Imagining the Atom: From a Techno-Modernity Star to a Radioactive Bogeyman [draft]

(Visual Anthropology Diaries #3)

Google Search: “Nuclear energy old posters”

If you search for “nuclear [old] energy posters” on Google, you will soon find yourself in an endless spiral of atoms dancing around hundreds of slogans: from such promising technological progress and labour prosperity, though sinister ones condemning nuclear energy and its “victims”, to assuring there’s a “peaceful atomic” future awaiting, and contemporary AI-designed such praising the atomic energy as “cleaner” and “safer”.

It’s strangely addictive to pick one object and follow how the images it produces, and the images produced for it, changed across time and space. This is the task I have for this week for my Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic filmmaking class at CEU. So I thought, why not use this opportunity to look at different representations of how this one peculiar substance that has always fascinated me –  nuclear energy – has travelled through visual culture in the past and present, in the United States and the Soviet Union, across Cold War modernities, through the Chernobyl moment, and into the current climate crisis and “green transition” debates. And how, along the way, it reflected different promises of abundance and national power, while also accumulating panic, grief, and horror.

Atomic energy is certainly not a classic “ethnographic” object, but an enchanting substance to observe if you are interested in the modern world we live in. Beyond being merely “technical”, it has long been loaded with opposing and contested dreams of “progress”, “modernity”, “democracy”, promises of “peaceful” and clean futures, as well as fears of ominous environmental fortunes and bodily harm. From this perspective, it becomes a dense medium through which to ask broader questions about the past, and about the future, about Cold War legacies and contemporary (geo)political imaginaries, about ecological anxieties and the shifting promises of today’s new green and digital capitalisms.

Google Search: “Nuclear energy posters”

This is also partly what I engage with in my PhD project, focused on contested nuclear revival and future-making in Bulgaria, though an ethnography of the never-completed Soviet-designed nuclear power plant. Both a ruin of a socialist modernity’s future dreams, and a remnand of the constantly different promises of what followed after, it has been the main long-term megaproject in Bulgaria that never generated power – yet it has repeatedly reapeared in the public agenda: from a techno-modernity icon to a post-socialist nuclear ‘bogeyman’; from a problem for EU integration due to its links to Russian energy, to a solution to energy shortages; from a potential ‘climate-friendly’ investment under the 2020 Green Deal, to a ‘dangerous dependence’ amid the 2022 invasion of Ukraine; and most recently, as speculative backbone for a national ‘AI future’ in the emerging digital economy…

So, we see that indeed nuclear power, depending on who is looking, from where, and when, carries different meanings connected to different hopes, anxieties, and political projects. As Gabrielle Hecht (2012), reminds us, nuclearity is a historically situated technopolitical status produced through specific regimes of knowledge.  What happens to those regimes of knowledge when they become visual? What gets made desirable, what gets made frightening, what gets erased, and what gets naturalised?

That becomes especially visible when we follow depictions of “the atom” across posters, films, advertising, activist imagery, and private or everyday visual traces. These images do aesthetic work, while also doing political work, formating the nuclear as progress, as threat, as sacrifice, as national destiny, as ecological solution, or as moral failure.

Images of Nuclear Energy

One quick check on the Internet immediately shows that nuclear energy has travelled through diverse mediums that artists have engaged with – propaganda posters, media articles, book covers, film, animation, digital art, (documentary) photography, and installations, even… conference booklets, monuments and soundscapes. And if I tell you nuclear energy also appears on the Simsons, you wouldn’t be surprised, right? 

An analysis of the broad material available throughout the endless Internet archive shows that these representations in visual culture have evolved from early 20th-century fascination and Cold War-era anxieties to contemporary critiques of environmental, geopolitical, and long-term storage risks, often highlighting the "invisible" dangers of radiation and the lasting legacy of nuclear waste. And more recently, nuclear imagery is being reactivated yet again within the overlapping pressures of climate politics and geopolitics. As the EU seeks to reduce dependence on Russian energy after 2022, and as decarbonisation targets intensify, nuclear returns to public debate as a contested “solution”. This shift is already visible in the newest image-making around nuclear power: the atom gets redesigned in cleaner palettes and future-facing styles, staged as “safe,” “reliable,” and “low-carbon,” and even explicitly invited to be reimagined through institutional art initiatives and competitions.

I will now go through some key themes and examples of nuclear energy in media art, that we can track chronologically (even if some topics are reoccurring).

Early Atomic Age Optimism (1950s Posters)

Early representations on both sides of the Cold War often envisioned a utopian future powered by a promise of limitless, cheap nuclear energy, technological prosperity and progress. This era saw promises of atomic-powered cars, planes, and cities, alongside breakthroughs in medicine and agriculture. Despite the looming threat of mutual destruction, both the US and USSR promoted the imaginary of the "peaceful atom" to boost industrial, agricultural, and domestic life. 

All this is seen especially in vintage posters from this time from both sides of the Cold war – where bright colors, big titles with bold fonts capture the spirit of an era when nuclear energy was seen as a future full of promise, progress, innovation, and clean power that could transform everyday life.

"Nuclear power in service of peace and progress!" (USSR, 1970s)

 

     "Atom for the cause of peace!" Soviet poster, 1959

U.S. poster, unknown date

A Poster for sale I found on Etsy with this description “Fallout New Vegas Poster -1950s Propaganda Wall Décor”

This US print I found on sale on Etsy particularly caught my attention. It is described (and markets itself) as “nostalgic” and “inspired by mid-century atomic energy artwork,”  a “nuclear family propaganda poster,”  (while also being framed as Fallout: New Vegas fan décor), listing promises “timeless retro charm,” and positions it as a bold statement piece for vintage enthusiasts and “lovers of historical prints.”

First, it visibly borrows the familiar mid-century U.S. domestic aesthetic, often utilising suburban lawns, picnics, brightness, and the choreography of “proper” happiness with arranged gender roles. Simultaniously the nuclear plant is inserted into the landscape as a normal (even benevolent) neighbour, while the slogan (“Our Neighborhood Radiates with Happiness Thanks to Nuclear Power”) turns radiation into a warm affective metaphor. Even the plant’s emissions, rendered as dramatic smoke/steam, echo an older industrial visual grammar where visible output signaled prosperity and modernity.

But what interests me even more is how this style of propaganda has become a commodity. Detached from its original institutional setting, it circulates as retro décor and fandom object, consumed as irony, nostalgia, or aesthetic pleasure, while still carrying the residue of the political promise it was built to sell.

Moreover, while looking at this Etsy-style “mid-century” nuclear domestic scene, I kept thinking about how different U.S. visual language around the atom often feels from Soviet poster aesthetics. In the United States, a lot of the “peaceful atom” imagery leans into advertising codes: warm colours, realism, cleanliness, the promise of comfort, and a kind of suburban intimacy, nuclear power as something that quietly supports the good life in the background. The scene is scaled down to everyday life, while politics enters through the texture of family, leisure and consumption. Soviet posters (and especially the more iconic ones that circulate today) often stage the atom through a more monumental, declarative style: strong diagonals, bold contrast, heroic bodies, collective futures, the state speaking in a loud voice through design. The nuclear object becomes something to collectively build, master, and claim as historical destiny.

Of course, both traditions have variety, and there are Soviet images that try to domesticate modernity too, just as there are U.S. images that go full techno-utopian (like this one below). Still, the overall feel is different: the U.S. mode often makes nuclear power familiar by folding it into domestic prosperity; the Soviet mode often makes it meaningful by lifting it into the register of collective ambition and public spectacle.

POWER FOR PROGRESS - 1970s Nuclear Power Plant Comic Book - Distributed in 1971 to visitors of the Big Rock Point Power Plant, Charlevoix County, Michigan USA - Ethan Persoff, http://www.ep.tcfull text of this 16 page comic found at http://www.ep.tc

 

Atomic Horror and Anxiety/ The Anti-Nuclear Movement (Cold War - Present)

If the earlier “peaceful atom” imagery works through reassurance, making nuclear power feel neighbourly, domestic, almost cute - another huge archive of representation moves in the opposite emotional direction: atomic fear. A lot of cultural production, especially in film and literature, has returned again and again to nuclear war, accidents, invisible contamination, and mutation. It often reads through a kind of nuclear “Gothic”. We can see dread that leaks into everyday life, bodies that become unstable, landscapes that turn uncanny, and a constant sense that something catastrophic can arrive without warning (or has already arrived, unnoticed).

Again, it is interesting here to observe how the image of "sinister" atom travelled across spaces, especially when it comes to the two sides of the Cold War axis. For example, in the U.S., the fear of the atomic bomb, dressed in anti-Soviet/anti-communist rethorics, was often fed with images and footages of the 1560s nuclear tests, where to test the impact of an atomic blast on populated areas, technicians built entire fake towns, with houses, shops, and even mannequin families. These settlements went by an ominous name: doom towns. In this sense, the "sinister" atom, similar to the "peaceful" atom was, again a "domestic" atom, where the scary feeling was built on the fear of loosing your home, your everyday life, the possiblitty of being a consumer!

While looking for visual material that carries this darker atmosphere, I also came across an online exhibition of anti-nuclear posters from 28 countries, launched in 2012 by Laka (a Dutch documentation and research center focused on nuclear energy and its societal impacts). It’s part of a much larger database (they say 5000 posters) linked to what they call the “fighting culture” of the international anti-nuclear movement, alongside things like music and graphic novels. Their self-description is interesting in itself: beyond campaigning, they position themselves as a kind of treasurer for the movement’s cultural heritage in Netherlands and internationally. This highlights how posters also become an archive of political feeling, visual strategy, and transnational circulation.

What is visible in these posters is that they make the “object” of nuclear power no longer a friendly symbol of modern life. It becomes danger, death, contamination, state violence, corporate irresponsibility, or an unacceptable risk distributed onto particular places and bodies. The aesthetic shifts often include sharper visual contrasts, more confrontational typography, more explicit moral language, more urgency. The colour palette is often yellow and black – symbol of exposure and radiation.

Below are a few examples from that collection that I’m using as markers across time and geography:

Australia, 1978

An Austrian poster from the Laka Online collection, 2004

 

Greece, “We say no to nuclear factory. We say no to nuclear death”, 1974

 

Indonesia, “Save our World from nuclear danger, 2008

 

Post-atomic bomb Artistic Critique and Activism (Arte Nucleare)

These anxieties soon were also reflected in the artistic scene. Arte Nucleare (Nuclear Art), founded in Italy in 1951–52 by Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo, was an avant-garde movement that responded to the atomic bomb and post-war political instability in Italy, using artistic critique to protest the atomic age's anxieties. It rejected traditional painting for an "organic" disintegration of forms, reflecting the threat of nuclear destruction while fostering an anarchic, post-atomic vision.

 

Enrico Baj Fire! Fire! (1963–4) Tate © Enrico Baj

 

Documentation and Post-disaster Memory (Fukushima/Chernobyl).

Post-disaster art and specifically memorials often explore themes of resilience and memory, such as in the work of Chim↑Pom, which critiques the societal response to nuclear catastrophes.

In 2008 the collective skywrote the word “PIKA” (onomatopoeia for an atomic flash) above Hiroshima, provoking debate about collective memory and trauma. Following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, they illegally entered the exclusion zone to collaborate with residents and other artists, work that evolved into the long-term exhibition Don’t Follow the Wind, viewable only when radiation levels drop. Their Street (Michi) (2018) in Taiwan created a temporary “third public space,” questioning who owns public institutions.

 

Monuments – between pride and disaster

Nuclear energy monuments are a whole different mediumI  find particularly interesting because they range from artistic tributes celebrating scientific achievement to sombre, preserved sites marking the destructive power and environmental legacy of the atomic age.

A really good example of that double feeling of achievement with dread still attached, is the Nuclear Energy (sculpture) by Henry Moore on the campus of University of Chicago. It marks the location of Chicago Pile-1, the first human-made, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction (December 2, 1942), which is such a condensed “birth scene” of the atomic age science, war, modernity, all braided together.

Nuclear Energy, Henry Moore (1898–1986)

 

On the other end of the spectrum is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome), kept as a preserved ruin, and framed explicitly as a material reminder of destruction and a call toward peace and nuclear disarmament.

 

And then there are sites that sit somewhere between memorial, infrastructure, and containment, like the continuing work of enclosing and managing the remains of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Here, the “monument” is also a giant technical structure meant to prevent further leakage and manage an ongoing hazard. It’s memory engineered into a barrier.

 

Key Nuclear Energy Monuments and Sites include:

·       Nuclear Energy (Sculpture) (Chicago, USA): Created by Henry Moore (1964–1966), this bronze sculpture marks the site of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

·       Hiroshima Peace Memorial (A-Bomb Dome, Japan): The skeletal ruins of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage site to memorialize the victims of the 1945 atomic bombing.

·       Monument to the Pioneers in Nuclear Energy (Obninsk, Russia): Located in the world's first "nuclear city," this monument features a scientist holding a split atom, commemorating the 1954 start of the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant.

·       Manhattan Project National Historical Park (USA): Includes three primary sites—Hanford (WA), Los Alamos (NM), and Oak Ridge (TN)—preserving the history of the development of nuclear weapons.

·       Chernobyl and Pripyat (Ukraine): The site of the 1986 disaster, now acting as a haunting, dark-tourism monument to nuclear catastrophe.

·       Atom (1967/2018) Sculpture (Moscow, Russia): A kinetic sculpture by Viacheslav Koleichuk, originally commissioned to celebrate 50 years of Soviet rule and nuclear power.

·       "Doom Town" (Nevada, USA): Remains of houses used for atomic bomb testing in 1955, serving as a relic of the nuclear testing era. 

Long-Term "Monuments" to Waste

·       Runit Dome (Marshall Islands): A concrete dome covering radioactive debris from U.S. nuclear tests.

·       Savannah River Site Reactors (USA): Decommissioned reactors encased in concrete to "entomb" the radioactive materials, effectively becoming, as described in literature, monuments for the next 24,000 years.

Representing the Invisible and Atomic Livelihoods (Contemporary Art/Anthropology/ Photography/Media Art).

Contemporary artists, such as Abbey Hepner, have used, or referenced, radioactive materials directly in their work to make visible the unseen risks of nuclear technology.

One of her recent exhibitions ‘The Light at the End of History’ (2020) explores land use and nuclear issues in the United States by taking an expansive look at humanitys coexistence with nuclear technologies and history, featuring chemical-based alternative process photography, and hybrid techniques, including things like uranium prints, X-ray film photographs, cyanotype on bone, and laser-engraved photographs, so the image isn’t carries its logic in the medium itself.

Nevada National Security Site, Outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, Radioactive waste shipped to WIPP: 107,087 Gallons, 2014, 9”x13” Uranotype (uranium print)

What I like about this approach in contrast to most of the depictiongs of “the atom” I found so far on the Internet is that it shifts the “evidence” away from the spectacular disaster image and toward the slower, quieter infrastructural presence of the nuclear in everyday landscapesHepner frames this as a long look at how people live alongside nuclear technologies and their histories in the United States — land use, waste routes, institutional footprints. It is a more anthropological approach, asking questions about people’s complicated relationships to nuclearity, about what counts as “visible,” who gets trained to see, and what kinds of technical, state, or corporate systems rely on the fact that most people won’t ever encounter nuclear risk as an image they recognize right away.

So here “the atom” is constructed as a distributed, long-duration presence, something that sits in landscapes, archives, routes, processes. We observe a clear shift from “event” (explosion/disaster) in earlier depictions, to the “afterlife” (waste, monitoring, containment, slow harm). The image stops chasing the dramatic moment and starts tracing the infrastructure and everyday lide. Here, me, the viewer becomes a kind of reader-of-traces: I am pushed to pay attention to process and material, and to the politics of what usually stays background.

This approach in fact reminds me of anthropologist Rye Morimoto’s recent  ethnography “Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima's Gray Zone” (2023), where he deals with the politics of perceptibility: how low-dose exposure and fallout become thinkable, arguable, livable, or deniable depending on which sensors, thresholds, categories, and storytelling infrastructures are treated as legitimate. In his work, “the nuclear ghost” is a local term that names the slippery quality of radiation as something people live with and orient around, even when official knowledge keeps trying to pin it down through technoscientific measurement.

 

 

Environmental and Future-Oriented Perspectives

Similarly, recent art examines the ecological footprint of nuclear energy and the long-term, deep-time challenges of nuclear waste storage, often adopting an "ecocinema" or immersive approach. I found Emilija Škarnulytė's Burial (2022), wich is cutting to the Ignalina nuclear power station in Lithuania, a sister plant of Chernobyl. From the trailer of what seems to be a hypnotic documentary, I understand she is deeling with broader questions of Cold war times, nuclear afterlifes and toxic legacy. I still haven’t found a way to watch it, but when I do, I will update this part of the post.

TV Disaster Aesthetics and the Radioactive Other. Chernobyl (2019)

I also couldn’t avoid the Chernobyl miniseries, because it has basically become one of the most influential recent “images” of nuclear disaster in popular culture. It’s a 2019 five-episode HBO/Sky production, and interestingly (for this post) it was filmed partly in Lithuania, with the decommissioned Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant used for key plant scenes. That link is important because it folds together a few of the threads I’ve tracking here so far: disaster memory, Cold War infrastructure, and the way certain sites keep reappearing as stand-ins for “the nuclear” in our visual imagination.

Something I still vividly remember, from watching Chernobyl back in 2019, is how violent the series made radiation feel, working through strong material realism. At the end of the episodes the nuclear becomes a kind of atmosphere you breathe and the images of burned skin and bodies literally breaking down from radiation haunts in your dreams for long after.

At the same time, when I watched it, I realized how it was not visible for everyone that the series builds a very clear political story about the catastrophe. It frames the disaster through Soviet institutional failure though bureaucracy, denial, misinformation, fear of consequences, the system’s reflex to protect itself first. In this sense it makes very clear how images of radiation, fear and disaster bring back to life a Cold War revival narrative and moral geography, where catastrophe reads as proof of systemic inferiority, where Chernobyl becomes a radioactive emanation of the Soviet Other, while “truth” becomes a Western virtue. This also steers how responsibility, modernity, and failure are distributed in the viewer’s imagination.

Decommissioning Posters. European Union “visibility” as a genre

Today the EU is deeply divided on nuclear energy, with a vocal anti-nuclear faction, led by Austria, Germany,  Luxembourg, and the Netherlands advocating for a complete phase-out, citing safety, waste, and costs. Others, led by France, view it as essential for decarbonization, leading to ongoing conflicts over EU energy policy.

So after the U.S. domestic atom and the Soviet heroic atom, there’s a third aesthetic that keeps popping up in the present: the EU decommissioning poster / billboard / infographic.

It has its own aesthetics where uou usually get the EU flag, a programme title, a line about protecting health and the environment, and then the visuals of “order”: timelines, milestones, hazard reduction, charts, maps, photos of workers in PPE, clean institutional colour palettes.

A lot of this comes from the way decommissioning is framed publicly. European Commission describes decommissioning as a long process from shutdown and fuel removal to dismantling and site restoration, aimed at long-term protection of the public and the environment. And the EU’s funding programmes explicitly narrate this as a shared European responsibility: safe removal of older Soviet-design reactors, decommissioning and waste management, knowledge-sharing, “a safer Union.”

But in the same time if one loosk at how the EU talks about the big “legacy” sites – Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant in Bulgaria, and Bohunice Nuclear Power Plant in Slovakia – the tone is very telling, the “progress” narative keeps poping up. Decommisioning also becomes about “progress”, “sustainable”, “bright”, “democratic” fitires. The difference is that the atom is constructed as a problem for the future and needs to be decommissioned, an environmental/technical legacy that needs careful stewardship. The focus is similarly on the afterlives, but more on their management, while the viewer is positioned as the European public and taxpayer watching “responsible governance” happen, but also is given responsibility to vote and to participate in the crafting of nuclear-free futures.

"go and vote for a nuclear free Europe" , Rob Wout AKA Opland , Netherlands 1984.

Popular culture/The "Green Glow" Trope

Simultaneously, popular culture, from cartoons to movies, often depicted radiation, nuclear waste, or magical substances as a vibrant, luminous lime-green, symbolizing danger, toxicity, or otherworldly power. While radioactive materials in reality do not glow green (or at all), and whereas real radiation is typically invisible or produces a faint blue Cherenkov radiation, the “green glow” trope was popularized by early 20th-century phosphorescent radium-dial watches and glowing uranium glass, and still persists in media, because it is instantly recognizable and serves as an instant visual shorthand for danger or power.

For example in The Simpsons, the "Green Glow" trope depicts radioactive waste and materials as a vibrant, luminous green, most notably seen in the opening credits with Homer handling a glowing rod and in Mr. Burns's "healthy" green glow who jokingly claims that a lifetime of working in the plant has given him this glow, highlighting his indifference to safety.

Nuclearity and the healthy "Green Glow", The Simpsons

Redefining Nuclearity: “Clean energy,” energy security, and a new visual script

Anyone interested in the topic also knows well that lately there’s been a visible attempt to refresh the public “look” of nuclear energy globally, and especially in Europe. In European Union communication, nuclear increasingly appears inside climate and energy-security language, low-carbon electricity, “reliable” supply, strategic autonomy, long-term planning.

Under the European Green Deal, the European Commission set “climate neutrality by 2050” as the horizon, and energy policy communication leaned hard into decarbonisation language and long-term transition planning. 

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the story visibly thickened with “energy security” and “ending dependence on Russian fossil fuels” , which is basically the political mood of European Union’s REPowerEU. In that context, nuclear starts getting narrated more insistently as a climate-relevant, security-relevant technology including through finance language: the Commission’s Complementary Climate Delegated Act (taxonomy) included certain nuclear activities under conditions, applying from 1 January 2023.

https://bahr.no/newsletter/eu-taxonomy-nuclear-and-gas-energy-activities-can-be-environmentally-sustainable

On the global image-making side, International Atomic Energy Agency was openly investing in this reputational/visual shift. Their “Nuclear Reimagined” art contest (2022) explicitly asked artists to generate new images of nuclear power in a climate context, and their later Nuclear Pop! contest (with winners showcased again in 2025) pushes a similar direction: moving away from the familiar toxic-glow aesthetic and toward “clean, reliable, future-facing” imaginaries.

I am finishing this blogpost with the image of the second winner of this competition and its description:

"Science Fiction" is a digital drawing made with Procreate in the form of a comic strip. It uses the similar sounds of the words "Fusion", "Fission" and "Fiction" as a pun. The first two words represent the two main categories of nuclear reactors, and the third refers to some environmental activists who advocate for the closure of nuclear power plants, while also defending the need to lower carbon dioxide emissions. What they do not expect (or at least they didn't some years ago) is that energy demand would be compensated with fossil fuel power plants. Therefore, the statement "Net Zero does not need nuclear" can be considered fiction, at least within the present energy-production panorama."

 

References:

Hecht, G. (2012). Being nuclear: Africans and the global uranium trade. MIT Press.

Morimoto, R. (2023). Nuclear ghost: Atomic livelihoods in Fukushima’s gray zone. University of California Press.

Škarnulytė, E. (Director). (2022). Burial (Kapinynas) [Film]. Lithuania/Norway.