How to Communicate over 100,000 Years? Nuclear Memory and the Management of the Future

The question of how to manage nuclear waste into the distant future is currently being addressed in Sweden and Finland through the construction of so-called 'final repositories for nuclear waste'. The purpose of these repositories is to safely store away the highly radioactive, and potentially deadly, leftovers of nuclear energy production underground in a geological burial chamber for the entire time that these substances remain harmful to organic life -- a time period that, according to planners, must stretch at least 100,000 years. However, in proposing to bury nuclear waste across 10 millennia, planners encounter a very specific problem: What kind of communication (language, signs, markers, etc.) is suitable for communicating over such a long time horizon, a period of time where no human message has ever persevered and no human construction has ever remained intact? Drawing on my research project commissioned by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB), I present some approaches to communicating what I term 'nuclear memory' -- that is, memory of nuclear waste repositories -- into the far future. Doing so helps address the urgent issue of safeguarding nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel), which intersects with a recent geographical interest in the management of distant earth futures.

 

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