Monument to the Victims of Chernobyl, Petrozavodski, Russia (William C. Brumfield)

With the election thankfully only a week away, we’ll soon be able to reflect on what we’ve learned about the terrain of the political debate of a raft of contemporary problems.  What will surely pop out is that nuclear power is certainly back on the table, up for consideration in a way it hasn’t been for decades.  The presidential candidates are in agreement over its necessity (see here and here), though one is, admittedly, more strident in his endorsement.

It will be up to conservationists and environmentalists to force policy makers to place value on individual people and organisms, cultures and ecosystems, when the weighing of costs and benefits begins.  All are easily lost in the statistical rhetoric of risk, the preferred scale of populations and millenia, and the ideology of technological promise.

But just how ahistorical will this debate be (assuming there’s a debate at all)?  (more…)