Deep time financing? ‘Generational' responsibilities and the problem of rendez-vous in the U.S. nuclear waste programme

Responsibilities across generations are at the forefront of policy agenda; whether this is climate change, remains of the nuclear age, care for the vulnerable, plastics pollution, public debt, or pension schemes. This provokes scholarly debates about where the moral cursor of action should be set in time to be qualified as ‘responsible’. Instead of adopting a normative stance, based on archival material, this paper examines how different relevant actors engage in time-making and grapple with complex and -quite peculiar- temporalities in their efforts to assign financial responsibilities associated with nuclear waste, a material to remain radioactive for a million years. Based on the analysis, the paper proposes a new concept, the problem of rendez-vous, to name the dilemma generated by the attempts to coordinate and synchronize parties, who are to act, or even come to exist, at different moments in time, with potentially conflicting and competing concerns and priorities. It traces the successive resolutions of the problem of rendez-vous that mediated the formulation of a mechanism to finance the U.S. nuclear waste programme (1978–1983). The analysis will be relevant to researchers interested in the temporalities of valuation and in studying how ‘generational’ concerns are construed and accounted for in environmental and financial valuations.