Highly radioactive nuclear waste – how to keep it from oblivion

(Press-News.org) Sweden’s radioactive nuclear waste will be stored in a sealed bedrock repository for 100,000 years. It will be hazardous for a very long time. So how can we ensure that humanity does not forget that it is there? Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, have come up with a proposal for how to keep the memory alive over generations.

“We’re trying to do something that no one has ever done before. The person who eventually reads this might not even be human, but perhaps a kind of AI or something else,” says postdoctoral fellow Thomas Keating, who led the research project together with Professor Anna Storm at Tema T – Technology and Social Change at LiU.

What he is referring to is a 42-page, oblong document with a yellow cover, called the Key Information File (KIF). It contains the most important information that a future reader may need about the planned final repository next to the Forsmark nuclear power plant in Sweden. It is divided into three parts: summary, critical information and instructions for the future.

The document was produced on behalf of the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB). The idea is that it will keep the memory of the final repository alive. Although the repository is to be sealed and thus in theory inaccessible, accidental or intentional intrusion, technological failure or existential societal change cannot be ruled out. All of this makes it important not to forget what is buried there.

The researchers have tried to create a document enticing the reader to reread it and share it with others. They have used professional illustrators to make it aesthetically pleasing. While the text is easy to understand, there are mysterious characters on the cover. It is a coded message for the reader to try to solve. Through playfulness, the researchers want to create curiosity and enthusiasm. 

But language changes over time. So does the interpretation of images and symbols. The document therefore tasks future generations with updating the information and transferring it to new storage media if necessary. It also provides suggestions on how knowledge can be kept alive, for example by including it as a subject in school curricula or creating stories and other cultural expressions around it.

The researchers have named this method SHIRE (SHare, Imagine, REnew). It is an invitation to the reader to share the content and become actively involved in figuring out how it can be renewed so as not to be forgotten.

The Key Information File is the result of three years of work. It has been reviewed in scientific seminars and in workshops with representatives of clients, the public and industry organizations, nationally and internationally. Several countries, such as France and Switzerland, are working on similar documents for their final repositories.

The researchers propose an update of the document every ten years, but it is not clear who will be responsible for this in Sweden. Although SKB has financed the research project, they have clearly stated that they do not want formal responsibility but are willing to contribute in some form. Thomas Keating believes that one explanation for this is the long timeframe and that SKB is not meant to exist past the completion of the final repository. 

Very few people in the nuclear industry are working on the question of how to preserve the memory of nuclear waste. There are several examples of how when someone dies or retires and work on this issue is discontinued.

“Perhaps we need a whole new research area for this type of memory study. This could be something for the universities to develop in the future,” says Thomas Keating.

The idea now is that the document be kept at The Swedish National Archives. In addition, it has already been decided that it will be part of the major archiving project Memory of Mankind. It is an archive founded in Austria in 2012 which aims to preserve humanity’s collective knowledge for posterity on material that will last for thousands of years. 

“So it will be printed on ceramic tablets and placed in an old salt mine in a mountain in Austria,” says Thomas Keating.

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