One Million Hot Cells is a joint artistic research seminar by Prof. Susanne Kriemann, Prof. Isabel Seiffert, Prof. Nina Zschocke and Judith Milz. The multi-layered, project-based seminar will culminate in a publication involving images, writing, designing, and will be published by Spector Books in autumn 2026. During the summer semester we engaged with research in various archives and sources that document the afterlife of nuclear energy in the form of nuclear waste, mainly the KIT archive and therein the image archive of the former nuclear research center. We visited the laboratories and conducted interviews with scientists of the JRC.

One Million Hot Cells brings forth images and texts circulating around nuclear technologies and their afterlife. The proposed timeline for safe storage for atomic waste by German law is 1.000.000 years. Conceived for research on highly radioactive substances, the 'hot cell' laboratory exhibits a specialized materialization, and equipment. Contrasting with the high-security isolation technology involved, and the research conducted is intimately linked to utopias, hopes and fears, and unresolved technical and philosophical problems of the 20th and 21st centuries. A selection of archival images is put in context by a group of international authors from diverse professions and study fields, they contributions being developed in collaboration with students of HfG Karlsruhe.

The texts and images in One Million Hot Cells critically as well as sensitively engage with materials so complicatedly invisible, odorless, and highly reactive as industrially released unstable isotopes.

Participating students: Peiyu Cao, Johanna Choultz, Tobias Ehrhardt, Alexandra Haas, Dabin Han, Jiaxuan He, Chiara Kern, Lauren Nightingale, Jana Renger, Michael Rothfuß, Leon Stark, Eric Stelse, Dakang Wang, Gabriele Winter-Perreira

International authors contributing to the publication: Lara Almarcegui, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Matthias Bruhn, Ele Carpenter, Rony Emmenegger, Irka Hajdas, Susanne Hauser, Samia Henni, Esther Leslie, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Anna Schäffler, Berit Seidel, Simon Sheik, Maike Weißpflug, Anna Veronika Wendland, and Lydia Xynogala.