhia situation ‘tense’ as both sides accuse each other of planning attack on nuclear plant,” The Guardian, July 5, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/jul/05/russia-ukraine-war-live-counteroffensive-particularly-fruitful-in-recent-days-senior-ukraine-official-says
- 6.
Reuters in Vienna, “UN nuclear watchdog finds no explosives at Zaporizhzhia plant,” The Guardian, August 4, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/04/un-nuclear-watchdog-searches-for-explosives-at-zaporizhzhia-plant
- 7.
Reuters, “Kyiv says Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant switched to reserve power line,” Reuters, August 10, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kyiv-says-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-switched-reserve-power-line-2023-08-10/
- 8.
Murray (2003), passim.
- 9.
Andrén (2014, 6).
- 10.
Shrader-Frechette writes that “[e]ach of the more than eighty such products created in the fission reactor is capable of releasing ionizing radiation.” Ionizing radiation is the name for energy released as radiation that is capable of changing the molecular shape of it comes into contact with other atoms—which is to say, ionizing radiation is what is capable of destroying or mutating organic matter. See Shrader-Frechette (1993, 13).
- 11.
Murray (2003, 129).
- 12.
Andrén (2014, 6).
- 13.
United States Nuclear Regulatory Committee (2019).
- 14.
Here, a particularly invaluable resource for those with backgrounds outside of nuclear and energy physics is Van Wyck (2005). See especially pp. 3–29.
- 15.
Murray (2003, 13).
- 16.
Ibid., 14.
- 17.
Derrida (1989, 828).
- 18.
And this is to say nothing of the oft-touted economic efficiency of nuclear energy production. Commercial nuclear energy production has, throughout its history, been financially propped up by government subsidies typically with the goal of justifying the continued production of weapons-grade plutonium rather than in the name of clean-energy initiatives. And this is without taking account of the costs presented in liability and damages accrued by governing agencies when workers and civilians find their health and the health of their communities negatively affected by the negligent management of nuclear energy facilities. It simply appears to be the case that nuclear energy is considerably more expensive than many “green” alternatives and that its appearance of affordability has largely been in the service of government-sponsored arms manufacturing. See Shrader-Frechette (1993, 15fn17, 19), Shrader-Frechette (1991, 334), Flavin (1983), and Stewart and Stewart (2011, 78).
- 19.
United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (2015).
- 20.
Van Wyck (2005, 6).
- 21.
Andrén (2014, 8).
- 22.
Environmental Protection Agency (2020).
- 23.
Murray (2003, 29).
- 24.
Shrader-Frechette (1993, 24).
- 25.
CNN (2018).
- 26.
Chicago Tribune (2015).
- 27.
Missourinet (2020).
- 28.
Russell Kinsaul “Dates set for cleanup of West Lake Landfill,” KMOV4, Saint Louis County, February 2, 2023. https://www.kmov.com/2023/02/02/dates-set-cleanup-west-lake-landfill/
- 29.
Atomic Energy Act of 1954 42 USC 2012, emphasis added.
- 30.
Andrén (2014, 7).
- 31.
Although let us note that the deep ocean was indeed the disposal site of choice for most nations until 1975, when an international prohibition on the practice was introduced. See Andrén (2014, 6).
- 32.
Shrader-Frechette (1993, 84).
- 33.
Van Wyck (2005, 6).
- 34.
Andrén (2014, 6).
- 35.
- 36.
Jungmin Kang, Masafumi Takubo, and Frank von Hippel, “Some fuels never learn. US Energy Department returns to costly and risky plutonium separation technologies,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 14, 2022. https://thebulletin.org/2022/09/some-fuels-never-learn-us-energy-department-returns-to-costly-and-risky-plutonium-separation-technologies/
- 37.
Kang et al. (2022).
- 38.
- 39.
- 40.
Salvatores and Palmiotti (2011, 148).
- 41.
Allow me to quickly point out that this too is an unimaginably long amount of time from the perspective of the functional and intentional survival of material structures and supporting institutions.
- 42.
Ibid., 162.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
- 45.
Andrén (2014, 7).
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
- 49.
Shrader-Frechette (1991, 328).
- 50.
Van Wyck (2005, 6).
- 51.
US DOE CRA 2014 WIPP, 25-1.
- 52.
Naas (1995, 124).
- 53.
To quote Naas again, “[i]f courage is, then, truly a knowledge of what is to be dreaded or dared, and if it is always the same knowledge that understands things in the past, the present, and the future, then courage must be a knowledge of what is best not only in the future but in the present and the past as well.” Naas will go on to demonstrate that this view of courage as “being guided by a knowledgeable calculation of risks” is fairly consistent across Plato’s dialogues, despite the aporetic treatment such a view of courage receives in Laches. In this way, we can trace the problem of relating to the future in terms of prediction and forecast from Plato through to the present as it appears in nuclear waste policy as precisely, a problem. How can we relate to the future in terms of pure calculation, since this would end up relating to the future as an extension of the past and present? And yet, how could we fail to do so? See Naas (1995, 128–129).
- 54.
- 55.
- 56.
- 57.
Hume (2000, 1.3.6.5).
- 58.
Shrader-Frechette (1991, 331–332).
- 59.
See Andrén (2014, passim).
- 60.
Shrader-Frechette (1991, 335).
- 61.
Rawls (1971, 291).
- 62.
In the Third Thesis from Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” Kant writes: “It remains strange that the earlier generations appear to carry through their toilsome labor only for the sake of the later, to prepare for them a foundation on which the later generations could erect the higher edifice which was Nature’s goal, and yet that only the latest generations should have the good fortune to inhabit the building on which a long line of their ancestors had (unintentionally) labored without being permitted to partake of the fortune they had prepared. However puzzling this may be, it is necessary if one assumes that a species of animals should have reason, and, as a class of rational beings each of whom dies while the species is immortal, should develop their capacities to perfection.” See Kant (2001, 14).
- 63.
Fritsch (2018, 30).
- 64.
Human Interference Task Force (1984, 8).
- 65.
Ibid., 11–12.
- 66.
Sebeok (1984, 24).
- 67.
Ibid., 26.
- 68.
Van Wyck (2005, xvi).
- 69.
- 70.
Ibid., 50. Note that, here, the DoE is committed to exploring a range of possible future social configurations. This commission for possible futures took place a full 24 years before that same DoE re-approved the WIPP on the presumption of social continuity over 10,000 years for the sake of geological predictions. Either the DoE decided not to worry about the possibility of social change or, as I have suggested, it is the case that the demand for social continuity is a pragmatic one meant to justify scientific accounts of the future despite the department’s own institutional understanding that such a demand is already a fiction.
- 71.
Stewart and Stewart (2011, 12).
- 72.
Andrén (2014, 3).
- 73.
Prádanos (2018, 165).
- 74.
Gramsci (1994, 20).
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
Olin Wright, 6.
- 77.
Gramsci (1994, 20).
- 78.
Olin Wright, ix–x.
- 79.
Gramsci (1994, 20).
- 80.
Shrader-Frechette (1993, 215).
- 81.
Andrén (2014, 97).
- 82.
Andrén (2014, 98).
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Peterson, M. (2024). Nuclear Waste and the Site of Intergenerational Responsibility. In: Derrida and Inheritance in Environmental Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52143-0_3
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