Nuclear waste repository site rock samples on display at Olkiluoto Visitor Centre, Finland. Photo: Thomas Keating.

Conference reports THE TIME & TEMPORALITIES OF NUCLEAR WASTE

This paper focuses on the notions of “time” and “temporality” of nuclear waste, as well as the different time horizons implied by practitioners of nuclear waste storage. In doing so, the paper develops understandings of a key problem defining nuclear waste storage in C21: namely, how to communicate information and memory over the 100,000 years that highly radioactive nuclear matter remains a threat to organic life. This question is notable not least because it involves the proposition of communicating with “deep time” future scenarios in which contemporary representational systems are ineffectual, and even the existence of the “human” is in doubt.

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2025:1, pages 123. Full paper only online
Published on balticworlds.com on April 7, 2025

 Abstract

Through a roundtable discussion, this paper focuses on the notions of ‘time’ and ‘temporality’ of nuclear waste, as well as the different time horizons implied by practitioners of nuclear waste storage. In doing so, the paper develops understandings of a key problem defining nuclear waste storage in C21: namely, how to communicate information and memory over the 100,000 years that highly radioactive nuclear matter remains a threat to organic life? This question is notable not least because it involves the proposition of communicating with ‘deep time’ future scenarios in which contemporary representational systems are ineffectual, and even the existence of the ‘human’ is in doubt. The practitioners and researchers in this discussion facilitate understandings of this problem through a number of critical matters of concern for the social sciences – from environmental semiosis, speculative philosophy, post-humanism, new materialism, nuclear semiotics, landscape art and aesthetics, future literacy, to nuclear waste at a regulatory level. Distinctly, the discussion advances not only how environmental things might help establish allies in the communication across vast time scales, but also considers the aesthetic techniques for imagining untimely modes of future-thinking that remain open to recuperation today – including through geo-ontological modes of thought, ecosemiotics, or the associated powers of nuclear environments to mobilize forces of aesthetic expression.

 Introduction by Thomas Keating

Participants in roundtable: Dr Thomas Keating (Linköping University, Sweden); Prof Anna Storm (Linköping University, Sweden); Prof Marcel Danesi (University of Toronto, Canada); Dr Vincent Ialenti (California State Polytechnic University); Prof Rosemary Joyce (University of California, Berkeley, USA); Dr Leila Dawney (University of Exeter, UK); Dr Francesco Mazzucchelli (University of Bologna), Italy); Dr Mikael Jensen (retired analyst for the Swedish Nuclear Waste the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, Sweden); Dr Jean-Noël Dumont (retired head of memory program at The French National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management (Andra), France)

In November 1991, a group of 13 experts met in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the United States to review and produce messages communicating to the future the existence of an underground nuclear waste burial site located a few hundred miles south towards the state border with Mexico. This nuclear waste repository, named the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, was originally designed to store nuclear fuel 10,000 years into the future – a time horizon that approximates the period these materials are anticipated to remain lethal to organic life. Split into two groups (Team A & Team B), and drawing on collective expertise from astronomy, psychology, geology, archaeology, semiotics, and architecture, the experts formulated a series of proposals a for creating messages and nuclear warning signs – known as ‘markers’ – that could exist on the surface of the earth across deep time periods. As their report notes, these “markers must be able to convey complex information, not just about wastes hidden from view, but also about the hazards of radioactivity as a function of time”.[1] Attempting to express the hazard of nuclear waste in relation to the passing of time, a key purpose of the markers was to act as a multi-millennia warning sign communicating the existence of radioactive materials buried underground – a task complicated by the requirement that these signs must be able to function in the future over multiple millennia, a time horizon wherein contemporary human language and semiotic systems can no longer be relied upon.

What these expert groups discovered, amongst other things, was a key problem defining any attempt to create a warning sign for deep future time horizons – be these an entire landscape designed to appear threatening or inhospitable, or a series of obelisks containing Rosetta-stone-like time capsules[2]  – namely, that markers always remain connected, albeit often subtly, to the evaluations and perceptive capacities of a given human subject and its perception of future time.[3] Yet through their documented concepts, images, and discussions, the expert groups helped advance a profound question: how to create warning signs no longer grounded in the subject’s contemporary common sense evaluations, but instead as something that remains open to any-subject-whatsoever in the distant future whose evaluations and modes of thinking may be quite different from today? In raising some of these existential challenges, these expert group discussions continue to shape research into nuclear waste cultures across the humanities and social sciences. From conceptualizations of deep time,[4] nuclear waste futures,[5] nuclear semiotics,[6] and nuclear memory,[7] to name but a few areas, the legacies of these nuclear waste marker discussions continue to inform thinking on the time and temporalities of radioactive materials that endure into the distant future.

Intersecting these conversations, this paper aims to advance the temporal problem of communicating the existence of nuclear waste burial sites over thousands of years through an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion.[i] Like the expert groups in the 1990s, this discussion draws on a variety of expertise, including from archaeology (Joyce), geography (Dawney, Keating), history and nuclear heritage (Storm), semiotics (Danesi, Mazzucchelli), and nuclear regulation and policy (Dumont, Jensen). Yet differently, this roundtable focuses more concertedly on how the need to communicate memory, information, and archives of nuclear waste repositories into the future can be understood as a particular problem that is of note for the social sciences and environmental humanities.

Two key themes animate the discussions. First is a focus on the theories of time and temporality informing current plans for underground nuclear waste storage of nuclear waste – including a discussion of the suitability of different time horizons (10,000 years, 100,000 years etc.) for managing these materials into the future. Here the paper intersects with wider debates about how time and time temporality itself becomes collectively understood through specific expert communities – albeit communities often marked by certain kinds of conflict and contestation.[8] In the context of nuclear waste, one of these expert communities includes the Nuclear Energy Agency who in recent report note that the problem of managing and communicating memory of permanent geological repositories over 100,000 years requires a varied “toolbox” of methods capable of responding to various kinds of future uncertainty.[9] Such a toolbox suggests the need for innovations within social sciences[10] – especially innovative approaches to thinking different possible nuclear waste futures that may be radically different from the present. It also demands thought of the way radioactive materials are most often imperceptible from the standpoint of the human subject by inhering durations of time and temporality that remain stubbornly in excess of human sense.

Second, and relatedly, includes wider discussions about the politics of nature,[11] naturecultures,[12] and new materialism,[13]particularly through discussion of the way the future management of nuclear waste through time is designed to variously interact with the lifeworlds of multiple non-human things. In previous research, Storm[14] has emphasized how the agency and aesthetics of clay and granite are invoked as ‘safe’ vehicles and mediums to store nuclear waste into the distant future. Research has also demonstrated how nuclear waste and security systems draw on a vast environmental network that mobilizes human and non-human things through affective infrastructures of pre-emption.[15] As this paper advocates, focusing on the future management and governance of nuclear waste into the future also raises critical questions about the claims made by governmental and scientific communities today in their attempts to “harness temporalities” for the management of future contingency.[16]

Of course, the relationship between future management and non-human agency is not limited to questions of nuclear waste. Hennig[17] considers the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as an “expression of the Anthropocenic indistinguishability of human culture and non-human nature” that attempts at once to both provide future food security for ‘humanity’ as it currently is organized, and also to act as a future archive accounting for the diversity of earthly things in itself. As an example of an archive designed to endure in the face of environmental crisis and nuclear warfare, the Global Seed Vault thus acts to reproduce “future-making practices inherent in the work of ex situ cold seed storage, with the normative, entropic view of the relationship of species diversity with time that arises from the field of biodiversity conservation more generally”.[18] In distinction to previous research, in what follows the discussion advances not only how environmental things might help establish archival allies in the communication across vast time scales, but also considers the forms of care and the aesthetic techniques for creating untimely imaginaries of distant nuclear waste futures. These imaginaries have wider significance for the social sciences insofar as they are informed by and contribute to cognate research into geo-ontological modes of thought,[19] ecosemiotics,[20] and the associated powers of nuclear environments to mobilize forces of aesthetic expression.[21]

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Thomas Keating: One of the things that seems important in thinking about the relationship between nuclear waste, time, and temporality is a common problem that is at once practical and speculative. On the one hand, this problem is practical in a sense that must think about the enduring materialities of radioactive spent fuel that will exist in permanent, geological repositories in the ground in Finland and Sweden – and potentially other countries. On the other hand, it is a speculative problem because it involves thinking and communicating across distant time periods – 10,000 to 100,000 years into the future – in which there may not be a human species to speak of, possibly no recognizable forms of language and semiotics, and that even raises the prospect of futures populated by unanticipatable artificial life and non-human entities.

Perhaps I can begin with Jean-Noël Dumont to kick things off: I would like to get a sense of which time scales or time horizons you are most interested in for your work. Who is the subject of nuclear waste you want to speak to, and how far in the future should nuclear semiotics and memory practices try to communicate? Is it one, 10, 100 or 1000, 10,000 or 100,000 years?

Jean-Noël Dumont: Thank you for the question, Thomas. To me, the main focus is on what is required by regulation, that is, on the first centuries after closure, mainly. That is what may be called the ‘medium term’. But the long-term perspective gives an impetus, a momentum, to that. But still, there is already much to do on the first time scale, in the ‘short term’, before closure. This is the field of knowledge management – it is not really what we are discussing here today, but we have this issue:  there, we have lots of information to provide to future people in charge of the repository, over a period of time that lasts decades. And, anyway, we will begin with the short term going into the long term. So, we would have a task to deal with these time scales, short and medium term, with a view on the long term.

TK: Mikael – you mentioned explicitly the role of time scales and the way that, in nuclear waste management practices, there is sometimes compromise and attempts to just ‘do our best’ in the face of incomprehensibly long time scales.

Mikael Jensen: Yes, I think that is the way the wind is blowing in regulatory work. You can see a general acceptance away from ‘strict limits’, which are difficult to explain and not well understood simply, towards ‘the best you can do’. And, of course, there is also a question of how much money you have in the beginning. With the marker project, there were people who essentially wanted to punish the nuclear industry by giving them a big task. But there are some ways where you may want to make optimization. And in the so called ‘Nordic project’, in the appendix of this I wrote a chapter about optimization similar to how we do an x-ray: a life-against-cost for approved methods. So, you can do something like this. But my guess would be that in the regulatory landscape we will move more towards the best available technique, doing your best and assuming that there is no obvious solution that is better.

TK: On the question of what it means to ‘do one’s best’ in the context of managing geological repositories for nuclear waste, one of the things I noticed that intersects a number of people’s research – I am thinking here about Vincent Ialenti’s deep time thinking, Marcel Danesi’s engagement with the folkloric in memory communication practices, Rosemary Joyce’s geo-ontological inquiry – is the sense we might turn to the geological to understand different durations of time and to think the future of nuclear waste differently. These approaches seek to overcome the sense that deep time is simply ‘unthinkable’ and something the human cannot possibly grasp. So, there is a sense of the ‘geo’ disrupts the conventions we have today about the way we imagine in the future. Marcel: you mentioned the idea and role of geo-mythology within this work. I wonder if you want to give a sense of whether you see geo-mythology is one possible way to grasp different frames and senses of the future of nuclear waste?

Marcel Danesi: I think your question is absolutely vital to this whole situation and discourse, because as we move away from geographical locales as part of our cognitive identity more to the virtual domains, free of the constraints of political geography and even cultural geography, that is going to become I think the key question. (By the way, let me interject something a little bit facetiously: I believe that this is the first time I have been part of an atomic priesthood today. We could have also had artists and poets as well as part of this discussion, because I think they have a lot to say).

Geo-mythology to me was a discovery. Let me give you an example. Researchers in Norway looked at the painting Scream by Munch and found that this is not something that is just an emotional reaction to something. Rather, the painting is a depiction of the Krakatoa explosion: the sky was painted to reflect not only the effects of that explosion, but the human emotional reactions to it, which ended up in the face of the Scream. Incidentally, some task forces on nuclear sites did versions of that Scream painting which did not work because they looked like cartoons – in my view, defiling the original Scream painting. In the broader sense, looking at myths and ancient art and so on, maybe it is a kind of aesthetic geography or geo-mythology that takes into account human understanding of these things beyond scientific understanding. And, as others in this group have already argued, we need the scientists as well. We could also use the input of computer scientists in all this. Can we devise an algorithm that can take the relay system, project it into the future and allow it to adapt itself? It would be its own self-contained atomic priesthood with no human emotions involved in any stakes, political stakes, into the system. I do not know how – I am just opening it up as a question. I think if Thomas Sebeok were alive today, he would take that into account. I am not supporting artificial intelligence in itself, but as a tool for helping us in our, not only temporality aspect of all this, but also our future cognitive aspects of it.

TK: Let me open this up to Vincent Ialenti here: what role do you think geo-mythology, or the notions of the geological and the earthly, have in helping us think with deep time futures of nuclear waste repositories?

Vincent Ialenti: As a cultural anthropologist, I approach this problem differently than, say, a geologist or natural historian. When recounting geo-mythologies, they tend to position the human story within deep time. In that framing, deep time becomes the backdrop context in which the human dramas of everyday life are contested: deep time becomes the ground and the human becomes the figure positioned inside of it. In my book, Deep Time Reckoning, I inverted this figure-ground relation. I did so by instead exploring how deep time lives inside the human. This brought into view an alternate set of geo-mythologies.

The representations of deep time I studied existed as assemblages of interconnected artifacts, ideas, and imageries that were created by humans in sociocultural settings. I engaged with this ethnographically by immersing myself among a unique band of scientists, engineers, and systems analysts who routinely ponder the fate of long-lived radionuclides such as uranium-235, which has a half-life of over seven hundred million years. These experts were working on what, in the mid-2020s, will likely become the world’s first operational deep geologic repository for used-up – or ‘spent’ – nuclear fuel. When developing safety assessments of this underground facility, they pondered far future glaciations, earthquakes, floods, landscape evolution, and human and animal population shifts. They developed forecasts of happenings tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years from now. They did so within the framework of particular cultural practices, particular organizational hierarchies, and particular enculturations in workplace training. Inhabiting these complex webs of sociality, my field informants conjured up technoscientific representations of distant future worlds. Visions if deep time emerged from human handwork and vice versa.

This figure-ground inversion changed the time horizons of deep time itself. During my fieldwork, deep time was something produced in the short term. It was an assemblage of artifacts generated within the shallow temporal matrices of everyday office life, project schedules, report deadlines, human career cycles, intergenerational successions of recruitments and retirements, and so on. Visions of distant future worlds emerged from banal workplace timeframes, organizational tempos, and momentary dramas of sociality—for example, from interpersonal workplace squabbles for project funding. And funding often determines form: the character and quality of the research product that materializes is often a function of the funding one is able to acquire to produce it. The same went for nuclear waste experts’ systems analysis models of deep time. The level of granularity a repository safety assessment was able to achieve was often a function of the amount of time and funding allotted to the research work behind it. Such decisions were, of course, not made across the millennia, but over the course of mere hours, weeks, days, months, and sometimes years. Again, deep time emerged from shallow time.

I decided to go in this interpretive direction when, a few months into fieldwork, I noticed that many field informants were repeatedly talking about an expert who died about 10 years ago on a slip on the ice. In my book, I give this expert the pseudonym Seppo. Seppo was a systems analysis modeler working on the safety assessment project. He had a reputation for being an authority in the project, but not giving those working with him any big-picture systems knowledge about the broader endeavor. He merely delegated tasks to his subordinates without mentoring them. So, when Seppo died suddenly, it sent the safety assessment project into temporary disarray. Colleagues had to open up his computer and look for clues about his lost thinking. They had to scour margin notes in the piles of reports he left behind. When I showed up almost a decade later, Seppo’s colleagues were still saying ‘what would Seppo do here?’ when troubleshooting technical problems. They were still summoning little traces or threads of his thought. These were the spectres of Seppo; the afterlives of his expertise.

Deep time, in my case study about Seppo, was revealed to be the product of the momentary timeframes of a single human life. It showed the fragility of deep time thinking as it manifested within specific human life-ways. It revealed deep time knowledge as something that needs to be preserved and cultivated by society—secured and kept safe. Ethnographic explorations like these can help us rework how we think about deep time, our place within it, and its place within us.

Rosemary Joyce: I think Vincent is pointing out something important about the way that we think about the ‘geological’. Just using that term is actually a way of bringing these things into a human scale of comprehension. As I think Vincent said, a natural historian would position the human within geological time, but geological time is not actually geology. It is a human framing of phenomena. What interests me about the geological, that I think has some relevance to the kinds of materials that we are talking about and certainly relevance to the kinds of sites that are being put in, is that the geological cannot be temporalized in that way. Geological time is these ‘chunks’, but they are for us, they are not for the mountain. The mountain started back at some point, and we can actually argue about origin points, and it continues and it will continue. For me the interesting thing about the enduring nature of the mountain is that it changes – it events – just like humans do, but its tempo is different.

I think if we switch from our idea of ‘long’, ‘medium’, ‘short’ – these things that are actually built into all of the temporality sequencing that archaeologists like me use, and geologists use – and instead talk about ‘temporal duration’, about things that might be more useful in thinking about endurance, we start shifting our language of temporality away from the ‘measurement of chunks’ to the ‘way that processes unfold’. And, for me, what happens when you do that is it becomes visible – that a lot of our language of temporality, the geological language certainly, the archaeological language certainly, but I also think planning language – is about freezing chunks of time so that they become inactive on some level. So, that certain kinds of things will not happen during them. And this is related to some of the things I think people are saying about the more recent acceptance of the idea that projections into the future, and that prediction is actually impossible.

MD: May I add, as a linguist, that the actual discussion we are having now, which is in English, is based on the fact that English has a present, a past, and a future tense. It would not be possible in the Hopi language, for example, which would consider what we just discussed, including myself, a moot point. One of the dialects of Italian – I was born as an Italian linguist, my PhD was in Italian dialectology – the Neapolitan dialect, does not have a future tense. Their whole behavior, their whole approach to geography, to geology etcetera, is ‘you live in the present’. Some people misinterpret this and say ‘why are these Neapolitans the way they are?’. It is probably that they do not have a conceptualization of the future because they have not been raised with that verbal tense. So, I do not want to knock down what we were doing here today, but this discourse is possible only because we are speaking English or other Indo-European languages. I would love to have seen this discourse spoken in Hopi which, of course, is impossible. I am not trying to be argumentative. I am just trying to shed light on what this whole thing is all about, what it has raised. And I still think it is an important topic because most of the problems come from people who speak with a verb tense that has a future tense in it.

TK: I would like to pick up on something Marcel mentioned about the role of art and artists in all of this. I have a question for Leila: what is the role of art and aesthetics in these practices of thinking the distant future in nuclear waste or of communicating memory of nuclear repositories? We can think of lots of examples – everything from Andra’s The Blue Zone concept, to the ceramic tablets used in Martin Kunze’s Memory of Mankind archive project, we can think of films like Into Eternity which Mikael was part of. All of these examples evoke something of the role of the aesthetic and artistic in stimulating this kind of intergenerational practice of communicating memory of nuclear waste repositories. Leila, what role do art and aesthetics play in your view?

Leila Dawney: We do have to think about this with an understanding of the social institution of art, and the practices of commissioning, production and reception of creative works, which tend to reflect the economics and cultural mores of particular times. For example, some of the commissions that Rosemary Joyce has spoken about reflect the dominance of land art at a particular moment, which is no longer as fashionable as it once was. Commissioning art and commissioning craft works, or any of these aesthetic forms, they can provoke interest, they can provoke thought, definitely. However, they always operate within quite limited institutional framings. I do not see these practices as a panacea, or as being the way to move a debate forward particularly, other than to provoke public discussion in particular, mainly elite, areas of public life. So ultimately these are kind of niche gestures, that work within a narrow context, and perhaps instead what we need to think about here is: ‘who actually has the power to decide and to alter the kind of temporalities, or the kind of ways in which we approach this problem, and how can we let different kinds of voices in’? If we are talking about bringing in the ‘geontological’, I don’t think that the commissioning of elite Western artists does not really does that. We need to think about how to incorporate marginalized temporalities, different understandings of ontology, and the relationship between life and non-life, into the institutional frameworks that are actually making decisions, and that actually have money and power behind them. For instance, the concept of deep time is being thought about a lot in Silicon Valley circles, but the way in which it is being articulated reflects a partial and narrow understanding of deep time. While the works that you mentioned can do much to stimulate debate, generate public interest and inform publics, their narrow institutional framings mean that I don’t think we should overstate the role that art and aesthetic forms can play in actually dealing with these significant matters of planetary concern, nor should artists be shouldered with this responsibility.

Francesco Mazzucchelli: I wanted to respond to Professor Danesi’s example of Italian dialects that do not have a future tense. One point here is that they can imagine a future – so, the discussion is complicated: to not have a future tense is not to say one cannot imagine it.

MD: Sorry – let me say: the imagination of the future is different from its conceptualization in language. That is the difference I was trying to note.

FM: I agree, because I come from a similar semiotics background, and I have read your books as well. I agree with you. But I was following this trail of thought and – let me be radical for a moment – it is quite surprising that the first formulation of the problem of nuclear waste was ‘how do we warn future generations?’. The first thing we should think about for the future is, more radically, ‘how do we make sense out of the future?’. This is because we are treating nuclear waste as a ‘bad thing’, as a dangerous thing that we are just living on the planet with. That is not the only problem with nuclear waste.

Nuclear waste, and any kind of waste, is a kind of object that is generated by many actors, many networks and powers of geology, economics, and many other things. But the problem of warning the future, which has been followed for many years, has made us forget that we are talking about temporality and time scales. The first objection that I always get when I talk about this topic is ‘why do you care about 10,000 or 100,000 – especially, when the Earth is going through climate crisis or climate change?’. This is the problem. We have a duty to make sense now about the problem of nuclear waste for the next generation. This is why the problem of warning the future is, of course, always there but it is kind of a background problem.

VI: To respond to Marcel’s point about Hopi and future tense: Finnish does not have a future tense. This was an interesting detail in my ethnography of Finnish deep time reckoning practices, as they manifested in the context of the Onkalo nuclear waste repository safety assessment project. However, while Finnish doesn’t have a future tense, its speakers still do have grammatical maneuvers for talking about the future. For example, one can speak in the present tense and talk about tomorrow by saying, ‘Tomorrow, I do this’. Or one can speak in the conditional mode. This is a rather oblique way of talking about the future—but I think  it contains a kernel of wisdom. Why make strong declarative statements about the future when you can instead riff off a spectrum of potential future happenings in future nows? Now I’m wondering: in Hopi language, do speakers do something similar? Perhaps they do not have a future tense, but have grammatical navigation equipment for talking about the future. I would love to know what those are.

MD: I discussed this in a book I did on linguistic relativity. They do have that, but it is not put in morphological or syntactic form, which does affect the way we look at sequences and that is an enormous difference. I should say, by the way Vincent, that I used your book in one of the sections of my own book, to discuss the connection between cognition and geo-mythology as a form of language.

The ancient myths did not have a future – they just did not! But ancient myths are still used today as projections of what humanity has become. I think it is not a matter of whether a tense is in the present or not; it is a matter of how we imagine things. That is why I met with artists: they embed their imagination into canvas. Language needs poetry for that to occur beyond its intent. So does narrative. That is not poetry, which is what I meant by all these maneuvers in order for temporality to be based on historicity. That was Sebeok main claim: in order for temporality to be understood, you have to look at the historicity of temporality within the culture you are in. Absolutely fascinating this idea of deep time, and I like the idea that it can be extrinsicated and put back in form – but it is done through semiosis, not casually or in any other way.

RJ: Just to second the idea that Hopi and other specifically Amerindian languages do actually have a capacity to talk about futurity. What I think is interesting here is that there is a question, on the one hand, of certainty and facts, which relates to our question of whether the future is a predictable temporality. And on the other hand, there is also the question of what William Hanks calls a ‘referential field’. So, how deictics in language actually define the scope from the speaker to a phenomenon, and that varies with different languages. That would be part of what we would want to think about when we are thinking about the lack of congruity in what native speakers of different languages might be taking for granted, taking what I call in my book the ‘common sensical’, which concerns where the uncertainty of the future begins. For some speakers it might be getting quite close to the moment of speaking. For other speakers it might be much further off. I think there is some work that we could do about the actual linguistic nature of temporality – in particular, the relationality of temporality, which would be helpful in thinking about just the anthropocentric part of this.

TK: This discussion on the role of the artistic and the linguistic, and thinking about questions of different Amerindian forms of linguistic temporality, relates somewhat to the different kinds of positionings of knowledge within language as a mode of memory preservation. This would be a good moment to bring Anna Storm into the discussion – could you give us a sense of the role the artistic and linguistic play in practices of atomic heritage, and nuclear memory communication, that you have been developing in your work?

Anna Storm: Yes, this question of language and art and how they in different ways direct our attention and understanding connects closely to what I have been working on in relation to atomic heritage. Although still an emerging field, atomic heritage practices so far are marked by a striking separation between bright and dark narratives, using very different linguistic and visual framings. The bright narrative generally highlights individual and state effort resulting in successful innovation and technological breakthroughs, often set in a nationalistic and white-collar laboratory framing. The dark narrative, on the contrary, is rather a universalized story of nuclear catastrophe with victims but no clear responsible actor, visualizing damaged bodies and abandoned landscapes. The nuclear waste and the communication to future generations about its hazards forces us – I believe – to overcome this simplified dualistic narration and see the existence of a radioactive Earth as a condition we all share, and for which we have to care. In this, as Leila also emphasized, marginalized voices and marginalized temporalities need to be incorporated to challenge existing hierarchies for who is able and allowed to describe our lifeworld. Furthermore, and now echoing Rosemary, the relationality of temporality encourages us to explore less anthropocentric approaches – even if the idea of deep time in itself might be conditioned by everyday life circumstances as Vincent said. A less anthropocentric approach may perhaps – as I have suggested in one of my texts – make us see bedrock and bentonite clay not only as technical components in a future geological storage space for high-level nuclear waste, but as non-human allies in this endeavor. Along a similar line, I have proposed, by burying our waste, that we in fact hand over the responsibility for its long-term safeguarding, eventually including the memory communication, to other organisms, who are to live in the nuclear landscapes, in the nuclear natures we have created both underground, on the ground and in the atmosphere.

RJ: To avoid hijacking an interesting conversation about temporality, I will say very briefly that the notion of landscape is central to my new book project where I pick up on arguments that have been made that the Western US in particular, is seen – in US culture – as an empty space; this goes along with the frontier ideology. This is also seen in the land art project that had their moment, which treated space as empty and therefore open to being marked. My current work aligns both the military projects and the land art projects as particular conceptualizations of the West as not just ‘empty’, but also basically ‘lifeless’. This is countered by the actual perspectives of the people who live there. This is one of these places where I think art projects, not of the land art type but of other types, have been quite successful in bringing the ‘livingness’ of this spatial scale into understanding.

MD: On this problem of thinking long time scales, in my view Sebeok’s problem has never been solved because the problem shifts from era to era. I think in trying to establishing a semiotic view, I am not trying to promote my own discipline but there is really no better way to approach the human mind and how it understands things like landscape and geological time and so on, as to how it represents it, with its signs, with its texts, with its many sign forms; in other words, as semiosis. Across time semiosis remains the same: it has to remain the same or we would change as a species in our mind. It is the representation that causes paradigm shifts.

I do not know if there is an answer to this – but then raising the question, as even perhaps as Plato understood it, the dialectic that this causes is, in itself, part of understanding the problem. The word ‘problem’ did not exist even in ancient mathematics. It was ‘proposition’ that first existed in mathematics: ‘I put something forward and let us see if it is consistent with what we know’. When ‘problem’ came into being, starting in mathematics, it was something that necessitates a solution. It is that mindset that we all have. If there is a problem, there has to be a solution. I think in the dialectic, it is the search for a solution that is interesting in itself and can only be possible.

TK: Speaking of what constitutes a ‘problem’ dialectically, or environmentally, one thing that emerges here is how the problem of communicating something of nuclear waste repositories over potentially vast time scales, which is often accused of being an act of profound human hubris, also reflect strange forms of care for an ‘Earth’ that actually exceeds the human species. This problem invokes a strange form of ‘caring’ for not just humanity in climate change, human continuation in light of ecological collapse, or the continuation of the next generation of your family, but care for an Earth where the human might not exist.

FM: I agree with you and the question of ‘warning’ the future says a lot about our society. The problem is about warning, of course, but it is also about something else. Central to semiotics is the sense that there are no stable meanings: meanings of old words in process are always dynamic, always subject to change. This important semiotician of culture, Juri Lotman, used to say that we have fundamentally one mechanism for long term memory, which is culture – nothing else. It is culture: culture as different forms of preserving texts, codes, also destroying texts and codes. Texts are central and can survive and pass between generations, and to talk to a society, to talk to a community and to change the meaning adapting to a society.

Probably it is the moment in which the basics of nuclear semiotics could be re-discussed, because it is not just a matter of ‘warning’. It is a matter of studying not just the content of the message, but the intentional position of the actors that are involved in this process. The preservation of waste has a meaning, but the meaning is not in the waste. Rather, meaning is given and attributed by a society.

It is the right moment to put this waste question in relation to other ecological problems that we are experiencing right now. The facts we are not alone on this planet. I like a lot Rosemary’s engagement with Kohn’s books How Forests Think – I think this is the right moment for this kind of engagement.

LD: On the question of care, this problem is very much evidence of a form of ‘care’ that extends beyond the now. It is concerned with a certain love for the Earth. But I think there is also a question about the extent and scale of the gestures of care that we are seeing, because what we are seeing is such a change in the way that we are thinking about these ideas within such a tiny, recent time scale. What we are actually dealing with is a problem that extends so far. This is the point I was making in relation to art and cultural production: we are still so presentist. We will be dithering and thinking about this for hundreds of years. So, yes, behind all this is definitely a care for the world, but how that care comes to be articulated down the line is something that I think we will disagree and change our minds about for many years. In other words, this is an ongoing, durational problem, and not one whose solution will be set in the present moment. Perhaps the most pressing question for nuclear semiotics is not the warning, but the nurturing of an ethos of care for the world that underlies these debates, and an expansion of our temporalities of concern.

[End of transcript]

[I] Note: For context, the impetus for organizing this roundtable emerged in the context of an online workshop on the theme of ‘The Time and Temporalities of Nuclear Waste’. This workshop was conducted within a project led by Anna Storm and Thomas Keating, and commissioned by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel & Waste Management Company (SKB) from 2021 to 2024. The focus of this project was on the writing of a Key Information File – a document that provides essential information on a so-called ‘permanent’ geological repository for nuclear waste under development in Forsmark, Sweden. The Key Information File for SKB is a central part of Sweden’s long-term strategy for informing future generations about the existence of a permanent geological repository for nuclear waste in Forsmark. Sweden and Finland are the only nations in the world to have committed to the use of permanent geological repositories for highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. Long-term storage plans have also been discussed by certain other nuclear waste producing nations, but at the time of writing are mostly focused on surface-level and/or temporary waste storage. This roundtable discussion occurred just a few weeks after the landmark decision by the Swedish government in 2022 to grant an environmental license to build a nuclear waste repository to last 100,000 years.

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[2] Ibid.

[3] Mikael Jensen, “Conservation and Retrieval of Information – Elements of a Strategy to Inform Future Societies about Nuclear Waste Repositories: Final Report of the Nordic Nuclear Safety Research Project KAN – 1.3.” Nordiske Seminar- og Arbejdsrapporter (1993): 596.

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[21] Mario Verdicchio, “Radioactive Futures of Environmental Aesthetics,” Studi di estetica, no. 24 (2022).

 

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