Into Eternity and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant - Moisey, Andrew

Considering the Desire to Mark
Our Buried Nuclear Waste
Into Eternity and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
andrew moisey
I am now in this place where you should never come. We call
it Onkalo. Onkalo means “hiding place.” In my time it is still
unfi nished, though work began in the twentieth century, when I
was just a child. Work would be completed in the twenty-second
century, long after my death. Onkalo must last 100,000 years.
Nothing built by man has even lasted even a tenth of that time
span. But we consider ourselves a very potent civilization. If we
succeed, Onkalo will most likely be the longest-lasting remains of
our civilization.
Michael Madsen, director and narrator of Into Eternity
Perhaps it is reasonable for the Finns to worry that in tens of thousands
of years, after no one left on earth speaks any known language,
someone will be trodding through their frozen forest and
exhume, half a kilometer beneath its granite bedrock, all the poison
they hid there. This will be radioactive waste from Olkiluoto
Nuclear Power Plant, an industrial park that quietly puffs away
alongside the beautiful west coast of Finland. The poison from
Olkiluoto will be lethal for a hundred thousand years, roughly