a short reaction to the winding down note by Patrick
a) yes "nuclear" has a negative image in a fraction of the public and its i think well deserved in many ways,the military applications are one of the most grim examples of how good sicience amd scientists can be driven by non scientific, completely ideological ambitions to produce real nighmares
b) yes, as i mentined some time ago most of the measuring and modelling techniques and devices in medicine and environmetal sciences ow very very much to good science done in "nuclear" environmets
c) despite the supposedly bad image, the work on fusion has mustered over the past 3-4 decades by far (several orders of magnitude) more funds than any other scientific field or discipline in history, so the bad image is really of very little practical consequence
d) high grade nuclear waste will be around and dangerous not for 1000 but 25000 years (half life of plutonium) at least, and the work to deal with them is indeed the only publicly funded endeavour that is thinking in terms of "devices", containers, deposits that could last those 25000y
some years ago i had a project arguing that it was sad that the only thing that our civilisation was explicitly preparing for our "neighbours" 25ky from now was a pile of toxic waste and that it would make sense to include in those canisters using a very small fraction of the funds and the space available could/should be devoted to send a positve message about who we where and appologizing for the mess
e) risk perception and the ways to deal with it present indeed interesting parallel features when deling with nuclear, nano and gmo, indeed an intersting field worth of further study
be well
r
--- On Mon, 6/29/09, W. Patrick McCray <pmccray@history.ucsb.edu> wrote:
> From: W. Patrick McCray <pmccray@history.ucsb.edu>
> Subject: [Yasmin_discussions] Artists and atoms: fission and fusion
> To: "YASMIN DISCUSSIONS" <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
> Date: Monday, June 29, 2009, 3:51 PM
> Dear All,
>
> As our YASMIN discussion for June winds down, I'd like to
> thank everyone for
> the stimulating ideas.
>
> The main point I will take away from this concern mostly
> the prevalence of
> negative images of nuclear fusion (bombs, reactors) that
> frame much of the
> public's perception. This is despite the uses of nuclear
> isotopes, as
> Gabrielle notes, for medical applications, an idea which
> dates back to
> Ernest Lawrence's cyclotrons of the 1930s. This makes me
> wonder about the
> uphill path projects like ITER might have to take if they
> are going to
> convince the public that fusion/fission projects, et al.
> are safe and
> desirable as well as scientifically interesting.
>
> One thing that I don't think came up - with discussions
> about how to store
> nuclear waste long-term - what are ways in which artists
> have been called
> upon to provide signs and symbols to make it clear what is
> buried deep in
> the ground at a site like Yucca Mountain in Nevada 1000
> years from now?
>
> I also found it interesting that our discussions unfolded
> in the context of
> North Korea's second nuclear test as well as political
> upheaval in Iran, a
> near-nuclear state (the idea of which brings up the whole
> question of what
> does it mean for a nation to become a "nuclear state.")
>
> While I knew something about art mobilized to promote and
> protest the atom
> in the United States, I remain interested in what these
> images looked like
> in other contexts - UK, France, India, China, and
> especially the USSR during
> the Cold War.
>
> Finally, the emergence of discussion about representing
> atoms at the
> nanoscale was an interesting albeit surprising turn. But
> people who study
> public perceptions of risk often draw parallels to fears
> about environmental
> and health issues around nanoscale materials to earlier
> worries about
> nuclear power...so maybe this topic has more mileage to
> go.
>
> Cheers,
> Patrick
> --
> W. Patrick McCray
> Professor &
> Co-PI/Executive Committee Member for the
> UCSB Center for Nanotechnology in Society
>
> Coordinates:
> Department of History
> University of California, Santa Barbara
> Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410
> TEL: 805.893.2665
> WEB: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/people/person.php?account_id=14
>
>
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