The Missing Mountain *
An entire mountain vanished in the 1950s in the Western Carpathians of Romania. Its uranium-rich rocks were transported by train to be processed into nuclear fuel in Sillamäe, in the former Soviet Union, now Estonia. Some were converted into nuclear warheads. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, those warheads were decommissioned and dismantled. Since 1995, the Megatons to Megawatts economic deal between Russia and the United States has transformed nuclear weapons into electricity, illuminating American homes with energy derived from Soviet warheads.This project traces a shared history of extraction, linking distant places and pasts through the voice of a confused uranium isotope, caught between being energy that is both vital and destructive at the same time. It explores uranium’s path as both a mineral and a time traveler, transferring isotopes across geographies, industries, and time scales.
ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 2, pp. 113-128.
doi:10.1162/artm_a_00416
https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/2/113/131442/The-Missing-Mountain
Content for this article is available at MIT Press. It is available as: Full Access . Click here for more information.
