To what end? I mean, why do you think we need this view of cancelled projects and decaying sites? You say "deepen the way we imagine...," can you please elaborate? I am just trying to understand how looking at abandoned sites, other than very interesting pictures and stories, can be useful in the nuclear debate.
Justin, thanks for your thoughtful question.
In general, as a public, we are very poorly served by our utilities when it comes to being encouraged to relate to and become comfortable with the physical infrastructure that makes nearly everything in our lives possible. Power utilities are by no means the only culprits here, we've been intentionally discouraged from understanding how a variety of basic services actually work and the roles that they play in our lives and in the physical places that we live. But I think that electrical power generation is an especially important example---people are very interested and very opinionated about the politics of power, about the costs, about their own perceptions of environmental and economic risk. And when people are not given the opportunity to grip and place these systems into the context of their lives and the places they know and value, one of two things happen: either it leads to profound disinterest and to institutions and policy-making that are overly expert-driven, or it leads to badly informed, but staunchly defended popular opinion in lieu of the kind of pragmatic interest in the subject that might actually be a benefit to anyone.
Part of the reason that discussions about nuclear power often feel so intractable and unproductive is that they're forced into a bubble by the way we treat the subject generally. Nuclear power is so rarefied from everyday life that for someone who doesn't work in the field, it's impossible to become familiar with it as anything other than facts/'facts' in a book or on a website or in a campaigner's political material (whether for or against). The debates feel so useless, like a macro version of the sorts of talking-through debates that dominate here on the internet, precisely because most participants are involved without ever having been given the opportunity to actually relate these installations to their lives. We personalize the issues for all the wrong reasons, vehemence springing from total unfamiliarity rather than from something actually lived and experienced.
Geographically, these installations are usually "way off somewhere else." Even when we do get to see one from a moderate distance, or even live in close proximity to it, they remain these inscrutable assemblies of variously proportioned concrete and shed-steel shells, behind line after line of perimeter security.
We used to celebrate this stuff, and encourage public engagement with it. I'm not big on the sort of 1950s nuclear nostalgia that some people go for, but I get the sense that, despite all the childishly naive assumptions about what we could do with the technology, people also had a lot better grasp of what it was going to mean to them on a personal level, to their relationships and their jobs and to the places that mattered to them. Nuclear power existed for them on an imaginary level as more than just a bogeyman. In contrast, today we don't have any idea what nuclear power means to us, but we're damn sure we have an opinion on it.
Recently, I spent some time kicking through various write-ups people had done about their visits to nuclear power visitor centers. Where they are even still open post-9/11, the general expression is disappointment. The displays are often a let down, but even worse is the fact that there's no one around, no enthusiasm to engage the visitor and bring them into the exercise of nuclear power. People want opportunities to participate in this stuff. That's why the kind of schlocky educational programming like
Cities of the Underworld and
Dirty Jobs and
Mega-Whatevers is so popular. We want the chance to be involved, and I would suggest that that isn't just a question of entertainment, it is something social and political---it's a response to the absence of opportunities to participate in the public life of these buildings and technologies and economic services.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to present what I'm doing as some kind of miraculous, game-changing thing. It's some art, and some writing. Hopefully it will mean something to some people, hopefully it will inspire better ideas in others and even in some of the institutions that I occasionally criticize. The way that all these unfinished sites got forgotten about is part and parcel of the same black boxing that keeps every active plant sealed and deleted from our imagination and our experience, only available to us when we worry about them as remote sources of uncertainty and fear. Marble Hill was a demolition site. But when I'm able to extend this work to other early 1980s cancelled sites, I'm looking forward to seeing what else I'm able to show and what else I'm able to provide to the viewer and the reader as tools for relating to the history of power development and to our contemporary circumstances. Security concerns being what they are, I don't get the sense that there's the same opportunity to make a contribution as an artist and an interpreter of our active nuclear infrastructure here in North America, so for now I'll have to settle for the dead and broken stuff.
I know that's long-winded. There isn't an easy answer. If what you're looking for is something to shift a technical debate, I have nothing to offer you. But so much of the debate takes place way off that grid, in places that scientific planning and energy economics only reach as strange, distorted, shadow things. As an outsider, I'm simply looking for ways to make those aspects of the public dialogue a little healthier, or to spur others into doing so.
