Nuclear Waste Facing the Test of Time: The Case of the French Deep Geological Repository Project

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to consider the socio-anthropological issues raised by the deep geological repository project for high-level, long-lived nuclear waste. It is based on fieldwork at a candidate site for a deep storage project in eastern France, where an underground laboratory has been studying the feasibility of the project since 1999. A project of this nature, based on the possibility of very long containment (hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer), involves a singular form of time. By linking project performance to geology's very long timescale, the project attempts "jump" in time, focusing on a far distant future, without understanding it in terms of generations. But these future generations remain measurements of time on the surface, where the issue of remembering or forgetting the repository comes to the fore. The nuclear waste geological storage project raises questions that neither politicians nor scientists, nor civil society, have ever confronted before. This project attempts to address a problem that exists on a very long timescale, which involves our responsibility toward generations in the far future.

Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative

“…For our focus on nuclear memory, this ontogenetic approach is significant because it attends to how acts of remembering are always subject to numerous historical accidents and events with the power to alter, or even entirely invert, messages communicated about nuclear things (Poirot-Delpech and Raineau 2016;Van Wyck 2004;Wikander 2015a;Arnold 2016). How, then, to theorise the relationship between nuclear matter and memory given this irreducible status of memory to a given 'thing'?…”

“…As Joyce (2020, 231) notes, rather than “suggesting how we can convey a perfect message from our present/ past to a future/present” what is instead needed are different sensibilities that allow “a way to imagine a future of contending common senses”. In this paper, we develop how geographers might contribute to this sensibility as something involving the production of alternative modes of expression that do not map onto common sense derived from contemporary anthropocentric and Western regimes of meaning-making and knowledge production (Burdon 2022; Povinelli 2021) – alternatives that would be capable of countering a recent tendency to conceptualise post-human futures using contemporary values inherent to a Western human ‘us’ (Weisman 2008; Zalasiewicz 2009).…”

Die Zukunft der Endlagerung: Was sind die Entwicklungen und Herausforderungen nach einer Standortentscheidung

“…An article on the French deep geological repository project Cigéo describes the coexistence of two forms of time in separate spheres: the manageable historical time of generations above ground and the geological time of deep storage below ground (Poirot-Delpech andRaineau 2016, p. 1826). The authors suggest that the gap between these two time horizons is apparently bridged by the Observatoire pérenne de l'environnement (OPE).…”

Political Mediation in Nuclear Waste Management: a Foucauldian Perspective

“…High-level waste is the most difficult to handle and manage, because the materials within this classification can remain radioactive and dangerous to human health and the environment for thousands (or in the case of some radio-isotopes even millions) of years. 2 Other examples that deviate from the universalist perspective (not explicitly drawing upon the work of Foucault) are Poirot-Delpech and Raineau (2016), who develop an anthropological perspective on the different dimensions of time involved in developing a geological repository in France, and Schröder (2016), who draws upon insights from science and technology studies (STS) to advance an interpretation of the development of geological disposal as a form of social experimentation.…”