Word: decayed
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Meanwhile, there still exists no proven method of safely isolating from the environment the millions of tons of radioactive wastes already produced for even a decade or two, let alone for the half-million years required for the poisons to decay to relatively safe levels of radioactivity. The Senate and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have already lifted their short post-TMI freeze on new plant licensing, and dozens of TMI clones across the country continue to operate freely...
...differs from individual sickness as pneumonia differs from plague. A decadent act must, it seems, possess meaning that transcends itself and spreads like an infection to others, or at least suggests a general condition of the society. Decadence (from the Latin decadere, "to fall down or away," hence decay) surely has something to do with death, with a communal taedium vitae; decadence is a collection of symptoms that might suggest a society exhausted and collapsing like a star as it degenerates toward the white dwarf stage, "une race à sa derniere heure," as a French critic said...
...second model is the metaphor of natural decay, the seasons of human life, for example. Animals, people, have birth, growth, periods of vigor, then decline and death. Do societies obey that pattern? The idea of decadence, of course, implies exactly that. But it seems a risky metaphor. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, like the 14th century Berber Ibn-Khaldun and the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Vico, have constructed cyclical theories of civilizations that rise up in vigor, flourish, mature and then fall into decadence. Such theories may sometimes be too deterministic; they might well have failed, for example, to predict...
Americans must beware, however, of looking for decadence in the wrong places. The things that can make the nation decay now are not necessarily what we think of when we say decadence: they are not Roman extravagances or Baudelaire's fleurs du mal, or Wilde's scented conceits. Nor, probably, do they have much to do with pornography, license or bizarre sexual practice. It is at least possible that Americans should see the symptoms of decadence in the last business quarter's alarming 3.8% decline in productivity, or in U.S. society's catastrophic dependence upon foreigners...
...sense of decay arises also from all of society's smoking frictions of rapid change, the anxiety caused by a sense of impermanence. The nation's creative forces, however, remain remarkably strong - in the sciences, for example, where achievements in physics, mathematics, biology and medicine rank beside anything so far accomplished on the planet. Before anyone tries to use too seriously the awful and thrilling word decadence, he ought to distinguish between the customary mess of life and the terminal wreckage of death...