Containment Zones, Part I
The territory of deferred accidents and controlled chaos is the territory of the future
Last month, I floated a concept that energy systems operate through dromology: speed, acceleration, and the accidents they generate. But nuclear power complicates this framework. Nuclear power’s temporal strangeness forces a reconceptualization of how tempo shapes power. My speed-based analysis reveals its limits when confronted with this strangeness.
Nuclear doesn’t move through time and space the way fossil fleets or renewables do. Fossil fuels keep time by linear depreciation and accounting schedules (organizing around financial timelines and planned obsolescence); and renewables keep time by weather cycles. But nuclear moves at a stranger cadence. “Nuclear time” — the temporal condition of nuclear power — is not market time or human time, it’s “containment” time, in the mold of a hyperobject, so all-encompassing that everything must synchronize around it.
For context, see Philosopher of the Oil Sands:
Hyperobjects exist, but at a scale so large that it is impossible to point to one and say “here it is.” Where is climate change? Where is the atom bomb? Where is democracy? These things are real, but vast and difficult to pin down.
The grid dispatches electrons in milliseconds, but nuclear licensing drags across decades. Operational time runs at the speed of light; institutional time crawls through hearings, reviews, and legal proceedings that span generations. Of course, this institutional delay, and its exorbitant costs, have been amplified by bad political actors, whose motives are grounds for an entirely separate post.
To integrate nuclear is to graft millisecond dispatch onto 80-year amortizations, to force the instantaneous and the eternal into a unified frame — a long medley with time signatures that owe more to King Crimson than AC/DC.
Oil and Nuclear
Nuclear is similar to oil in that both operate (in some respects) on state time rather than market time, buoyed by subsidies, strategic reserves, and military force. But where oil is nomadic and obtains power through mobility (tankers, chokepoints, flows), nuclear is monastic, securing power through immobility: fortified domes, exclusion zones, millennial waste. Oil’s dromological accident is geopolitical rupture; nuclear’s accident is ontological rupture. One disrupts flows, the other unseals deep time on Earth.
Transmuting Time
But this static monasticism is changing. Experiments in small modular reactors and microreactors attempt to compress nuclear’s geo-institutional tempo into something closer to a market cadence. If successful, they will make nuclear a stabilizer for radical new pathways: producing hydrocarbons out of thin air, removing the grid as an anchor client and opening up wild new markets, and perhaps civilizational-level innovation.
Tolerance for Catastrophe
Temporal compression comes with its own dark logic though: all the stability and innovation that go with nuclear carries the potential for not just an accident, but “the” accident. In terms of dromological space, every technology inscribes a territory for its accident. The reactor dome, the petrochemical fence line, the blackout map. These are not just safety perimeters but cartographies of deferred catastrophe, admissions that failure has been anticipated. They are containment zones —sealed landscapes where the tempo of electrons is milliseconds but the tempo of waste is centuries. To rule energy is to orchestrate rhythms but to also decide which populations will live inside the containment zone when the accident arrives.
Here, containment is not failure. It is anticipation engineered by realism, and a willingness to live inside the perimeter of the Ultimate Accident.
In the end, nuclear risk tolerance is a civilizational fitness test. Successful societies of the future will negotiate with its high-consequence, low-probability risk. Those who fear such risk may become failed states.
LINKS
Evolutionary Love & Charlie Kirk: “Mr Kirk was a devout Christian who evangelized passionately and unapologetically. I believe some of the hatred that he received was a result of his modeling of Agapic Love. Inspiring growth and development in others can often be confrontational and can even feel indistinguishable from an attack on the core of someone’s identity. Agapic love does not acquiesce to and affirm every impulse, desire, or idea one might have. For those raised in the modern environment of almost endless affirmation and permissiveness, Kirk’s modeling of love is interpreted as hatred.”
Federal Capitalism: “Although not officially recognized, ‘Federal Capitalism’ encapsulates US political economy with a pithy phrase. Federalism, as an organizing principle, has two general aspects: limits and multilateralism. Power, ownership, and responsibility is divided, distributed, and limited among a large group of stakeholders. Welcome to the new normal, the same as the old normal, but different.”
On the Range of City Sizes: “…it is undeniably true that there is no single ideal city size, and that a variety of city sizes is necessary for a society, even if that variety does not conform to a Zipfian distribution. Alain Bertaud’s Order Without Design (2018) makes this point well. Law firms specializing in international trade need a wide range of easy business connections and not a lot of space, and so you will find them in the largest cities. Farms need a lot of space and do not benefit much from agglomeration, and so you will find them in rural areas. Furniture factories occupy an intermediate position. Diving into this subject has been an exercise in humility. Those of us who think a lot about cities are full of ideas about how they could be designed better. But there is much that we do not understand well.”
Pioneers, Prophets, and Patriots: “Conventional agriculture has radically transformed North America's native oak savanna habitat—an expansive grassland sparsely populated by large oak trees and grazed upon by bison and other large mammals—resulting in mineral-depleted soil and, consequently, unhealthy food and human beings. [Mastadon Valley Farms’ Peter Allen] practices regenerative agriculture on his farm, aiming to recreate many elements of this native habitat. His talk ‘Graze Against the Machine’ argued a dual thesis on the relationship between ecological stewardship and political sovereignty: that mankind's facilitation of large-scale mammalian grazing is the key to producing healthy topsoil and a sustainable ecosystem in North America; and that such an ecosystem is necessary to resist Machine domination of the food supply and to secure our freedom. He argued that man must become our ecosystem's keystone species, decisively shaping the ecosystem to restore its natural savannas.”
What Portland Should Learn from History: “Portland has the lowest consumer and business sentiment rating among 47 cities included in a national survey. Its total crime rate was second-worst in the nation in 2024, according to a study based on FBI statistics. It has the worst housing outlook in the nation, according to LendingTree.com. It has one of the highest cumulative tax rates in the nation and schools that rank well below average in most measures for both instructional time and educational outcomes. Portland has fared so poorly in reports issued over the past few months that there are only two questions, closely related, left to ask. How much lower can the city sink and how long will it take for it to recover - assuming it does?”