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Plutonium-239 has a half-life of twenty-four thousand years.
If we stay on our current trajectory of carbon emissions, by the end of the next century we will have locked in changes to the climate for thousands of years.
If species continue to go extinct at their current rate, it could take millions of years for the world to recover its biodiversity.
Winden is coated in woodland. Seen from above, the town’s houses are small islands in a swaying pine sea. that seems to threaten to submerge them; miles and waves of coniferous growth fed by a thick, near constant rain. That the woods can be dangerous is not a new idea, from our earliest stories they have been spaces of lurking, ambiguous horror, but the forest here is laced through with a more modern threat. This green-needled sea and the lives that move through it are dominated by the twin cooling chambers of the local nuclear power plant, their white steam constant and rising above the canopy.
This town and its nuclear reactor are the fixed point that Netflix’s television series Dark revolves around. What starts off as a fairly regulation crime drama about missing children spirals and splinters into a maze-like plot (this is how somebody has tried to trace its complexity). Time is paper thin here. The show is built around thirty-three year intervals and follows the town over these generations, characters relentlessly travelling backwards and forwards within this structure, cause and effect echoing back at themselves.
Winden is a fictional place (filmed just outside Berlin) but the show’s thirty-three year cycle is designed to roughly mimic the stages of Germany’s real nuclear energy development and decline. The Winden power plant is proposed in 1953, around the same time that the first experimental nuclear reactors were developed in Germany. An accident in-show happens in 1986, the same year as the real-life Chernobyl incident. We see the plant in the process of being decommissioned as part of the federal government’s phase out of nuclear energy, roughly mirroring Germany’s commitment to being free of nuclear power by 2022.
More than any other real world parallel, it is the scars from Chernobyl that can be seen most cleanly in the show. The creators have spoken about how acutely the spectre of the fallout was felt in Germany, how it shaped their own childhoods, of radioactive sweetshops and now-acid rain. The incident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Pripyat in modern day Ukraine, shown beautifully in HBO’s 2019 miniseries, released a fallout that is estimated to contain around four-hundred times the amount of radioactive material as the combined bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spreading as far as the Welsh mountains. The first episode of Dark takes us back to six months after the incident. Dead birds fall to the ground, their feathers flecked with white spots from the fallout. A character is warned about the newly acidic rain. The fictional hangs off the real like a shadow and is haunted by these cultural anxieties, the show fascinated with the joined utopian and apocalyptic potential of nuclear power.
It is difficult to wrap your head around nuclear energy, the scale and complexity of it. It is an alien-feeling force, imitations of the sun conjured up here on earth with metal and maths. The steam always erupting from those two towers that dominate the Winden skyline is the result of controlled nuclear fission, of atoms being split apart and their energy harvested. Thousands of small pellets of uranium have been bundled together into individual fuel rods, which are then tied with other rods and submerged in water. Neutrons are fired into the heart of the uranium atoms, causing them to become unstable and break apart. More neutrons fly out from these newly split atoms, the surrounding water slowing their pace so that they collide with the uranium around them at just the right speed. The cycle continues; collision and release, collision and release. The energy that was holding these particles together is released out as heat, boiling the water and producing that erupting steam that turns the turbines to produce electricity. When in action, temperatures in a reactor core can reach three-hundred degrees Celsius, with pressure like being half a mile below the surface of the sea forcing itself against the walls.
Dark is a mix of tones. From the initial fairly mundane crime and family drama, the scales of the show continue to escalate, developing into a religion-flecked mission to avert/ensure a nuclear apocalypse. The nuclear seems to blend into the religious so easily. There is a ready mysticism in its power, a sense of the beyond-human, that drove Oppenheimer to take his famous quote from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad-Gita. As its series progress, Dark leans into this sense of scale, wrapping the nuclear waste at its core in layer after layer of religious imagery and language.
This near-religious sense of awe and scale animates Echo at Satsop. This short film began as a response to the Fukushima disaster and is built around the director and multi-media artist Etsuko Ichikawa simply clapping in an abandoned cooling tower in Southern Washington. The footage is ominous and calming; built of dappled sunshine and stark lines, flowing water and solid stone. The walls seem to extend indefinitely, concrete upon concrete upon concrete. The sound of the clap reverberates, captured by five recorders at different levels up in the one hundred and fifty metres tall tower, echoing around this cavernous space where steam used to run to the sky, and atoms collided and broke apart below. In the notes to the film, Ichikawa talks of wanting to use the cooling tower as a place of ‘prayer and purification’, inspired by ‘the emotional juxtaposition between ethereality and fear’ she felt there. The simple motion of clapping is amplified to a feeling of ritual by the scale of the space. Things reverberate here, they are not simple. The sound of the clap moves, changes, echoes with itself. The film was played as an exhibition at the Jack Straw New Media Gallery, where ten different speakers around the site tried to mimic this audial immersion and reverberation. Shaped by the tragedy of Fukushima, the video is part-film part-ceremony, a haunted meditation on the scale and power of nuclear energy. Dressed in white, a figure of clean clarity among the weathered industry, Ichikawa taps into the sublimity of nuclear power, its inherent terror and pure awe.
Beyond the obvious, but rare, capacity for disaster, the biggest issue with nuclear power is its waste. What do you do with all of this toxic mass, this lingering, radioactive matter that can poison water sources and ruin food supplies.
The current solution is that you bury it. Hide it away under thick, stable stone, lock it deep enough that it will never come back out. Somewhere no tectonic or volcanic activity can shake it loose, where no floodwater can wash its residue away into streams, through pipes and into bodies. Somewhere that other groups will not be able to get their hands on it.
And the amount of this waste is growing, day by day. Rob Orchard’s piece on this is brilliant to read, telling how America’s stockpile of waste alone grows by two thousand metric tons a year, the equivalent of eighteen blue whales of hot, radioactive, purely toxic waste sleeping in submerged containers on-site and in the rock bed.
This waste will last for tens of thousands of years. By the time it degrades, what will the world look like? Ten thousand years ago, Britain was still connected to the German forests of Winden by a now-submerged stretch of land called Doggerland. People living in modern day Germany had not yet started farming. In ten thousand years, what will be left? Who will be there to trace isotopic records in the stones. Which seas will our current coastlines be washed away under.
It is difficult to get your mind to work on these timescales. Our lives work to rhythms. Mornings give birth to days, days blend into a working week, weeks roll into months. Plants grow and decay in seasons. Bodies are nurtured, held and then fall away. Nuclear waste decays at such a pace so as to be effectively permanent. It completely unsettles how you see time. The language you speak, everything you know or dreamt of being possible will have passed away by the time the waste being processed and stored now stops being radioactive.
This longevity, the temporal perversion that is so fundamental to nuclear waste, is why it so suits being the basis of Dark. The first episode’s opening screen shows a quote from Einstein - ‘The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly present illusion’ and it is through the nuclear waste that Dark shows this illusion’s fragility. The show is built around interrelation, consequence; its central theme is how your actions reverberate through the generations that follow you, and how your life is built out of the echoes of previous generations. The repercussions of one initial accident with some nuclear waste spiral out into the lives of this German town: initial collision sparking next collision, family into family, neutron into atom, fragments breaking apart and joining together. The decisions taken around nuclear waste, the actions of today’s politicians and planners will linger on for tens of thousands of years stored away in their vaults. Every generation to come will live in a world laced through with their choices.
This length of thought has recently become a legal requirement for the government in Germany, as its highest court ruled that the country’s current climate targets are not strong enough to ensure the younger generation’s ‘fundamental rights to a human future’. Nuclear energy is necessary if we are to de-carbonise in the near future. These are the timescales we are working with now. One of the touted dates for the start of the Anthropocene is around 1950, as the residue from our nuclear testing started to become a permanent deposit in the Earth’s crust. In the radiation, the plastics, the concrete, you can see society’s ability to give itself a false permanence, can see just how temporal a thing you have been crafted into. In this new Anthropocene we can see with a growing clarity how the actions we take now in day to day life will continue to resonate on for an uncomfortable, unsettling amount of time. Like in Dark, time seems to have become thinner. We can see our choices returning to us, ramifications newly stark and bare, echoing back to us in garbage patches and forest fires. Living fresh in the knowledge that you will be able to measure your life in microplastics; all gently, gradually washing away to lodge in rock cranny and gull-stomach.
Info:
Dark is on Netflix. Echo at Satsop is only short and can be watched in full here.
If you’re interested in all of this kind of thing, the work of Timothy Morton is some of the best on it. There’s a good longread intro to him here. Also, a lot of the inspiration for this came from Irène DB’s tweeting out on nuclear waste and the aesthetics of waste storage sites. Very much worth checking out.