James L. Acord – the transformation of (nuclear) waste

(Related post here.)

While on the subject of dangerous waste, James L. Acord deserves a mention.

(Below, portrait of the artist in his hasmat suit, via.)

Prominent in Seattle in the 1980s, Acord moved to Richland early in the 1990s to hob-nob with engineers on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. His aim was to make sculpture from nuclear material, more specifically, to transmute a radioactive isotope of technetium to a stable or
nonradioactive isotope of ruthenium and incorporate it into a stone and
advanced metal alloy sculpture.

Determined to shed his old identity and become somebody with whom
engineers might identify, he frequented Richland’s Goodwill store, buying
the kind of suits, ties and shirts engineers wear.
His hair he cropped down to a military crew cut. His shirt pocket sprouted a pen protector. As he said at the time:

The less you
frighten people, the further you get. People here tend to
think of artists as the enemy. Conversation bump along on square wheels, but they bump along.

If artists are the enemy, they’re not the kind of enemy Richland
residents need to worry about. In his time there, Acord found few others. When he was featured in a
two-part profile by Philip Schuyler in The New Yorker (October ’91), he was unable to find the magazine on sale in the Tri-Cities area.
(Acord’s project covered in the Guardian here.)

In 1993, after endless negotiations with the Department of
Energy, Acord became the only individual on the planet licensed to
“own and possess” nuclear material. To mark his triumph, he had the
license number tattooed on the back of his neck, regrettably
undercutting his efforts to pass for a local.

Alchemy is the age-old dream. I want to render high-level
nuclear waste harmless and use it in sculpture.

If nuclear waste can be rendered inert, why isn’t it done? Expense is
the reason the Department of Energy gives, but Accord had other ideas.

The Department of Energy is like the Catholic Church in the 12th
century. It’s a fully mature bureaucracy. It’s
committed to the dogma that waste should be buried in the ground. It
has 30 years of studies worth billions of dollars saying that waste
burial is good. Getting it to backtrack is hard.

(Anyone with current info on Acord, please post in the comments.)