A sea of caesium: Atomically-standardized time and atomically-irradiated space in a nuclear Pacific
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This article will develop the element caesium as both an organizing metaphor and a material trace that renders apprehensible the attritional violence of nuclear colonialism, a violence dispersed across time and space even as it is constitutive of a particular type of time and space: atomically standardized and atomically irradiated. Although caesium has been studied inscientific journals as a fallout product and decay marker, the element's capacity to illuminate the entanglements at play within the spacetimes of radioactive colonialism in the Pacific has not been explored at length. The article will focus on two isotopes of caesium in particular: caesium-137 (137Cs), or radiocaesium, and caesium-133 (133Cs). Caesium-137 is a byproduct of thermal-neutron fission, the process behind the destructive force of an atomic bomb. Of the radionuclides produced by fission reaction devices, 137Cs is especially dangerous because of its high yield, intermediate half-life, high-energy decay pathway, and chemical reactivity. Caesium-137 is a material trace off the legacies of nuclear-colonial and military impositions in the Pacific, a radioactive currency circulated in the form of leukemias, birth defects, and cancers of the lungs, liver, and thyroid. Caesium-133, while not a radioactive isotope, is the basis of the atomic clock, a parameter that determines modern international time standards like the International Date Line. The hyperfine frequencies of the 133Cs atom ensure the primacy of a homogenous temporal landscape over the heterogeneity of multiple temporal rhythms, to ends and by means that not only include “the violent oppression of indigenous and non-Western worldviews” but are conditional upon the same (Kolinjivadi et. al., 2020, 909). The caesium-133 clock suggests that globally standardized time and the logistical infrastructures underwriting nuclear military-imperial projects are self-reinforcing. Therefore, this article aims to show that the conceptual formation and metrological management of certain spacetime topologies and the continuity of radioactive colonialism are mutually implicated in the construction of one another; more, that the quantum chemistries of caesium limn and render apprehensible the positive feedback loop at play.
Source: Regeneration.
Author: Kaitlin T Moore
Institution: Wake Forest University
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4413350727