Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Plutonium Memorial Competition

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Plutonium Memorial competition Overview
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Michael Simonian’s 2001 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Plutonium Memorial competition winning entry, 24110:

Simonian won the contest by envisioning a concrete and steel tub sunk into the ground on the Washington Mall that would hold a 500-ton stash of plutonium casks. It could be easily policed there, while silently reproaching lawmakers for their shortsighted nuclear policies. Beneath a circle of peeled-up lawn and playing fields, the concrete lip of 24110 would be embossed with portraits of politicians and scientists as well as logos of nuclear-industry corporations.
A capillary layer of gravel and volcanic tuff atop the casks would theoretically expose pedestrians to just .01 REM annually. (According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the average person receives about 360 millirem of radiation per year.) Raying out from the walkway would be 241 “clock totems,” a series of flared steel tabs, one of which would be bolted to the ground every century to mark the passing of a little plutonium half-life.

The one takeaway point from Fast Food Nation, which has stuck with me, is that American culture has become obsessed with hiding processes, people and technology who are either an inconvenience, the “other” or who operate as sharp relief to Middle Class American life. Meatpacking is done in far off worlds, by a mostly immigrant workforce; energy is produced somewhere else, where the environmental impact burdens others. Americans have successfully created a sphere of ignorance to live, work and play in – which possibly is the only way we can go about our lives.
This is why Michael Simonian’s entry, 24110, to the 2001 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Plutonium Memorial competition is so compelling. Rather then hiding the waste in a facility, far away and over a fault line (Yucca Mountain), Simonian’s entry forces the polis to come face to face with the effects of our policy choices.