What is the relationship between kitty litter, nuclear waste, and the global news media?

In the nuclear facility

One way you pack nuclear waste is to put it in a barrel of kitty litter. There are many materials used in kitty litter, but presumably the kind used for nuclear storage would be a clay rich in zeolites, a class of naturally absorbent material that absorbs radiation.

Fill a barrel with a zeolite, drop in the nuclear waste, and ship it to some rectangular U.S. state. This worked for a long time, but in February one of the barrels exploded underground in New Mexico at the massive Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) nuclear waste storage facility. Radiation alarms went off. In April, press releases and reports were issued, explaining how the WIPP performed in the face of the leak (not bad, apparently).

Then on May 5, an energy expert named James Conca proposed an explanation for the nuclear leak in a blog post at Forbes, where he is a Contributor. It looked likely to him that someone used organic kitty litter instead of the clay type. The barrels overheated and exploded.

If true, this would be spectacularly dumb, like building a stadium but replacing the cement with bread. The combination of nuclear waste and alleged government stupidity made for a perfect story, and it took about two weeks for the Forbes blog post to get noticed, digested, and excreted as national news. On May 30 the AP reported: “Officials are trying to determine whether a switch from inorganic to organic litter is to blame for a chemical reaction that caused an accident that contaminated 22 workers and indefinitely shuttered the plant.” Then the media trail goes cold. Radiation remains.

One observation: We mine kitty litter from the American Southwest, ship it east, pack it around nuclear waste, and send it back to the American Southwest. There’s such balance in nature.

In there, cats hang

Did kitty litter influence Internet culture?

Yes. Here is the sequence:

In 1947, Edward Lowe connected the odor-absorbent properties of fuller’s earth to the urine of cats. As a result, Felix catus was more welcomed indoors. Cat Fancy magazine was launched in 1965 (to the delight of Ayn Rand). The Internet came into being at the tail end of the 1960s. A poster of a cat “hanging in there” became very popular in the early 1970s. By 1985 cats were more popular pets than dogs. By the early 2000s: The Internet was huge, and pet-related media had become a staple of western culture; i.e. such films as 2001's Cats & Dogs (“Things are gonna get hairy!”), the Animal Planet cable channel, calendars, etc. There were 95.6 million cats kept as pets in the United States in 2012 and a recent poll found that 86% of Americans use the Internet.

In an excellent 2012 article about his quest to understand Internet cat culture, Gideon Lewis-Kraus proposed that cats rule the Internet because they are imperious while we are needy; we forever reach for them—and the further we reach, the more they retract. The New Republic thinks it’s because we’re “in awe of them”; Leigh Alexander put forth that “the cultures of the internet lend themselves much more naturally to the traits associated with ‘cat people’.”

All of this might be true, but there is also an Occams Razor-ish explanation: “Internet media” is our culture’s basement, a pile of ephemeral junk all glued together on a severe budget. Cat pictures are a perfect fit for that culture.

Say you are messing around on a web forum where people share pictures. And your cat is right there, indoors, thanks to Edward Lowe’s wonderful intuition. She is standing on the keyboard, in your way, staring at you with that blank look on her face like a soft furry shark. You don’t even need to stand up: Her body is small enough to fit in the frame of your cheap camera, which can take an infinite number of digital photographs at zero cost. Click! And again, and again. The only thing easier than taking a cat picture is taking a selfie. And if one of those hundreds of photos is particularly hilarious, you might share it. Then someone adds some words to it. And someone else, and so forth. Thus Internet cat culture.

Internet cat culture isn’t required to have a particular meaning, nor must our sharing of certain pictures represent anything fundamental about humanity’s need to connect to cats or each other. I propose that Internet cat culture exists because, collectively, we would prefer to remain in our chairs.

By remaining seated we end up with slideshows, lists, countless videos, collections, memes, and the like, not to mention Longcat, Grumpy Cat, Nala, Lil Bub, and the various overhyped viral media empirelets built upon kitpix. And sweet, beautiful Maru. Certainly Ed Lowe in 1947 could never have predicted the memes and clickbait that would follow, but he figured out a fundamental rule of business that applies today as well as it did back then. If you want to change the world, fill a bag with dirt and give it a name. The world will come running.