[Images: Via National Geographic]."The train is hauling a so-called CASTOR convoy," National Geographic explains, "named after the type of container carried: Cask for Storage and Transport Of Radioactive material. These trademarked casks have been used since 1995 to transport nuclear waste from German power plants to France for reprocessing, then back to Germany for storage."
I'm reminded of a short video shown last week at the Landscape Futures Super-Workshop here in Los Angeles.
Produced by Smudge Studio/Friends of the Pleistocene, the film shows us a flatbed truck carrying transuranic nuclear waste along a desert highway. As Smudge write, "Our brief passing of this truck was a momentary point of contact with this waste, bound for deep time." Filmed in sepia-toned Super-8, the 35-second film has a timeless and dramatic surreality, verging on postapocalyptic.
I should add, briefly, that the name of the train seen in the first three images—a CASTOR convoy—lends all of this a nicely symbolic overtone. In Roman mythology, Castor and Pollux were twin brothers; Castor was mortal, Pollux immortal, and it should come as no surprise to learn that Castor is eventually killed.
However, in one version of the story, "Castor's spirit went to Hades [Hell], the place of the dead, because he was a human. Pollux, who was a god, was so devastated at being separated from his brother that he offered to share his immortality with Castor or to give it up so that he could join his brother in Hades." I mention this otherwise superficial overlap because Smudge's notion that nuclear waste is on its way to being entombed in "deep time," far below ground, takes on explicitly Hadean resonance when put into the context of something called a CASTOR train.
(Related on BLDGBLOG: One Million Years of Isolation: An Interview with Abraham Van Luik and Fossil Reactors).
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