Nuclear representation is torn between the global society of the nuclear spectacle and the micro-threads of lived experience, between the heroic if morally poisoned scientists and the damaged Plutonium knights of the nuclear workforce. There is scarcely a viable theoretical framework capable of mediating the sciences of the nuclear and implications for the humanities. Literary forms struggle to mediate hybrid forms between the extremes of what is nevertheless an industrial project, an ecological miasma and a living nightmare. When the possibility of an issue of Angelaki addressed to the nuclear was first discussed, there were some suggestions that the nuclear was an anachronism, a throwback to the culture of the 1970s and 1980s, but the crises of the nuclear regime have persisted and deepened. The moment of Derridean nuclear criticism had suffered its own half-life into relative critical indifference, seemingly to be replaced by extinction criticism.