Living with Nuclear Bodies: The Spirituality of Fermentation

Abstract

Nuclear contamination challenges assumptions that harm can be contained through technological control, political borders, or bodily separation. Across the Asia-Pacific, radioactive exposure moves unevenly through racialised, gendered, and colonial histories, rendering some bodies more vulnerable to ecological violence than others. Nuclear regimes continue to depend upon theological logics of purity, sacrificial exclusion, and protected innocence. This article develops a spirituality of fermentation through Asian eco-feminist theology and the Korean practice of sakhim. Fermentation becomes a practice of sustaining wounded life through endurance, permeability, and communal care. From this spirituality of fermentation, I develop the concept of Vital Fluidity as an ethical and theological framework for understanding how life continues through shared vulnerability, where bodies, nourishment, and histories remain deeply entangled. The article contributes to intersectional debates in theology, religion, gender, and ecology by approaching contamination through relation rather than separation. Under nuclear conditions, ethical responsibility emerges through practices that hold grief, contamination, memory, and nourishment together within shared existence. Fermentation therefore becomes a practical theological model for living with nuclear bodies.

1. Introduction

In 2023, supermarket shelves across South Korea were rapidly emptied of sea salt following announcements by the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) regarding the release of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. Prices rose by more than 40 per cent in the months that followed, prompting the South Korean government to release strategic reserves to stabilise the market (Yeung et al. 2023). Although regulatory authorities repeatedly insisted that the treated water met internationally recognised safety standards, the public response revealed anxieties that exceeded scientific calculations of acceptable risk.

The rush to secure sea salt reflected concerns about contamination and the vulnerability of bodies sustained through oceans, food systems, and everyday practices of care. These anxieties emerged most visibly within domestic spaces, particularly among women who were socially expected to manage household nourishment and everyday bodily care. Responses such as storing salt reflected forms of embodied ecological knowledge produced through these gendered responsibilities rather than through abstract scientific discourse alone.

Within Korean culinary culture, salt functions as a medium of preservation and fermentation, a practice known as sakhim. Salt enables cabbage to become kimchi and soybeans to become jang, allowing nourishment to endure across time. The stockpiling of sea salt harvested before the release reflected anxieties that once radioactive contamination enters the ocean, the marine and ecological systems that nourish human bodies may themselves become wounded. Nuclear contamination moves through ecosystems, kitchens, bodies, and relations of care.

These concerns emerge within the geopolitical reality of the Korean Peninsula, which exists under what may be described as a double nuclear condition. To the north, security remains shaped by the presence of nuclear weapons and the political logic of deterrence, where safety is imagined through fortification and containment. To the east, the ongoing aftermath of Fukushima presents a different form of nuclear threat characterised by dispersion and circulation through marine systems. Radioactive materials move through ocean currents, food chains, and bodies, crossing political and biological boundaries without restraint. These conditions expose the limits of systems grounded in fantasies of separation and control.

Nuclear contamination destabilises distinctions between the safe and the toxic, the protected and the exposed, and the human and the more-than-human. As radioactive materials move across bodies, oceans, and generations, they reveal the extent to which all life remains materially intertwined (Neimanis 2017). Contamination cannot be fully externalised or confined elsewhere. It enters shared systems of water, nourishment, metabolism, and care. At the same time, vulnerability to exposure remains unevenly distributed through gendered labour, racialised histories, biological vulnerability, and colonial systems of power. Nuclear harm is therefore not only a technological problem. It is also a theological and ethical crisis concerning whose bodies are protected, whose bodies become sacrificial, and whose suffering becomes socially bearable.

This article argues that nuclear contamination exposes the theological logic embedded within ostensibly secular systems of containment, where purity, sacrifice, and exclusion continue to organise responses to ecological harm. Drawing on Asian eco-feminist theology and Korean practices of sakhim, this article develops the concept of Vital Fluidity. The concept takes shape through reflection on fermentation as a practice of sustaining life within wounded ecological relations.

As a Korean theologian working within Asian eco-feminist theology, I approach sakhim through everyday practices of food preparation, nourishment, and communal care. These practices continue to shape responses to ecological uncertainty while carrying memories of survival, adaptation, and relational responsibility. This article draws on eco-feminist and practical theological approaches that begin with lived experience, embodied practices, and the concrete conditions of everyday life. In this context, sakhim serves as a theological resource for understanding contamination, vulnerability, and ecological responsibility under nuclear conditions. The concept of Vital Fluidity emerges through reflection on these practices in dialogue with Asian eco-feminist theology and contemporary reflections on nuclear contamination.

The article first examines how nuclear contamination wounds the relational processes through which life is sustained. It then turns to Asian eco-feminist understandings of vitality before developing sakhim as a spirituality of fermentation. Building on these discussions, it introduces the concept of Vital Fluidity and explores its theological implications through the notion of the Nuclearised Sorrowful Eucharist. The article concludes by reflecting on ethical responsibility and care under conditions of ongoing ecological contamination.

2. Nuclear Contamination and Wounded Relationality

Nuclear contamination grounded in separation, stability, and control disrupts ethical and theological frameworks. Radioactive materials move through oceans, food chains, atmospheres, and generations, unsettling distinctions between the human and the environmental, the local and the planetary. Under nuclear conditions, the crisis extends beyond simple exposure to hazardous substances. It concerns the relational processes through which bodies, ecologies, and communities sustain life together. Asian eco-feminist theology becomes significant here because it approaches vitality as a relational condition emerging through interconnected bodies, environments, and temporal flows.

Two concepts are central to this understanding of vitality: Shakti and Chi. Emerging from South and East Asian theological traditions, both understand energy as inseparable from relational existence. Shakti refers to the generative vitality through which the material world is sustained, while Chi emphasises breath, movement, and circulation as conditions of life. In both traditions, life depends upon interaction, permeability, and transformation.

Within eco-feminist theology, Gnanadason develops Shakti as a critique of development paradigms which are grounded in extraction, technological mastery, and economic expansion (Gnanadason 2005). Writing from postcolonial contexts shaped by ecological destruction and gendered violence, she links the exploitation of land to the regulation and exhaustion of women’s bodies. Modern systems of development sever energy from the relations that nourish life, rendering both nature and care disposable. Shakti therefore names the conditions through which bodies and environments remain capable of sustaining one another.

Nuclear contamination exposes the fragility of these conditions. Radioactive isotopes persist across ecological and generational timescales, affecting soil, water, food systems, and the temporal rhythms through which nourishment becomes possible. Harm appears not as temporary disruption followed by recovery, but as contamination embedded within bodily existence itself. Under nuclear conditions, the earth affirmed by Shakti as generative bears the wounds of contamination that persist across generations. The question is no longer simply whether life continues, but whether wounded relations can still sustain life.

A similar tension emerges within Kim’s theology of Chi. Identifying Chi with the movement of the Holy Spirit, Kim understands vitality as something sustained through circulation rather than stability, allowing relationships to endure under conditions shaped by war, displacement, and trauma (Kim 2011). Chi names the movement through which fragmented life continues breathing. Yet radioactive contamination renders circulation deeply ambivalent. Radioactive materials also move continuously across bodies and ecosystems, crossing political and biological boundaries with ease. This movement does not nourish life. It results in accumulation without transformation.

Read together, Shakti and Chi reveal the limits of responding to nuclear harm through containment alone. Nuclear conditions demonstrate that relationality itself can become wounded, and that circulation may cease to sustain life in restorative ways. The Korean concept of gi-makhim provides a language for naming this condition. Combining gi, meaning vital energy, and makhim, meaning blockage, the term describes a state in which circulation becomes obstructed and vitality stagnates. In medical contexts, gi-makhim refers to bodily constriction, where breath and energy can no longer move freely. Applied to nuclear contamination, it names a planetary condition in which energy remains active but can no longer be metabolised within ecological systems. Radioactive materials persist as indigestible matter within the earth’s metabolism.

Containment alone cannot resolve this condition. Responses focused solely on spatial management fail to address the interruption of the processes through which bodies, environments, and communities nourish one another over time. Contamination circulates. Wounded relations endure.

At this point, sakhim, understood as fermentation, becomes theologically significant. Fermentation begins from exposure, instability, and wounded materiality. It works through sustained relation, controlled exposure, and slow transformation across time. Read alongside Shakti and Chi, sakhim offers a way of remaining with wounded life without relying upon fantasies of purity or repair. Endurance becomes the ethical and spiritual labour of sustaining relationships within wounded worlds. The following section therefore examines fermentation as a spiritual practice for living within irreversible contamination.

3. Fermentation as Spiritual Practice

Nuclear contamination transforms the question of survival into a question of how life may continue within enduring wounds. Radioactive exposure persists across ecological and generational timescales that exceed ordinary frameworks of repair. It remains materially active long after political attention fades, moving through oceans, food systems, and bodies through slow and often invisible forms of accumulation. The crisis therefore concerns more than technological management or environmental remediation. It concerns how nourishment, responsibility, and communal life continue when restoration to purity is no longer possible. Within this context, sakhim emerges as a spiritual discipline for remaining with wounded existence.

Within Korean ecological and theological thought, practices of care have often been articulated through the concept of salim, a term associated with household labour and the sustaining of everyday life (Poling and Kim 2012, p. 114). Salim involves cleaning, restoring, and repairing relationships and environments so that bodies may continue living together. Yet much of this work has historically been carried out within domestic spaces and often by women. Activities such as preparing food, preserving kimchi and jang, and sustaining everyday household life have frequently remained undervalued despite their importance for communal survival. As Gebara argues, much of the work that sustains life remains socially invisible, even as it sustains communities and ecosystems (Gebara 1999). Salim therefore draws attention not only to practices of care, but also to the forms of labour through which care is made possible.

The desire to sustain and restore life also shapes many environmental responses to ecological crises, particularly those oriented toward remediation and recovery. Such approaches presume that contamination can eventually be removed and that disrupted systems may return to stability within humanly manageable timescales. Nuclear contamination unsettles these assumptions. Radioactive isotopes such as carbon-14 and tritium remain active across centuries and millennia, altering the temporal conditions under which care takes place. Restoration alone becomes insufficient. The challenge concerns how responsibility may continue within worlds where wounds persist across generations. In this sense, sakhim extends care into conditions where recovery and closure can no longer be fully imagined.

As a practice of fermentation, sakhim begins from instability, exposure, bitterness, and decay. It works through sustained relation and slow transformation across time. As Katz notes, “fermentation is the transformation of food by various bacteria, fungi, and the enzymes they produce” (Katz 2012, p. 1). Substances are held within carefully maintained conditions that allow gradual change to occur. Korean earthenware jars (onggi) provide one such environment. Their porous structure permits circulation while protecting contents from excessive exposure, enabling fermentation to unfold through controlled permeability. Transformation emerges through duration, attentiveness, and the labour of holding unstable matter together.

Sakhim offers a form of mature containment distinct from nuclear containment systems. Nuclear governance seeks absolute separation between contamination and protected life. Fermentation accepts permeability while negotiating exposure. Its aim lies in sustaining conditions under which fragile matter may continue nourishing bodies. Fermentation therefore resists fantasies that harm can be removed, hidden, or sealed away. Bodies survive through ongoing negotiation with instability and vulnerability.

The distinction becomes clearer when fermentation is contrasted with rotting. Rotting describes uncontrolled decomposition leading toward disintegration, whereas fermentation involves a disciplined engagement with the process of something breaking down. Microbial transformation is neither fully controllable nor entirely chaotic. It requires patience, attentiveness, and the maintenance of relational conditions across time. The onggi therefore functions not only as a practical vessel, but as a material-spiritual technology embodying a different ethic of care (Sayers 1987). Transformation occurs through remaining present to processes that exceed immediate human control.

The spiritual dimensions of sakhim also extend beyond culinary practice. Within Korean psychological and theological discourse, sakhim has been used to describe ways of living with han, the condensed sorrow associated with violence, historical trauma, and structural oppression (Choi 2005, pp. 91–93). Grief is approached as something carried within communal and relational life across time. This form of containment neither romanticises suffering nor erases it. Pain is metabolised relationally through shared endurance (Ko et al. 2004, p. 1011). The significance of sakhim lies not only in its symbolic value, but also in the practices of food, care, and communal life that sustain it.

Under nuclear conditions, this spirituality becomes ethically urgent. Radioactive contamination resists both denial and resolution, remaining materially active within ecologies and bodies long after disaster is declared manageable. Sakhim asks how wounded life may be carried without erasing memory or normalising harm. Just as fermentation requires vessels capable of sustaining unstable mixtures across time, nuclear conditions require communal and theological forms capable of holding grief, contamination, and ecological trauma without expulsion or denial.

Three movements shape this spirituality of fermentation. Endurance names the practice of remaining present to contamination across generations. It should not be confused with the acceptance of suffering as inevitable. Rather, it is the practice of remaining with wounded life while continuing to remember, care, and respond to the conditions that sustain harm. Memory preserves awareness of the unequal histories and ongoing costs of nuclear modernity. Transformation concerns the gradual reshaping of relational life through shared vulnerability and care.

Sakhim therefore articulates a spirituality for living within contamination. It does not promise recovery or escape from wounded conditions. It sustains ethical and spiritual life through endurance, attentiveness, and communal care. Fermentation becomes a practical theological model for sustaining wounded bodies and wounded worlds through the labour of remaining in relation.

4. Vital Fluidity: An Ethics of Shared Vulnerability

The spirituality of fermentation developed through sakhim raises a further question. How does life continue when contamination can no longer be removed, repaired, or contained? Nuclear contamination does not simply expose the interconnectedness of bodies and environments. Exposure circulates through shared systems of water, air, food, and metabolism, making fantasies of bodily autonomy and environmental separation increasingly difficult to maintain. Under nuclear conditions, contamination becomes inseparable from the problem of relationality itself.

Vital Fluidity emerges from this question. Nuclear contamination reveals the wounds carried within the relations through which life is sustained. Waters, foods, bodies, and ecologies continue to nourish life while also bearing contamination, grief, and unequal vulnerability. Under such conditions, care and responsibility remain necessary as communities seek to sustain life amid ongoing contamination. Vital Fluidity is an ethical framework that names the work of sustaining life within wounded ecological relations when contamination cannot be fully removed, vulnerability remains unevenly distributed, and restoration cannot be fully imagined.

Vital Fluidity builds upon existing insights into the material interconnectedness of bodies and environments. Concepts such as trans-corporeality have demonstrated that bodies are never isolated entities but exist through ongoing exchanges with the more-than-human world (Alaimo 2010). Vital Fluidity takes this recognition seriously while attending to the particular conditions created by nuclear contamination. It asks how life may be sustained when these relations are marked by enduring exposure, ecological grief, and unevenly distributed vulnerability. From this perspective, the significance of relationality lies not only in recognising that bodies are materially entangled, but also in considering how communities continue to care, remember, and assume responsibility within those entanglements. Vital Fluidity draws attention to the ongoing labour of sustaining life within wounded ecological relations through the practices of salim and the fermentative spirituality of sakhim.

This shift carries theological implications. Modern systems of nuclear governance continue to rely upon containment, separation, and purification. Safety is imagined through borders, quarantines, and technological barriers designed to isolate contamination from protected life. Yet radioactive materials move across political boundaries, ecological systems, and bodies without restraint. Separation therefore becomes unstable as a model of protection. In practice, it often relocates vulnerability onto others.

This critique does not reject efforts to reduce exposure or protect vulnerable communities. Such measures remain necessary. Yet radioactive contamination cannot be fully separated from the ecological relations through which life is nourished and sustained. Once contamination circulates through oceans, food systems, and bodies, the challenge extends beyond containment to questions of how communities continue to care for wounded life.

Vital Fluidity offers a different ethical response to this displacement. Bodily permeability becomes the basis of ethical responsibility rather than a failure of protection. Care depends upon remaining in relation within altered material conditions. It is here that salim and sakhim converge. Restoration and endurance become interconnected practices. Care becomes the labour of sustaining life where repair remains incomplete.

Fermentation clarifies the relational significance of this ethic. Salt, microbes, air, and organic matter remain in continuous interaction within the porous environment of the onggi. Nothing is completely sealed off or expelled. Transformation emerges through regulated relations and sustained proximity. Fermentation therefore offers a model of coexistence grounded in permeability rather than isolation.

Vital Fluidity begins from the recognition that bodies are materially implicated in one another. Nuclear materials enter bodies through air, food, and water, circulate metabolically, and return again to shared ecological systems. Isolation cannot eliminate exposure. It redistributes harm unevenly across populations and environments. Contamination circulates. Bodies remain connected.

The historical treatment of the hibakusha following Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals the violence embedded within these logics of separation (Miyamoto 2017). Survivors of radiation exposure were frequently treated as socially contaminated bodies whose presence threatened fantasies of a clean and protected social order. Their exclusion did not arise from moral failure, but from the visibility of bodily permeability itself. Nuclear governance relocated anxiety onto already wounded bodies, turning exposure into stigma.

The distinction between the “pure observer” and the “contaminated victim” becomes difficult to sustain once bodies are understood as part of shared systems of exposure. Vulnerability is not an exception to relational life. It is one of its material conditions. Ethical responsibility begins where bodies remain entangled and unable to secure innocence through distance from harm. This reframing transforms trans-corporeality from a source of anxiety into a site of ethical commitment. Care becomes organised through coexistence rather than exclusion, and vulnerability becomes a shared condition of ethical life rather than a marker of failure or contamination. Such an ethic calls for forms of community grounded not in purity or innocence, but in the shared reality of vulnerability and contamination.

The notion of a “communion of the soiled” gives theological expression to this ethic. Communion here refers to a willingness to remain present to what is wounded, compromised, and materially entangled. Against aspirations toward cleanliness and separation, this communion insists that ethical life begins within contamination itself. To live with nuclear bodies is therefore to cultivate forms of relation capable of carrying vulnerability, grief, and ecological wounding.

5. The Nuclearised Sorrowful Eucharist

The Eucharist becomes one of the theological sites where shared vulnerability under nuclear conditions is materially embodied. Eucharistic communion has traditionally signified participation in divine life through shared elements such as bread, wine, water, and salt. Under nuclear contamination, however, these elements can no longer be understood as environmentally neutral. The substances through which bodies are nourished carry histories of ecological exposure inseparable from acts of eating, preserving, cooking, and sharing food. Communion itself takes place within conditions of wounded materiality.

The concept of the Nuclearised Sorrowful Eucharist names a sacramental form of life shaped by implication within wounded ecological systems. Nuclear contamination intensifies this condition of implication. Radioactive isotopes circulate across oceans, ecosystems, and generations, moving through food chains and metabolic processes. Harm no longer remains geographically defined. The domestic table becomes one of the sites where nuclear contamination enters bodily life.

Across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions, bread and wine function as material signs through which Christians remember, encounter, and participate in the mystery of Christ (Commission on Faith and Order 1982). Under nuclear conditions, this sacramental logic takes on a sorrowful dimension. Sea salt, central to the practices of sakhim and fermentation, now carries residues of radioactive contamination. Long associated with preservation and nourishment, salt comes to embody the contradiction of the nuclear age. It sustains life while carrying the memory of ecological rupture.

Radioactive isotopes move through marine ecosystems and enter human bodies through acts of consumption. Survival itself becomes entangled with wounded planetary systems. Under these conditions, sacramental participation can no longer presume uncontaminated materiality. The substances that nourish human bodies continue to sustain life while bearing the traces of ecological contamination. Communion therefore persists through wounded material relations rather than through fantasies of purity. The concern is not that Eucharistic communion loses its sacramental significance. Rather, communion takes place within a world where the waters, foods, and bodies that sustain life also bear the marks of ecological contamination.

The Nuclearised Sorrowful Eucharist names this condition of embodied implication. To eat is to participate in metabolic systems shaped by contamination, where environmental harm is materially absorbed and carried within bodily life across generations. Eucharistic participation therefore becomes an acknowledgment of shared vulnerability within wounded ecological relations rather than a movement beyond them.

This sacramental condition intensifies the ethical claims developed through Vital Fluidity. Bodies remain materially implicated in one another. Separation cannot function as the basis of ethical care. Nuclear governance continues to relocate vulnerability elsewhere through containment, borders, and social exclusion. The Nuclearised Sorrowful Eucharist interrupts this logic by insisting that wounded material flows are already shared. This theology does not romanticise suffering. It attends to the conditions under which life now continues. Communion takes place through proximity to wounded ecological realities.

Within this framework, everyday practices of salim acquire renewed theological significance. Cooking, preserving, and sharing food become acts carried out under conditions of uncertainty and ecological anxiety. Women, who have historically borne much of the labour of sustaining household life, perform a domestic liturgy of endurance. Through ordinary acts of care, toxicity, grief, fear, and nourishment are metabolised within familial and communal relations. This labour becomes one of the primary ways in which responsibilities for wounded existence are materially enacted.

The Nuclearised Sorrowful Eucharist therefore names a sacrament without purity or closure. What is shared is a wounded metabolism binding bodies together across species, geographies, and generations. Eucharistic communion becomes a commitment to remain ethically present within wounded conditions.

Seen in this light, sakhim also functions as a communal and sacramental vessel. Fermentation depends upon containers capable of holding unstable mixtures across time. Communal life under nuclear conditions likewise requires theological and social forms capable of holding grief, contamination, and historical trauma within shared existence across time. Vital Fluidity extends the spirituality of fermentation into the collective labour of sustaining relational life within wounded worlds.

6. Conclusions

The concrete seawalls lining the coast of Fukushima reflect an enduring faith in solidity as a means of managing nuclear harm. They express the desire to secure safety through separation, containment, and technological control. Yet the ongoing leakage surrounding Fukushima exposes the limits of this logic. Under nuclear conditions, contamination does not remain fixed in place. It moves through oceans, atmospheres, food systems, and bodies. Contamination circulates. Bodies remain porous.

This article has argued that living with nuclear bodies requires an ethical and theological imagination capable of remaining with wounds that persist across bodies, environments, and generations. Nuclear contamination exposes the theological assumptions embedded within systems of containment, where purity, sacrifice, and exclusion continue to organise responses to ecological harm. Even within secular forms of nuclear governance, safety is often secured through the displacement of vulnerability onto already exposed bodies and environments.

In response, this article has developed the concept of Vital Fluidity through Asian eco-feminist theology and the Korean practice of sakhim as a spirituality of fermentation. Fermentation offers a way of living within wounded ecological conditions through endurance, permeability, and shared vulnerability. Sakhim shows how life may continue through forms of relation capable of carrying instability and exposure across time.

Vital Fluidity reframes ethical responsibility under nuclear conditions. Responsibility emerges through proximity to wounded life rather than distance from vulnerability. Contamination is not simply an external environmental problem. It shapes the relations through which collective existence is sustained. At the same time, vulnerability remains unevenly distributed. Nuclear exposure continues to follow racialised, gendered, and colonial histories in which certain communities bear disproportionate ecological risks and sacrificial burdens. Women responsible for feeding households, preserving food, and sustaining everyday bodily life often carry the intimate labour of metabolising ecological anxiety within domestic space.

Any theological response to the nuclear age must therefore attend not only to material entanglement, but also to the unequal structures through which vulnerability is organised and made survivable. Similar questions arise wherever harm becomes part of the ordinary processes through which life is nourished and sustained, whether through microplastics or chemical pollution.

For faith communities, this may involve cultivating practices of care that acknowledge ecological vulnerability rather than denying it. Greater attention to the material conditions through which life is nourished and sustained, including food, water, bodies, and ecological relationships, may become an important task of theological formation. Such practices may help communities name ecological harm while sustaining hope and responsibility within wounded worlds (Malcolm 2026).

The Pacific Ocean continues to circulate while carrying toxicity, grief, nourishment, and life together. A theological imagination adequate to this reality cannot depend upon fantasies of uncontaminated existence or final restoration. It requires practices of care capable of remaining ethically present within wounded worlds. Fermentation does not heal the nuclear world. It teaches how wounded bodies may continue nourishing one another through memory, endurance, and the labour of remaining in relation amid irreversible contamination.