Onkalo
On Thursday I happened to turn on the TV and was "greeted" by a couple of Finnish men staring at the camera occasionally saying something about nuclear waste. Intrigued I sat down to see what it was all about. The editing of the documentary was very special, many interesting camera angles and strange seemingly out of context shots of moose hiding behind trees. The interviews were done in a way that enhanced the finnishness of the scientists. Although I missed the start, the thread that held the documentary together was a message written to people 100,000 years into the future warning them not to enter the nuclear waste storage facility that was being built at Onkalo in Finland. It's an amazing project to store nuclear waste 400m underground in tunnels that will be secure for 100,000 years. As one of the scientists pointed out, above ground is to unstable. People have to be employed to maintain the buildings, wars can happen, governments will change. 100,000 years is a very long time. Underground things are different. The rock at Onkalo has been exactly the same for millions of years, in geological time 100,000 years is not very long.
Tags: Topic 8, nucleat waste