Abstract

Crystal Cook Marshall reopens Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor’s title chapter as a theoretical, philosophical, and political warning that we have not heeded. We are no longer site-specific whales swimming near nuclear reactors. Coalfields, often a focus of Cook Marshall’s work, now bring risk to us all, dispersing and excelling catastrophe—we create coalfields, and we are coalfields. Blending personal narrative, excavation of STS, and direct encounter with Hurricane Helene, Cook traces our contemplation of “natural” terrors (the whale) to an industrial terror (a nuclear reactor) to our manufacture of nature into an industrial terror which offers no one and nothing any harbor.