»
and then beyond until they have dispersed and their drivers have been delivered into distant and unseen homes around West Cumbria and beyond. What is also there, beyond this sight, is another more permanent one on the edge of green fields where the land meets coast and sky; you can see it, perhaps, not simply as something occupying the skyline but as something that takes on strange forms depending on the viewing angle or time of day. A ‘Martian castle’ as Paul Theroux once wrote.7 Or perhaps, as darkness falls it shapes up as a glowing presence that – in the words of local poet John Gibbens – takes on the appearance of ‘a city-sized battleship’ that has pitched up at the edge of the land.8 At Sellafield, since the end of the Here, in the place Second World War, the idea of the that was built over future has taken on another dimension. and excavated the The legacy waste from plutonium and energy source of nuclear energy production accumulated the first industrial at the site projects West Cumbria into revolution – coal a non-human kind of temporality; one more akin to the geological scale. Nuclear – the new future would be built on waste – unlike any other kind of waste cheap, abundant, – is unique in that it is of a kind that ‘resists its own containment’ and, as such, atomic energy. presents peculiar challenges.9 The human scale of time, which provides the context of our day-to-day experience (even when it touches upon our futures), is relatively modest in scope and, indeed, is often marked by the repetition of ‘seasonal’ events – birthdays, anniversaries, school terms, sporting seasons, political cycles – that give the years ahead ‘a rhythm’ that directs our sense of what lies in front of us.10 But even more than this, is the issue of future predictability within the human scale. Governments, for instance, come and go in a handful of years, and economists and other forecasters unerringly fail to predict what will happen with any certainty as little as a decade ahead in time. Within that kind of context of experience of the future, 94