Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Your decision must respond to the resolutional action driven by plutonium 239.
As a judge you are a reactant responding to this debate. As a rhetorical artifact, you might expect this 1AC to make sense. But what about objects that defy human expectations?
So-called HYPER-OBJECTS have properties not directly assessable to human experience. For example, plutonium 239 is a hyperobject—Its fissiles reactions and radioactive decay defy the intuitions and timescales of the clever apes who claim to manufacture the stuff. Plutonium drives the fragile expectations of federal government actants incentivizing nuclear power production.
The resolution is also a hyper-object—You cannot rely on your ‘gut’ intuitions but must instead engage in rigorous empirical inquiry: Begin your decision with a response to the agent of resolutional action; in this case, we expect an affirmation of the agency of plutonium 239.
The process creating plutonium began as flurries of protons and neutrons mixed and matched through a process called FUSION—Hydrogen plus hydrogen yields helium PLUS energy—Beginning cycles of galaxies and stars that after 9 billions years created this debate.
Humans saw a shining ball spinning around our Earth—But eventually we are leaning that we are not the center of everything.
We are showered with light dispersed by the sun’s fusion of hydrodgen into helium—And yet this feeble star is nowhere hot enough to fuse together  92 neutrons with 92 protons.
Only the hottest supernovas spurts out Plutonium 239, and this fragile byproduct quickly decays into the more prosaic Uranium 235.
And yet the potential of Plutonium 239 calls us to react.  Its byproduct Uranium migrates from the Earth’s mantle to its crust. It takes two billions years—a timeframe not accessible to human intuition.
Uranium-235 is quite feisty. The first (seventeen) nuclear reactions of Uranium-235 preceded human existence. Radioactive products that were produced that have since decayed, but this would not be the last of Uranium-235’s instability.
The most energetic Uranium-235s of all have recently become entangled with neutrons flying through space at impressively fast trajectories and even higher temperatures relinquishing its desire to remain Uranium-235, its proton splits in half—what we call fission.
Barbara Adam writes in 2007:
Barbara Adam. Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. 2007. “Futures Traversed”. http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/futures/wp_ba_futurestraversed130207.pdf. Pages 10-12. caf!!!3
Control of the … dynamics and thermodynamics.
But energy is not the sole byproduct! Neutron collisions overcome Uranium’s will to remain stable, creating Plutonium-239, which responds to new neutrons through nondeterministic reactions whose outcomes can only be known in probabilistic terms. Plutonium willing to retain neutrons becomes Plutonium-240, then becoming Plutonium-241, transmuted from Plutonium-239 yet also excessively volatile, ready to burst forth into energy upon the collision of one last fateful neutron…

science from: Pamela Gay. Professor of Astronomy at South Illinois University. Interviewed by Fraser Cain. November 8 2010. “Fission”. Astronomy Cast. http://www.astronomycast.com/2010/11/ep-206-fission/.
Source: “The Expanding Universe: From the Big Bang to Today”. Space.com http://www.space.com/52-the-expanding-universe-from-the-big-bang-to-today.html.
Dana s. Ulmer-Scholle. 2007. “Uranium: What is it?” New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/resources/uranium/what.html.
“Chapter 3: Neutron Physics”. Harms. Candu.
World Nuclear Association. “The Cosmic Origins of Uranium”. November 2006. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf78.html.
After jettisoning its radioactive objects, plutonium refuses to completely dissolve into energy. Wrestling with the spectre of plutonium, policymakers have ambivalently explored options of reprocessing, temporary shortage, and even the burial of permanent casks.
Galison ‘11
Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Prof in History of Science and Physics at Harvard, 2011 “Waste-Wilderness: A conversation with Peter L. Galison” 3-31, Friends of the Pleistocene https://fopnews.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/galison/
PG: I’ve been thinking …  thousand or a million.
But the genie will not go back into the bottle—Plutonium floats through time and space, inhaled through human lungs and permeating the blood stream, then being deposited in the skeleton where it dwells for decades. But plutonium is more than one kind of thing, and these so-called isotope are labeled by referring to the number of neutrons in the atom.  Decaying Plutonium-239s emit alpha particles, consisting of two protons and two neutrons bound by the doppelganger of a seemingly benign helium nuclei. Decaying Plutonium-241s emit beta particles: positrons gliding faster than its alpha siblings.
Nuclear decay occurs through the action of weak nuclear forces, one of the four irreducible forces in the universe as we know it. A neutron decays into a proton by splitting in half, giving up an electron while retaining the proton remainder.
Plutonium is a HYPEROBJECT defying the size and time constraints of human perception. Human eyes cannot see a Plutonium atom decaying, and what we think we know is seen through a microscope darkly—Responding to plutonium’s action requires reckoning with inefficacy of purely human thought.
Koltick ‘11
Nicole Koltick. Professor of Architecture at Drexel University. 2011. “A Materiality of Agency: Speculations on the Impact of Biological Computation on Materiality and Space”. Conference Paper. https://blonsway.expressions.syr.edu/beyonddigital/files/2012/02/a-materiality-of-agency_nicolekoltick.pdf. Pages 3-6.
When reconsidering our …divergent spatiotemporal scales.
We expect the federal government to respond. Plutonium places an ambivalent demand on federal energy policy, as a blessing and curse, as a proliferation threat and solution for energy security. Federal incentives for nuclear power are inevitable.
Federation of American Scientists ‘12
Federation of American Scientists. February 2012. Edited by Charles Ferguson and Frank Settle. “The Future of Nuclear Power in the United States”.
Nuclear power also … future energy portfolio.”
Plutonium’s demand for nuclear energy is received by a diverse network of agents, governmental and nongovernmental, human and nonhuman. Decision emerge through open-ended processes involving nuclear materials as proper agents of action.
Barthe ‘9
Yannick Barthe. Researcher at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation in France. 2009. “Nuclear waste: The meaning of decision-making”. Making Nuclear Waste Governable. http://www.andra.fr/download/andra-international-en/document/editions/381-va.pdf. Pages 23-25.
While irreversible geological … initially its spokesmen.
Nuclear power demands new ontologies that encounter it as an actant—capable of making political demands on United States energy policy.
Galvin’9
Ray Galvin. University of East Anglia. 2009. “Modifying Actor-Network Theory to Analyse the German Project of Photovoltaic Electrical Energy Generation”. Pages 6-7.
‘Radical stage’ approaches … alone, could achieve.
Plutonium, nuclear power, and the flows of electricity it emits all have radical influence on federal energy policy—these reactions affect our engagement with the resolution.
Bryant ‘11
Levi Bryant. 2011. “The Materialism of Onticology”.
In the opening … or realism make.
united states federal government should increase financial incentives for nuclear power production
We affirm the expectation of nuclear power incentives as a response to plutonium’s demands for a new energy policy. The does not resolve the political, but instead cultivates the capacity to respond.
McManus ‘11
Susan McManus. Lecturer in Political Theory at Queen’s University. 2011. “Hope, Fear, and the Politics of Affective Agency”. Theory and Event. Volume 14. Issue 4.
Bodies are also … to the political.
Energy production is the outcome of affective flows stimulating human and nonhuman objects alike. Enchantment with otherwise inert matter vitalizes federal energy policy.
Bennett ‘10
Jane Bennett. Chair of Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins. November 3 2010. Interviewed by Gulshan Khan. “Agency, Nature and Emergent Properties”. Para_Doxa. http://neodoxa.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/agency-nature-and-emergent-properties/.
KHAN: In The Enchantment …. patterns of consumption.
Debates on the resonances of emotional connection educate for political engagement
Hart ‘7
Gender modified*. Reciprocal Revelation: Toward a Pedagogy of Interiority, Tobin Hart, Professor of Psychology Co-founder and President of the Child Spirit Institute University of West Georgia, Journal of Cognitive Affective Learning, 3(2) (Spring 2007), 1-10. Oxford College of Emory University. 1549-695 https://www.jcal.emory.edu//viewarticle.php?id=83andlayout=html, JP Miller
With most topics, there is … is not a will to believe but a will to wonder. (p. 46)
Debate is a system of communication that feeds off radically different speech objects generating creative affective response—the illusion of limits dissolves the system into entropy.
Bryant ‘12
Levi Bryant. Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. January 2012. “A Disturbing Thought About Communication”. Larval Subjects. http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/a-disturbing-thought-about-communication/
One of the … “yeah, that’s true.”