Image by Ray Hennessy.
Parts I, II, and III are available here.
“The invaders made the Earth get old and want to die.”
Leslie Marmon Silko, Gardens in the Dunes
A frequent speaker at local rallies, Cathy Sampson-Kruse (Wallulupum member, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla) often moves from oil trains, the deadly “black snake” in warnings by an old Native woman seer, to a more insidious threat: the revival of nuclear power. I’ve seen Cathy holding her Eagle feather upright with one hand and grasping the mic firmly with the other as she implores those gathered: “there’s another black snake in the form of industries leaving radioactive wastes in lands across our beautiful Pacific Northwest.” Climate activists often refer to this threat as a zombie invasion.
Over a decade ago, environmental journalist Peter Dykstra observed, “Perhaps the oddest thing about nuclear power’s journey through American history is that we can’t seem to decide whether nukes are dying, being reborn, or walking around as zombies.” Since early in the 21st century, the internet has been awash in ecstatic claims that we are on the verge of an energy revival, a nuclear renaissance– claims that have strengthened the metaphorical association with zombiism. As we know from horror films, zombies are dead people who become undead and stalk the land to devour the flesh of the living and turn them into other zombies. One nuclear zombie story centers on the push in the US to bring decommissioned or abandoned nuclear plants back to life, in spite of the horrific economic costs and risks of radioactivity. Plus there is no burial ground yet for these undead reactors to dispose of their toxic remains that could threaten life on the planet for tens of thousands of years. The other zombie story centers on nuclear entrepreneurs’ aggressive campaign to bring this dead industry back to life with a new generation of small nuclear reactors (baby zombies) that they claim is necessary to power the massive construction of data centers underway across the country. In spite of plans in several states to revive reactors, the old massive power plants have been closing for decades and the few that are being built are plagued by bloated cost overruns, delays in completion, and serious design problems. It’s a dying industry. Their 21st century progenies, in contrast, are hailed as more conducive to the demands of modern supply chains. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are generally designed to produce 50 to 300 megawatts (MW) of electricity, compared to the typical 1,000 MW of traditional large-scale reactors. This is part of the horror show we are seeing across the country with the unholy union of AI and nuclear companies. SMR entrepreneurs offer dazzling futuristic prospects of generating electricity to power these massive data centers. It’s a fantasy marriage of the big and the small.
Throughout the history of nuclear power, periodic earthquakes and tremors have undermined public confidence in industry leaders, including in the seismic political impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. An earthquake and tsunami damaged nearly all of the power plant’s backup energy systems resulting in the release of radioactive material into the surrounding area. While the nuclear industry conceives of the planet as a stable reserve of dead materials to be extracted and exploited, geologists will tell you otherwise. Mother Earth is quite active and erupts with considerable frequency.
Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, the death and attempted rebirth of the nuclear industry unfolds across one of the most active geological landscapes in the world, a region carved out through turbulent activity in the Earth’s crust over millennia. Some of this story of nuclear power and the people and places resisting it is told in my film Atomic Bamboozle: The False Promise of a Nuclear Renaissance.
Atomic Bamboozle brings the natural beauty and wondrous grandeur of this region into the picture. We hear from tribal leaders about their deep attachments to the Columbia River and how their temporal philosophy differs from their colonial conquerors. Because of its meandering path through tall mountain ranges and into the Pacific Ocean, the Columbia evolved as one of the great rivers of the world in the diversity of its habitat. It is also the most engineered river with 14 hydroelectric dams. The arresting beauty of the Cascade Range was created through ongoing volcanic activity underground. In addition to the Cascadia subduction zone, which is the boundary where the oceanic tectonic plate slides beneath the continental plate, the Portland Hills Fault, site of a potential catastrophic future earthquake, runs directly through the metro corridor.
The film also tells the story of the movement against nuclear power in Oregon. The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant along the Columbia River was permanently closed in January 1993 and its cooling tower imploded in 2006, an important victory for the movement. But the radioactive waste remains on site in 34 steel inner containers, each surrounded by a 150-ton concrete-and-steel dry cask. This spent nuclear fuel will remain at the Trojan site until the federal government has a central site to put radioactive waste–a site not on any foreseeable political horizon. And this zombie industry lives on in an aggressive campaign to build small nuclear modular reactors in the region.
The Denial of Death
There is perhaps no other industry in history that has had to manage its deep psychological association with death in telling its story. This is part of the currency of zombiism among its critics. The nuclear industry emerged in the post-World War II era where the dangers of its products were seared into public consciousness. The US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced horrific images of large-scale destruction and death. The horrors of the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima nuclear accidents mobilized public opposition to nuclear power. The psychological work of this industry has from the start centered on collective repression of these disturbing memories.
The repression of industry-produced accidents is fortified by the imperatives of capitalism. The survival of large-scale industries depends on perpetual growth and expansion. This economic imperative relies psychologically on denial of limits and denial of death itself. Old industries do die of course but the economic victors walk over their graves triumphantly. Fracked gas proclaims its superiority over “dirty oil,” whether tar sands oil or “sweet crude.” But like life and death in video games, the resurrection of protagonists is central to the plot.
Avoidance of death in capitalist societies contributes to this tendency to collectively repress memories of industrial disasters. Many Indian tribes draw on spiritual traditions requiring respect for the dead, traditions that are important in collective remembering. There are taboos against displaying photographs for one year after a tribal member passes away. The annihilation of American Indians and their violent displacement by white settlers make holding onto stories of departed spirits vital for survival.
The Story of Big (Bad) and Small (Good) Nuclear Reactors
One defensive tactic of the industry is based on psychological splitting, separating the “bad” old nuclear from the modern “good” nuclear, promoted through imagery associated with rebirth and vitality. Unlike the sclerotic old towers, these young offspring of the industry are celebrated as hyper-mobile, ready for just-in-time ordering from SMR factories assembling them to snap together like lego blocks–rhetoric that resonates with the imperatives of uninterrupted supply chains under neoliberal capitalism. Remote communities desperate for power can order a starter-set!
As critics of the industry point out, the SMR technologies are not as new as they appear on corporate PowerPoint presentations. The Navy developed several models in the 1960s that never got off the ground. The Department of Energy supported small reactors in the 1980s and 90s and later abandoned them as not cost-effective. Designers of contemporary SMRs rely on prior technologies to bring their computer-generated designs to the next phase of development. They also depend on military laboratories for their basic research and universities for technology development and IP transfers. And nuclear entrepreneurs depend on the regulatory power of the Atomic Energy Commission and the lobbying power of the nuclear industry. Like with many start-ups and investors in technological innovations, deep dependencies on the military and older industries tend to be downplayed. Starkly downplayed as well are persisting dangers that plague the industry. After 75 years of addressing the problem of waste disposal, scientists and engineers have not yet figured out what to do with the high-level radioactive materials that remain lethal for tens of thousands of years.
Many scientific critics express alarm over the success of SMR campaigns in securing government funding for nuclear entrepreneurs. “I’m frankly speechless at the success that the proponents of these plants have had in bamboozling … a lot of government officials,” reported Peter Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and former chair of the Maine and New York utility commissions. “They should be shouldering a much heavier burden when it comes to the credibility of what they are saying.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists and hundreds of physicists worldwide challenge claims that the climate crisis requires nuclear power in order to reach net-zero carbon emissions. This source of energy produces highly radioactive waste that must be kept securely away from contact with life forms, including humans, for tens of thousands of years and sometimes several hundred thousand years. As Maury Galbraith, director of the Western States Energy Commission, told me, “The biggest problem that I have with this industry, including these small reactors that they are designing, is that they are using a technology that burdens future generations with a profoundly serious problem that we cannot figure out today or maybe ever. It’s not a good idea to trade one dangerous problem for another in the name of addressing climate change.”
The Living and the Dead
In the Pacific Northwest, tribal campaigns to expose the hidden problem of radioactive wastes are integral to the moral obligation to honor the dead. Cathy Sampson-Kruse and other tribal members from the Pacific Northwest have lived for over 70 years with the legacy of Eisenhower’s “atoms for peace” at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation along the Columbia River in Washington. When Northwest tribal leaders challenge the nuclear power industry and its claims around clean energy, they point to the legacy of this vast wasteland along the Columbia River. Hanford has been the burial site for radioactive waste, particularly from military reactors, since the second World War. As the government site where much of the research for the Manhattan project was carried out, the region carries a tragic history that continues into the present and tens of thousands of years into the future. Hanford is the graveyard for an industry tightly aligned with the military and intent on burying its problems deeper and deeper underground–a history documented by Joshua Frank in Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.
It may take an expert in Indigenous futurisms to unpack the feverish visions of white experts as they try to engineer a future that extends as far into the future as imaginable. As Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon explains to me, ghosts and other spirits of the dead are not simply figures of fear and dread in Native cultures. Rather, ghosts can animate the living in positive ways. If we are receptive to ghosts as guides or to the dead as carrying lessons for the living, Dillon suggests, we may be less vulnerable to colonial ways of thinking. Dillon writes that ‘‘viewing time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream is central to Native epistemologies.” Images of the future are perpetually haunted by ancestor spirits. Indigenous philosopher Kyle Whyte explains, responding to the climate crisis and finding a path forward “starts with questions about how ancestral and future generations would interpret the situations that we find ourselves in today.”
Scientists schooled in settler colonial and capitalist worldviews have trouble thinking beyond a narrow horizon of time. But the problem of nuclear reactive waste does require such ways of thinking. And indeed, scholars from around the world have come together to create technologies for warning people that may inhabit the planet up to 200,000 years from now about life-destroying substances produced by forgotten civilizations.
Horror and a Script for the Future
The scene could be the opening of a Hollywood movie. The Nuclear Energy Agency, an international organization based in France, produced a 90-page report in 2012, shortly after the Fukushima nuclear accident, with updates published each of the subsequent five years. With the lofty title, “Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory (RK&M) Across Generations,” the report offers a menu of ideas and a “tool kit “ for warning future generations that may have stumbled onto repositories with sealed casts of radioactive nuclear materials. Ideas ranged from pictures of a thorny landscape to convey the idea that “nothing good happens here; stay away,” to a picture of a cat (the Ray Cat) that would change colors when exposed to radiation. The report states their primary goal: “Preventing future generations from unnecessary interference with the repository and supporting future societies to make informed decisions about the repository, imply two different tasks. The first requires maintaining awareness of the repository, whereas the second requires preserving detailed knowledge of the repository.”
The RK&M experts express a deep belief in the power of human institutions to rescue future generations from this toxic legacy. Among the tool kit ideas were calls for storytelling about the repositories. Folkloric imagery and pictures were thought to stand the test of time better than attempts to create universal text-based signage. Libraries, museums, university archives and other institutions were listed as possible“repositories” for this knowledge that would remain the burden of humanity for thousands of years and intended to survive long after their own societies have collapsed and their recorded languages have vanished. One contemplative scientist noted that unlike time capsules, where pictures of the best of humanity are preserved to be discovered in the future, The RK&M project preserves knowledge that feels morally and ethically more difficult. “We are exposing future generations to human-made materials that could sicken or kill them in ways they will not understand.”
In preparing for the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-1805, President Thomas Jefferson explains the guiding values that would map the cartography of the region and upend life for tribal people in the genocide that would follow: “The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River, and such principal streams of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado, or any other river, may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent for the purposes of commerce.” The expedition was funded primarily through the U.S. government.
Neoliberal economists view markets as more efficient than governments in controlling the services on which people depend for survival. The 18th Century economist Adam Smith describes the capitalist system of economic competition and supply and demand as the “invisible hand” of a nation’s progress. Yet from the early mission of Lewis and Clark through the expansion of rail, the fossil fuel industry and the nuclear power industry, big government has forcefully held that imaginary invisible hand. These forces and the terrible destruction to people and the planet are no longer invisible. Nor is the role of the State these days in its subsidizing of corporations and their industries of death.
With the AI vampires and the Nuclear zombies stalking the land and sucking the lifeblood out of so many communities, people are rising up in revolt. They are refusing this dystopian vision of their future. And many are learning to listen to our Indigenous spirit guides.
This series first appeared on Jan’s Substack.
