cross-posted at Second Power
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.
