Category Archives: Transhuman News

An artist's rendering of NuScale Power's small modular nuclear reactor plant. Photo courtesy of NuScale

Even before Chernobyls RBMK reactor became the standard design of the Soviet Union, it was known to have inherent safety flaws but kept unchanged because it was cheaper that way. Historians later found that more than economic and technical considerations, it was social, regulatory, political, and cultural factors that contributed to the RBMK becoming the standard design. More, it was the RBMKs capacity to embody a vision of the future of the Soviet Union that led to this decision. A few years later, this vision fell apart when the RBMK design suffered from the worst reactor accident the nuclear industry ever hadonly to find itself in the middle of a war zone some 36 years later.

Over the past decade, we have witnessed similar hype for small reactors proposed as a potential game-changer for the future of nuclear power. Small modular reactors, or SMRs, are much smaller than the current standard 1000- to 1600-megawatt electric output reactors. Mini-reactors have been heralded as nuclear champions by their promoters, able to meet safety and regulatory requirements, tackle security and nonproliferation concerns, and even embody sociotechnical visions of what a world of abundance powered by SMRs might look like. Such visions have included cheap, risk-free energy that eliminates reactor accidents, an end to energy scarcity, with SMRs powering remote communities and developing economies, a plentiful world where water needs are fulfilled by SMR-powered desalination stations, and an environmentally friendly energy source embedded in a virtuous fuel cycle, with SMRs producing carbon-free and waste-free electricity. Small reactors even have their place in visions of space exploration, assisting future societies in the colonization of the moon, Mars, and possibly other extra-terrestrial worlds.

Scientists have started working on independent reviews of those claims. The results showed that SMRs do not necessarily perform better than gigawatt-scale reactors on a variety of measures. A recent Stanford-led study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the nuclear waste generated by small modular reactors. The study concludes that most current SMR designs will actually significantly increase the volume and complexity of nuclear waste requiring management and disposal when compared to existing gigawatt-scale light water reactors.

Here, Bulletin associate editor Franois Diaz-Maurin talks with Lindsay Krall, the lead author of that study and a former MacArthur postdoctoral fellow at Stanfords Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) who is now based in Sweden.

Franois Diaz-Maurin: Before we start, most of our readers wont know what a small reactor is, to begin with. So, lets help them here. What are small modular reactors, and how do they differ from conventional large-scale reactors?

Lindsay Krall: Sure. A small modular reactor is defined as a reactor with less than 300-megawatt electric output. So small modular just refers to the size and the construction strategy, the latter being that the reactors are fabricated as modules in a factory and then shipped on-site by truck where they are assembled. Thats what modular means. Small refers to the energy or the electric output. Sometimes developers call these reactors plug-and-play. SMRs can include a huge variety of reactor types depending on the coolant and moderator that they usefrom light water to molten salt, sodium, graphite, gas-cooled graphite-moderated reactors, to even lead-cooled reactors.

Diaz-Maurin: In your study, you say that almost half of the SMR designs listed by the IAEA are considered advanced reactors that can employ chemically exotic fuels and coolants

Krall: Exactly. Another way in which SMRs differ from current reactors is that, in some of the designs, reactors are passively cooled. That is, instead of having pumps that circulate the coolant, these reactors rely on internal, natural convection around the reactor core. Because they are passively cooled, developers consider these reactors to be inherently safe. So, if there is a loss of electricity on-site, the reactor will continue to stay cool through this natural convection flow, because they are not relying on external electricity to run a pump.

Diaz-Maurin: Great. Lets turn to your research findings now. Most SMRs are said to adopt an integral design, in which the reactor core and auxiliary systems are all contained within a reactor vessel. Now, because of their smaller size and compact design, one can expect that SMRs will generate less waste than larger reactors that operate at the gigawatt scale. But you have reached the opposite conclusion in your study, that SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than light-water reactors. And this by factors of 2 to 30. How is that? It seems counterintuitive

Krall: Well, one thing thats clear from the analysis is that the waste output really differs depending on the type of coolant the reactor is using. If its using water, then we have processes to treat that water and decontaminate it and hold it so the water coolant itself does not become radioactive waste. However, for a sodium-cooled reactor, for instance, that sodium coolant is likely to become low-level waste at the end of the reactors lifetime, because it becomes contaminated and activated during reactor operation. So, the up to 30 times more waste thats been driving the headlines, its mostly the sodium coolant. Another aspect is that things in a small reactor do not scale intuitively compared to other forms of energy. For instance, one thing I went into was neutron leakage.

Diaz-Maurin: Lets stay here for a moment. In the paper, you attribute the higher volume of waste generated mainly to an intrinsically higher neutron leakage associated with SMRs. Can you explain what neutron leakage means and how its driving your results?

Krall: Sure. To put it simply, neutrons are released when theres a fission reaction. Then, those neutrons are supposed to go forth to propagate the fission chain reaction and help the reactor sustain criticality. But in a small reactor, due to that smaller core size, youre having more of these neutrons that leak out of the periphery of the fuel. Its essentially due to the fuels surface area to volume ratio, but not exactly. Still, one big issue is that this neutron leakage is then leading to lower fuel burnups. [Fuel burnup or fuel utilization is a measure of how much energy is extracted from a given nuclear fuel. The higher the burnup, the more efficient the reactor is.] So thats what I mean by more physically reactive waste. Say, you start at the same enrichment level, as in a large reactor, the small reactor will have a lower fuel burnup. And due to that lower fuel burnup, youll end up with a higher concentration of fissile material in the spent fuel, which can increase the likelihood of recriticality in the spent fuel. [Recriticality is a measure of the potential for fissile materials to spontaneously start a sustained fission reaction.] If a storage or disposal canister fails and becomes flooded with water, recriticality is a bigger risk with the spent fuel from a small reactor and that needs to be mitigated. An effective way to mitigate that risk is to avoid putting a critical mass inside a spent fuel canister.

Diaz-Maurin: Now lets go back to the wastes themselves. What type of waste are we talking about, anyway? In the paper, you mention spent fuel, high-level waste, and long-lived and short-lived decommissioning waste Can you walk us through the waste streams from SMRs and how they differ from large reactors?

Krall: Yeah, so SMRs, just like standard commercial reactors, produce spent fuel. And that spent fuel has a particular burnup based on its initial enrichment and how the reactor operated. So, its not, you know, like these claims, oh, were going to reduce the mass of spent fuel by 90 percent. It turns out that a lot of those claims assume that there are several rounds of reprocessing. But based on the license applications of the vendors to the [US Nuclear Regulatory Commission] for these reactors, theyre not. The reprocessing isnt factored into the reactor design. So, I just use the burnups that are being stated in these reactor applicationswhen they are stated, because oftentimes, theyre redacted. So just like a large reactor, small modular reactors produce spent fuel. And that spent fuel has a lot of different characteristics that need to be taken into account when youre storing, transporting, and disposing of it.

Diaz-Maurin: In the paper, you say that compared to large reactors, SMRs will increase the volume and complexity of those wastes. I get the volume part. But what is this complexity about?

Krall: Its what I mean with different characteristics of the spent fuel, not least being this fissile isotope concentration. It also produces heat. It has a particular radionuclide composition, including fission products, which can be both short- and long-lived. And so, I employed four different metrics to measure the spent fuel. And then the long-lived low- and intermediate-level waste in the article is the activated waste. This waste is so close to the reactor core that it absorbs the neutrons that are being leaked and becomes activated. In current reactors, the activated waste is mostly steel from the structural components that keep the core intact. This steel will also become activated in SMRs and, as a result, it will contain short- and long-lived nuclides that need to be dealt with during decommissioning. Reactor decommissioning will require radiation shielding and that steel, the activated steel, will also need to be disposed of in a geologic repository.

Diaz-Maurin: Whats the difference between short-lived and long-lived waste from the perspective of waste management?

Krall: Long-lived waste should be disposed of in a permanent geologic repositorya passively safe, rock cavern with multiple engineered barrierswhere the radioactive materials discharged from the reactors will be contained over long periods of time so that they can decay. Short-lived waste includes mostly the reactor structures that have come in contact with a primary coolant that was circulating around the reactor core and through the steam generators. This waste also should go to some sort of disposal site. Sweden, for instance, has a 50-meter-deep repository, whereas some countries just dispose of it in shallow landfills.

Diaz-Maurin: I think I get the complexity too now. And, so, because of that complexity, I see why you need to use several metrics like the chemistry of the spent fuel matrix, its radionuclide content, the heat generated, the radioactive decay, etc. Yet, in the paper, you mention that nuclear technology developers and advocates often employ simple metrics, such as mass, volume, and radioactivity. Indeed, most critics of your study that Ive seen tend to focus on the waste volume part. Do you think nuclear engineers dont understand how the chemistry and physics of the spent fuel will affect waste management and disposal?

Krall: I think nuclear waste management is a pretty niche field. Its a small community of people that think about very bizarre things on a day-to-day basis, like, the 100,000-year evolution of the hydrology at this random location in Sweden. So, I think, theres definitely a disconnect between the people working on the back end of the fuel cycleespecially with geologic repository developmentand those actually designing reactors. And, you know, there is not a lot of motivation for these reactor designers to think about the geologic disposal aspects because the NRCs new reactor design certification application does not have a chapter on geologic disposal. So

Diaz-Maurin: Thats interesting, because some developers of SMRs claim they already include a waste disposal program as part of their design program. That would be indeed a much-welcomed development, compared to how conventional reactors have been deployed

Krall: Well, yes, if they had a chapter on geologic disposal, that would be helpful because at least their proposals could be reviewed in some way or another. Ive heard reactor designers propose a number of left-field ideas, for instance, were going to dump this sodium reactor in a deep borehole. People can just shout random thoughts because theres no accountability for them in proposing an unworkable idea. But if they wrote these proposals down on paper in an NRC application, then at least there might be some way to regulate these unconventional waste management ideas.

Diaz-Maurin: Lets assume for a moment that license applications of SMRs do include a chapter on waste disposal aspects. Still, things would not be that straightforward. There would still be the problem of the public acceptance of geologic repositories as a possible limiting factor.

Krall: Yes, the public acceptance I dont know if thats anything a reactor designer is going to achieve with geologic repository development. As I said, these nuclear waste management companies are a very niche community. And there are good reasons for that. The most successful geologic disposal programs are those that have best managed to decouple themselves from reactor construction. So, waste management organizations have intentionally separated themselves from the larger nuclear industry as part of their strategy to work towards public acceptance. It would not be beneficial for these organizations to promote reactors and get dragged into the pro- vs. anti-nuclear politics. The best way we can approach it is as: The waste is here, and it needs to be disposed of in a long-term safe way. I dont think that somebody who is promoting these reactors will achieve public support for a geologic repository.

Diaz-Maurin: Since it was published on May 30, your study generated a lot of responses, including harsh ones, from the nuclear technology developers and advocates. I guess you knew the conclusions of your article would cause some controversy in the nuclear community. But were you surprised at the level of those reactions?

Krall: Yes, there have been a lot of responsesboth positive and negativeand Ive been surprised at everyones reaction. You know, for me, coming from the science area where nobody reads the stuff I writeI mean, I cant even get my supervisors to read it. [Laughter] And then to go to something thats making headlines this was a bit shocking for me. And then to see that those headlines focused so heavily on the volume estimates. You know, like, Small nuclear power projects may have big waste problems, Mini nuclear reactors have an outsized waste problem, and all of that Obviously, its an exciting headline. But thats not exactly the point I was trying to make in the article. Another issue, I guess, is that I didnt really know how the article would be released. There was a copy of the paper circulated to the media or to the press some five days in advance of the articles publication. So, reactor developers were contacted by the press about the article before it was even published. As a scientist, I was just thinking, Oh, thank God, this paper got accepted, and I dont have to work with it anymore. But then the release of the paper shocked me.

Diaz-Maurin: Some critics say you used outdated information in your study. For instance, NuScales chief technology officer, Jose Reyes, wrote a letter to the PNAS editor-in-chief where he says your analysis focused on the NuScale 160 megawatt thermal (MWt) core, but that they had already implemented another reactor design, the NuScale 250-MWt core. Reyes then adds that this new design does not produce more spent fuel than existing light water reactors. Does this contradict your findings?

Krall: It doesnt. Its actually exactly in line with my findings. We used the certified NuScale reactor, the 160MWt because, with their application to the NRC, there was enough technical data to perform our analysis. Its interesting to note that their larger 250MWt reactor is going to have to undergo a whole new licensing process. Theyre submitting that license application, I think, in December. So, its a bit surprising that theyre now marketing a reactor that isnt licensed. It does seem that this larger reactor will have a higher burnup, of 45 megawatt-days per kilogram, according to NuScale. Well, first of all, thats still lower than existing full-scale reactors. So, theyre still going to produce more waste, which is a far cry from the general belief that all SMRs will produce less waste. It would be good if they had a higher burnup. But, the higher burnup and consequently lower waste volume, I will guess, is partly driven by the fact that the new design is a larger reactor. So, just as our paper argues, smaller reactors generate more waste.

Diaz-Maurin: So does it mean we should expect future designs of small reactors to be up to, say, 999-megawatt electric output?

Krall: Yeah, I think on the larger side of the SMR spectrum, the waste will be more similar to those of existing reactors. So, an important point of the paper is that you need to choose an SMR design carefully, with insight from the back end, so as to avoid disrupting the spent fuel management system too much. In countries with active waste management programs, itll be easier to get insight from the back end. But in countries that dont have such programs, how are people purchasing these reactors going to get insight from the back end? That is not clear to me, especially when its not part of the NRC license application.

Diaz-Maurin: In his letter, Reyes also says that you did not contact NuScale for information or clarifications regarding data, such as fuel burnup, that he says they had made publicly available. Is this true?

Krall: We are being accused of not discussing the study with reactor designers. This isnt true. We did seek information from them, I mean, usable information about their actual design being submitted to the NRC. That information was not given to us. Instead, designers would only speak in generalized terms about an ideal SMR fuel cycle, which is not necessarily what is actually being licensed. And, even this generalized information would be marked as proprietary, not something that I could publish. As scientists, we prefer to reference peer-reviewed analyses. But there is a scarcity of peer-reviewed information in this field.

Diaz-Maurin: The development of SMRs has been around since about the early 2000s. Why are there still only a few studies that analyze the management and disposal of nuclear waste streams from SMRs?

Krall: Well, first, theres not a lot of funding for it. In my case, for instance, I did most of the research during these fellowship positions where I had funding for it. But I ended the fellowships before the paper was published. So, I spent some time editing the manuscript, submitting it, and revising it all on my own time. And there arent a lot of motivating forces to get funding for independent analyses of the waste streams. Since the dominant narrative is that the waste is manageable and similar to what we currently deal with, it results in a lack of funding for independent technical reviews of the nuclear fuel cycle. And its a real problem.

Diaz-Maurin: As you know, at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we are committed to reducing manmade threats to our existence. And we are also dedicated to one clear goal of advancing a safe and livable planet. Do you think SMRs could help make our planet a safer place, as their developers tend to suggest?

Krall: I think it depends on the SMR design. For certain SMRs, especially the larger ones, I dont know where the sweet spot is, but I think they can be viable as long as you choose to construct the right design. But how are you going to choose the right design without any insight from the back end? I think SMRs can be viable if you have insight from the back end when youre both designing and selecting a design.

Diaz-Maurin: Let me play a little devils advocate here. Nuclear waste disposal is becoming reality. Finland just authorized the construction of its deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel. And other countries are following closely, like France and Sweden, where you work. So why would a little more waste from small modular reactors necessarily be a problem?

Krall: In a country that has a spent fuel management program, whatever design theyre choosing to construct, developers will have insight from the back end, both for decommissioning and for geologic disposal. So I think, SMRs can be deployed safely, as long as the back end is being managed responsibly. But in countries where thats not the case, I think its a bit more like the Wild West.

Go here to read the rest:
Interview: Small modular reactors get a reality check about their waste - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

In January of 2022, I traveled to ancestral Wazhazhe land in Belle, Missouri, where an arts organization had invited me to do a residency while assisting in giving the land back to the Osage Nation.

The terms were such:

The owners would not leave their land;The arts organization there would still double as a small ranch;The administrators were not open to collaboration with Wazhazhe people on any of their operations or programming;And the organization wanted me and any Wazhazhe artists I involved to instruct them inthe manner of giving the land back.

I spoke with Wazhazhe women, and we decided that it would be better to wait until the upcoming election cycle was over to return the land, so that no communication would be lost in a potential change of administration. The women I asked are ones who use the word decolonial and who prioritize life by moon cycles over the Roman calendar. We are Wazhazhe women who have begun a process of reforming ourselves, transforming our womanhood amidst norms of scarcity mindset amongst our people and a generational inheritance of dysfunction.

My own process of transforming began with the reception of my work in graduate workshops. When I first attended a creative writing masters program, I was told, in short, that my characters represented an ongoing Indian problem. My women characters were too contradictoryboth Christian and Native, tribal but living in diaspora, not cultural enough, and additionally, excessively vain, in denial, conservative, and mentally ill.

I first learned to write on the East Coast, at a top-rated public university with an excellent creative writing program. There, I formed my characterization. Did my characters affirm patriarchal notions of womanhood? If they did, then that was good. But in California, my writing came off as critiquing patriarchy. I was impressed, as though my renderings of women suggested what was wrong with men, proving that patriarchy made women go insane. My autobiographical characters continued to garner critiques, but my recursive sentences, emotionally reflective summary, scenic details, and ruminative pacing were praised. It was only the women who needed to change, and not just by a little.

My West Coast assimilation had me revising both my personality and beliefs. Tribal connection did not challenge my worldview; I was encouraged to do whatever my father told me, or in some cases, to listen to others peoples fathers speak on through the mouths of their daughters. I was encouraged to protect men.

When teachers critiqued me, they were also critiquing my tribe. My Southern Christian, colonized Native mind was not my friend, and the informed were eager to correct me. Teachers worried aloud to me about my blood quantum. Was I at least a quarter? In workshop, conversations highlighted cognitive dissonance: how could one ascribe to a faith which held that ones own culture was pagan, and yet still be a Native person? Boarding school history did not matter; it was my responsibility to heal and reform myself, and white people wanted to help me.

In the end, I did lose my faith. Not in the classroom, but when a Christian in a band I was in told me that no one cared about the Osage language, and to stop writing in it. Other Christians like to speak on how Christs followers are fallible, and sinners; but I had never really felt that the ka^ of a leaf related to the Christ. Ideological gymnastics were taking up space in my life.

In turning against the world view with which I had been raised, I searched for ways to relate to my parents while also distancing myself from them. The word healing functions as a euphemism for the reorganization of concepts broadly to create new neural networks, and thus habits, thoughts, opinions, friends, and goals. It is a self-directed re-brainwashing.

As a child, my mother worked full-time and I worked at my fathers construction business, cleaning paint brushes with paint thinner and sweeping the floor under what seemed like a continual rain of sawdust. My father took pride in making me tough, though it didnt make me tougher to inhale paint thinner and sawdust. My father was raised by an Osage single mother who attended Boarding School, and I thought of them when I read Terese Mailhots characterization of self-worth in Heart Berries.

Mailhot describes self-worth as a construction white people designed to give a false sense of separation from each other for the sake of identity capitalism. My father would agree. I was embarrassed that he wanted to be a writer and yet did not publish work, so I worked to become a writer in order to help him. When it became clear that the strange ideas Id inherited from him were foiling my attempts to pursue the writing profession, I chose to transform. Ironically, my transformation left me without my obsessive fixation on my father and his needs and problems.

Reading and self-education were the first sight of my transformation. Besides Heart Berries, I read Louise Hay, Esm Weijun Wang, Jean Gnet, astrology blogs, Brandon Hobson, Toni Jensen, Linda Hogan, and N. Scott Momaday. Some people I observed stopped their transformation when they were able to find what their prior dysfunctionality had prevented them from obtaining. For some, this was a man, or even stability. For me, it was publishable writing.

When I moved to Oklahoma for a job at a tribal school, I encountered a different way of viewing the world, accessible through studying our language, Wazhazhe ie. It took me twelve years of serious engagement with every best practice I heard of the writing life to make publishable work, but this language would have solved my world view problem. But I am an Indigenous woman in America, and I have been told repeatedly that the way this country formed me historically is not good enough. We are not taught Wazhazhe ie in school, and this is our land. There is something gravely wrong with this situation.

Wazhazhe people have a need to reimagine ourselves, but on a governmental level, weve only just adjusted to our 2006 Constitution, which is meant to reflect both syncretization of the Western world we live in and what we think is best to govern ourselves in the ongoing conditions of colonization now. Under our current tribal administration, I could not even participate in repatriating ancestral land, and the reason was because of division in our tribe.

I wanted to call our chief about giving the land back. Hes known for calling people to yell at them frequently, as well as making threats. The arts organization told me their land repatriation was not connected to any of the arts organizations activities, or even their occupancy of the land. I did not want to help them. I wanted the chief to help us. The settlers would remain on the land until death, and they had told me so to my face. I was angry. Alone in my studio, I tore up a document theyd asked me to read and to endorse as a Wazhazhe woman artist. I screamed and wept.

Later, I asked the arts administrator if he knew of his ancestors. He said that had never heard of any of them, and instead considered himself to be from Egypt in his past lives. The spiritual sidestepping of his ancestral connection was problematic; his disconnection absolved him of responsibility to his mother land, and by extension, to my own as an earth keeper. I could do little but witness his guilt.

When a person rejects a Christian framework but replaces it with appropriation, one is still functionally inside the legacy of Christianitys westward expansion, and does nothing to protect the land. Although the contemporary culture has dissociated itself from its origins, our origins remain, in the exact conditions in which they were abandoned. The Land back administrator was able to make so-called separations between deeply connected things such as his arts organization named after our tribe, and the land on which it sat.

The land and the organization theyre not related, hed said.

This was a man who claimed to hear my own ancestors speaking to him day in and day out, and who said they shot arrows at him whenever he entered or exited a house on this land.

He felt the enmity between our ancestors. So did I.

In Earth Keeper, N. Scott Momaday writes that a pioneer woman and her ancestors experience belonging on this earth. I asked my students at the Institute of American Indian to vote, as though on a committee, on whether settler people should stay or go (if Natives had a choice). After discussion, we agreed that we did not believe European people would ever leave, and if they became earth keepers, it would be possible for us to collaborate. We thought, if more Native people go into leadership, like Deb Haaland has, then our views will gain real credence.

Every morning, I sit cross-legged on a pillow by the cracked window and imagine the sides of my body turning two opposite colors, one red, and the other blue, to represent balance between earth and sky, and the way that I contain both body and spirit. Every person has this duality within them, but many people are invested in a sense of victimhood. We forget our motherland. Among my ancestors are European people, and as a mixed Indigenous person, I am forced into leadership.

Before my European ancestors were in England, as Normans, they were in Northern France. Although I have no current place there, I do believe that I have a responsibility to this land, even if I have not yet ascertained how. Part of my spirit rests in that land, and my responsibility to it also lies in its waters. My time on Wazhazhe land is only a part of my total rematriation.

On my mother and her mothers side, my ancestors are from New Orleans. They are mulatto according to the census, which is generally defined as an erasure-based mix of Indigenous, African and European ancestry. My mother did not acknowledge her matrilineal lineage, but immersed herself so wholly in her faith that, to me, it seemed like an addiction: it provided a false solution, and prevented her from having to transform. The concept of sanctification seemed like absolution to me, and the delay of a so-called perfection into eternity. I looked for matrilineal reconnection but it seemed a betrayal of my mother and her mother.

I do not consider any person separate from the responsibility of our own generational trauma; rematriating to the lands from which we first came; honoring as well as mourning the actions of ancestors; and resolving our part in conflicts. Without these four actions, we lose connection. I prefer to maximize connection, in the way of Rainer Maria Rilke, who writes, Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even if your best hours, is right. Sometimes this means syncretization, or the blending of Indigenous and Western culture, as N. Scott Momaday has advocated with the building of metaphorical bridges between our worlds.

When it comes to the Land Back movement, how will our pragmatism play out in keeping the earth? Our Indigenous tenure is more legitimate than that of settlers, but if we choose to work together with those make earth keepers of themselves, will we be able to protect this land? I am inspired by a radical Black farmer who told me that its not ones identity, its what one believes. I dont like any erasure of ancestral work, but I understand that the land itself may support this work better than any book, ideology, or education. Though I did not call the chief, I stay in conversation with ancestral water. The river absorbs my rage.

__________________________________

A Calm & Normal Heart by Chelsea T. Hicks is available now via Unnamed Press.

See the article here:
Of Wazhazhe Land and Language: The Ongoing Project of Ancestral Work - Literary Hub

My research on the tongue was divided across the equator, the exhaust offset. In the northern winter I hurtled south towards the summer, to Split Point | Wathaurong land. The cabin lights will be dimmed for landing. Research comes from Old French recercher which means to search closely, from cercher to seek for, through Latin circare, to wander, traverse, from circus, for circle. Returning to that divided kingdom a few weeks later, London glinting below as bared teeth, over the speaker would come the refrain: this is customary when flying in the hours of darkness.

The roads were icy that February morning and the sky overcast, and the temperature scarcely rose inside the library. I was following a lead on a pamphlet popular in 19th-century New York called The Tongue of Time. It covered the natural and spiritual worlds, disease, witchcraft, trances, dreams, death, diet, serpents, opium use, the childbearing of older women, mouth care and hygiene, accounts of people with two souls, and the universality of deception.

With each flight the stairs narrowed, spiraling inward until I stepped out into clouds of my own breath. Through the slat on the landing a hard sunless light, livid in color, was moving along the floor, over drifts of books known as the overflow. The landing felt as though it were shifting ever so slightly from side to side, doubtless a psychological effect of the spiraling staircase and the narrowness.

And I had been told that, so close to the tower, the sound of the wind alone could produce that effect, the effect of an edge, vertigo, as standing on the end of a pier. It felt familiar, the volatility that pervaded everything I read about the organ. What was the human tongue? The last animal of the faces reserve. Through the slat I saw a sail of white birds lift and fall up and beyond the brickwork.

I had until that morning been looking for stories of women, saints or otherwise, whose tongues had been cut out at the root. In many of these tales, speaking again after the violence is the point of the story (its a miracle) but I was redirected when I came across The Tongue of Time. The archive boxes were arranged in dim rows extending from a main corridor, strings of dormant cells. The light there was controlled by a timer, itself a bone-neon more commonly found in hospitals and apartment complex stairwells. I turned the dial and the minutes began to run down.

Some of the boxes had ink markings from previous systems, disintegrated letters and numbers the color of sandstone. I found The Tongue of Time and sat on the floor with the overflow to read it. When I finished I made a brief note for reference, in case I needed to revisit the work in a year or two: Stories, mainly allegorical, myths, moral directives. The tongue is employed as a metaphor for the extension and consumption of aeons, the way time laps at ones heels. It contains conflicted and disparate worlds, confessions, issues and arguments of all kinds. I placed the pamphlet carefully back in the box and returned it to its cell.

My relationship with the tongue began with an incision made on my fathers body. He was leaning on the drip looking bad enough to be redeemed. The hot purple wound ran from his solar plexus to the base of his gutin medical terms, an incision from the xiphoid process to the pubic symphysis. To the eyes of a child he had been opened along his length and stapled back together. And I felt it then, soundless, the stuck muscle in my mouth become stone. This was a long time ago.

Towards the end of his life my father would sit in the garden and I brought him things he could eat. The last thing he could eat was soft bread. Break it into pieces, he said, and I did as instructed. What voice would I have needed (were there words I could have used?) that might have opened a final kindness between he and I. But here are his arms in sheets of skin outstretched for the bread, our faces set. And the vapor of my voice held for so long it alchemised into feeling: the relief of his becoming weaker.

Break it into pieces. They were the last words he said to me. The word archive comes from arkh () Ancient Greek for beginning place or point of origin. Meanings evolved to written records and the public buildings in which they are kept. Archives are patient, dependent on care and active listening for creation and survival. To assemble an archive is to piece things together. But its parts gesture to how much we cannot know, to how much is missing and may not be recovered. Go far down into the word and you find water. The root comes out at the ocean, or rather the cosmic oceana yawning elemental chaos from which all supposedly emerged.

In the library caf, on my break, I read in a magazine that our oldest and most primitive vertebrate ancestor Saccorhytus coronarius was a big mouth with no anus. Fossils from around five hundred and forty million years ago reveal its mouth-body was no bigger than a grain of black rice. This first creature was covered with a thin skin and lived in the sands of the seabed. It is unlikely that Saccorhytus coronarius is a direct human ancestor, but the creature tells us about the early stages of our evolutionit had bilateral symmetry, two symmetrical halves.

Of womens mutilated tongues, I had a particular interest in stories where the breakage was self-inflicted. Self-muted and deeply bitten, sacrificed in order to save something else. In effect, self-censored to prevent what could come to light. Like the story of Tymicha for example, in the Syrian philosopher Iamblichuss Life of Pythagoras which dates to the sixth century BCE. Persecuted under the tyrant Dionysius, she bites off her tongue when threatened with torture. Tymicha then repurposes the organ as a physical weapon and spits it at him in defiance. The story makes it clear that, being female and prone to talkativeness, she breaks her tongue because she might not be able to govern it, and may instead be compelled to disclose something that ought to be concealed in silence.

For years, being quiet, I felt clear. Clear and cool. I tended the lies of othersI packaged them like cold cuts and offered safe keeping, or gave them safe passage onward to fortify other stories. And this was care-work, a craft even, with its own bruised grace inside a culture that could not be changed, a familial system that needed to be preserved for a kind of survival.

Later, I gathered pieces of information about the tongue. The rare books and documents smelt delicious, like old-growth foresta rich earthiness rose from their pages. Others of vellum were salty in scent, soft to the touch and made no sound, the membrane silent when turned over. I thumbed metaphorical bodies: The Anatomy of the Soul, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Anatomy of a Womans Tongue, The Anatomy of Abuses. I ran the tip of my index finger along the spines, letting the timer that controlled the light run down, shut off, working in half-light. No longer minding, no longer noticing.

The treatment of the tongue revealed cultures of violence and fear, and the organ required special thought and care in its use. But in the negotiation of this contested site, writings on the tongue also demonstrated, by virtue of their moralizing, how closely care and control could be interwoven.

The following spring I presented an extract at a seminar to share some initial findings on the historical treatment of the tongue.

Extract.The organ itself is longitudinally separated into symmetrical right and left sides by a section of fibrous tissue, the lingual septum, that results in a groove or furrow on the tongues surface called the median sulcus. This is the line that scores the tongue through the middle.

The philosophy of anatomy housed an assumption that the truth of a moral blueprint within could be excised an old logic that married physiological markers with divine design. Moral topographies were written in sinew and bone. The view inside the tongue at its dividing line provided a glimpse of what stuff lay under the inscription at the surface. For moralists, the line evoked the anatomical duality of the flesh, and recalled an inherently deceitful organ. The tongue was mapped morally long before the organ was laid out on the slab, and it has been read and written over long after. My interests lie here, in the dissection. The sixteenth-century Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius made an incision down the median sulcus, butterflying the tongue, opening it out. The dissection revealed its shape when cut from the body, giving it a physical presence beyond its relationships with the palate, teeth, lips, and larynx or voice box. The tongues dual physiological landscape was examined where it cleaves, displayed according to the fissure.

Tongue | Language || Lingua

After the seminar a man who had made a comment disguised as a question approached me at the wine table. He was a historian by trade and had I read Latour? (I had not.) Thank you for your question, I said. We chatted for some time until I noticed the room had thinned out. He leant toward me and confided that he hears voices in the archive, the voices of the dead asking to be heard. Did I hear them too? No, I said. I dont hear voices exactly. What then? he asked. Its more like the presence of things I cant remember, I said. Words rarely came to my aid like that and although what Id said made little logical sense, he nodded as though it made sense to him. He was looking down, eyes on his empty glass. I asked him if he felt they were actual voices, the voices he heard. He nodded again and put his glass with the others. Tell anyone and Ill kill you, he said.

It was very important to him, he explained, that his work in the academy was serious work. He was known in particular among his colleagues for the scientific rigor he brought to his field of historiography. I touched my left collar bone at the indent and found the strap of my bag slung there. I said I had to go. SALIVA! he cried suddenly, with an intensity that seemed both haphazard and precise. And he bubbled something about how spittle is a portal to the past. All your ancestors back to the Neanderthals are contained inside your saliva! he said, the room now empty but for the two of us.

The tongue had been made to wear its apparent proclivity for slipperiness and deceit (readings were made into its ecosystem and appearance). It was simply the best instrument we had for our projections. Interesting to consider, too, that words often have their genesis in the material. Mendacity comes from the Latin word mendax (lie) and has the root stem mend, meaning physical defect, fault. This is also the source of the Sanskrit word minda, physical blemish, and the Old Irish mennar, stain. The lie carries these residues: a mark, a taint, the fleshly defect as sign. On another branch, the root stem -mend leads to amendto free from faults, to set right, to make better.

Among the rows of boxes, with one bar of reception, my mother and I sent each other messages. I asked her about her day; I asked her questions about the past. She was often forthcoming, but equally often I felt like I was tipping a Magic Eight Ball upside down, shaking it, asking it to prophesy a pathway back instead of forward. I waited for her reply as though watching the triangle emerge from the watery murk with its abrupt, perplexing message.

Why did you make me lie about the violence?

No answer. It was not the right question. I tried a different one.

What, in your view, did my father lie about? She came online. She was typing Everything.

And then she disappeared again, to last seen.

Different kinds of silence have their own idioms; they are passed down in family cultures. The wound on my fathers body concealed a tumor the size and shape of a fist. Deep in his abdomen it sprouted and metastasized until the evidence of its presence broke the surface, necessitating the line that divided his body into a right side and a left. That a text can be read allegorically does not make it an allegory. Allegory, by definition, contains instructions for its own interpretation.

I read my fathers body as confession. I traced words to their roots, I traced words for lying, for different kinds of lie in different languages. I believed if I went back far enough I could find understanding, or rather an answer would be there, waiting for me. Leaving the library after dark, walking past the rows towards the stairs at the end of the corridor, I saw my father, stapled crudely along his length, the drip drip drip of the saline solution, the riddle of him trying to work itself out of itself.

Before this, during my first year of research, I became concerned that my interest in the tongue was devolving into obsession, even addiction, and I told Theo I would not be continuing. She just frowned and said nothing. The next time I saw her she pressed a copy of Augustines Confessions into my hand. Who takes care of the past? she said. Her words felt like a contract signed under duress. I laughed (fear; grief?). Until that point I hadnt considered the past to be something that needed looking after.

In his essay A Plague of Mendacity, the Egyptian-American cultural critic Ihab Hassan wrote that lying may be a riddle deeper than language itself. It is wise to remember that the most adroit methods of innate deception have evolved for survival. Animal pretends to be plant, plant pretends to be animal. Mimicries of shape, color and scent saw some flowers outlive dinosaurs. In the temperate waters where I was raised, a crab decorates its carapace with algae and seaweeds to move undetected by predators. In the desert, a tongue orchid tricks a wasp into sex.

I met Theodora in a line waiting to hear Judith Butler speak on the topic of vulnerability. I held my place in the queue for an hour or so when it began to rain and my eyes fell on her back, on her sweater soaking up each droplet, until I could make out the spectres of two shoulder blades. She glanced back at me and smiled. I looked up and let the rain fall over my face. People ahead were being turned away at the door; the hall had filled to capacity. When this news filtered along the line a man behind me broke down at volume. I have thought often of him since, of his loud crying and how no one said a thing to him, how everybody left him there like he carried a taint, as though we might catch the thing that makes one reveal too much.

Etymologically, the lie contains residues of fault, but it is also the case that a truth can feel tainted, necessitating a lie. The truth of his needof our needfelt marked, raw and vulgar the moment he stopped pretending he was fine. Saturated, I walked back to my attic room and thought about the Janus face of this problem, the messy truths we lie for, and the ways that those lies afford us a gritty shroud in less-than-ideal systems.

When I got home, I dried off and watched a YouTube clip of Butler talking about queer alliances. A queer alliance, they told a happily seated audience, is unpredictable and improvised, and might be a response to crisis. It is also, they said, a response to historical necessity. I would go back, see if he was okayhe might be gone, I thoughtwhen there was the woman in the white sweater on the other side of my door. Im Theo, she said. She was out of breath, and wet. She had followed me back and let herself in to the building.

I lived those college years in an attic with rising damp, listening to creatures moving in the walls, eating them out. The foundations of that place were rotted to the core. After Theo left I prepared coffee for a night of work ahead, and I read about protocols and devices used to enforce breakage. The bit and bridle had its inception in the British Isles in the Middle Ages. Records show it was principally used on those accused of gossiping, women who were thought to be outspoken or vying for power, or wives who moved beyond the boundaries of what their husbands and communities deemed suitable for them. The bridle held the head and face in iron and a two-inch rod was inserted into the mouth, clamping and flattening the tongue to prevent movement.

Learning by mouth was visceral. The bit and bridle would reshape the tongue, a technology that saw a violence upon the mouth-site designed to bring it into line and change the organs muscle memory. The device was repurposed for the long project of colonization, used to break the will of people taken to the Americas from their African homelands. What began with preventing speech was used as an index for the entire body. By going inside the mouth, body and mind could be silenced and reordered, reorienting a person towards anothers will.

I thought about what tongues are used for and what they can do, from the tip to the root. There is a habit of weakened use, a soft inheritancea muscle trained in how not to move, how not to work. This habit may be rehearsed to non-use; rehearsed. The French naturalist Lamarcks first law: more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally disappears.

So, if a speaker stops using their tongue (not knowing why, or having chosen to stop using it, or having been violently forced to do so) over time eventually it seems like it was never meant to be used in that way. The idea here, the misbelief so pernicious and arresting, is that your tongue was never yours to use.

Theo helped me to remain present, remain focussed on what mattered. One night as we lay in bed she turned to me and smiled and touched her thumb to my cheek bone, my temple. In the country where I grew up, we could be jailed for what we just did, she said.

There are many ways to break a tongue, and there are many ways to recall its power, not only as an instrument of speech that shapes sound within its home of the mouth and palate, but as an organ involved in knowledge acquisition, sense making, flights and figment. In one 15th-century record from Europe, under the right moral and structural conditions, the tongue itself was believed to be a portal to hidden knowledge. The moon had to be in the right position, and the tongue and mouth needed to be washed clean, then certain precious stones placed under the tongue at the tie would allow visions of the future to be revealed. Ordinary people carried out the ritual. The organ was a threshold, a line or pathway bridging temporal and spiritual mysteries.

What did those everyday folk feel or hear or see, I wondered? With all the parts in their right places, the precious stone under the tongue, and the moon up there on full. Those people believed in the tongue as a piece of psychic apparatus, as an organ that could bring fortunes to light. I spent a lot of time thinking about those people. I wondered, when everything aligned, if they saw the very day and moment they were in: where the past had brought them and where their future was being made. When what one had known, and what one would come to know, opened inward to unfold the present, imparting oneself to oneself like an actual miracle.

In the life of Saint Christina, her pagan father has her flesh torn off with hooks, her legs broken. Christina throws her flesh pieces at him: eat the flesh that you begot! The story spirals downward in this vein. He has her rocked in an iron cradle of hot oil and resin like a newborn babe. She is then paraded through the city naked with her head shaved, but when thrown in a furnace with snakes for five days they only lick the sweat off her skin. At the end of all this her tongue is cut out and, never losing her voice, she throws the severed thing at her tormentor, blinding him in the eye. Tongue flesh as pice de resistance.

I assembled some pieces as instructed, gathering evidence for a confession I could not make or that Id forgotten how to make or amend, make amends, make good, make it good, rehearse, rehearsefrom rehersen, to give an account, to report, to tell, to narrate a story; to speak or write words; repeat, reiterate; from Old French rehercier, to go over again, repeat, literally to rake over, turn over soil or ground, to drag (on the ground), to be dragged along the ground; to harrow the land; rip, tear, wound; repeat, rehearse, from hearse: a framework hung over the dead. From herse, a harrow, from hirpus for wolf, in reference to its teeth (Oscan language, extinct). An avowal I held down like a job.

The night after I read The Tongue of Time, I dreamt that the scar on my fathers body was on my body. Waking to the taste of blood in my mouth, left incisor lodged on my tongue, a pain gradient revealed my jaw locked like a door. In the dream I am in the library trying to cram my organs back inside my body. I dont have any staples, so Im attempting to close the skin of my torso like a winter coat. This approach is reasonably effective but the experience of having my guts spill into my hands has been embarrassing.

Im glad no one really visits this wing of the library. I hear the familiar turn of the timer and feel a thin light shiver through the gaps. When I reach the row and look at the dial it reads zero. I know that when I peer down there I will see a chair against the far wall with a box on it and although I want to pretend this is safe, if I walk down the row holding myself and reach the box I know the light will cut, in other words, a trap, and then Im here.

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From the new issue of HEAT, Australias international literary magazine.

Since its inception in 1996, HEAT has been renowned for a dedication to quality and a commitment to publishing innovative and imaginative poetry, fiction, essays, criticism and hybrid forms. HEAT remains committed to featuring established voices alongside new ones, with the overarching aim of gathering literary perspectives that traverse geographic, cultural, and generational borders. With its minimalist, tactile aesthetic, Series 3 aims to throw light on a carefully curated selection of writers, inviting deeper focus and intellectual intimacy. Subscribe to follow the series as it grows and evolves, with each installment designed to be loved and preserved for years to come.

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The Oddest of Organs: A Brief History of the Tongue - Literary Hub