Arts and the deep nuclear future : a prospectus

Community Arts and Cultural Development (CACD) can celebrate and enhance community resilience while making ecological knowledge needed to resolve complex problems. This has been demonstrated in disaster management, in regional and urban development, and in initiatives for climate change adaptation. CCD can also highlight injustices and assist communities to find a voice. This paper explores these functions by considering the role of CACD in exposing and investigating society's on-going experiment with nuclear materials. These impact people and ecosystems across the whole nuclear cycle - as a result of uranium mining, nuclear weapons testing, radioactive waste handling, and the releases from 'civil' nuclear installations. We envisage a new 'Nuclear Futures' multi-arts program that links artists, communities and researchers from Australia, the UK, and Japan. Central to this program would be the encouragement of long-term community responses that are empowering, despite intractable intergenerational health problems and ecosystem damage. As decisions about nuclear issues are made along a 10,000 year trajectory (such is the half life of many radioactive materials), the arts will deploy imagination and creativity to envisage and determine how the deep nuclear future will unfold.