The Future of Nuclear Waste

This weekend, I read Rosemary Joyce’s The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material (2020). It’s a pretty good book and I’ll almost certainly add it to my syllabus for the course I want to teach in the spring on “Things” (or something similar).

The book examines the efforts to develop a system of marking the location of nuclear waste deposited in deep storage designed to last for 10,000 years. The two major waste repositories, the WIPP site in New Mexico and the now stalled Yucca Mountain site, would receive some kind of marking which would discourage curious humans from excavating the site and releasing the radiation. Joyce’s work examines the assumptions that the two committees assembled by the US government used to make their arguments on the best way to mark out these sites. To generalize a complex process (and a complex and dense assemblage of documents) the two main considerations. The first thought it might be possible to mark out these sites through certain archetypal forms of expression that can serve as warning to humans even 10,000 years in the future. The other approach looked to past forms of monumentality and well-preserved objects and sought to incorporate durable material and forms into any project. Other considerations included the use of language, certain arrangements that would express warning or discourage curiosity, and even those that might ensure that might express the dangers of the site through the use of mutated vegetation.

Joyce was not especially interested in whether any of these proposals would work. After all, it is impossible to know how human society 10,000 (or even 2,000) years in the future might understand the monuments left behind. Instead, Joyce explores the common sense, cultural assumptions, and sometimes bizarre misapprehensions of archaeological knowledge that led various experts (although none of them are archaeologists) to assume that fired clay tablets might be the best way to communicate a message over millennia, that granite is the most durable stone available, and that past societies constructed monuments with the expectation that they would persist for thousands of years.

Joyce offers a detailed and nuanced primer for how sophisticated (and at times, just basic) archaeological knowledge throws into relief the assumptions that guide how we understand the past in the present. I was struck by Joyce’s thoughtful discussion of the tension between how archaeologists understand ancient monumentality and non-archaeologists engage with what we often call “heritage.” As someone who works on a local historic preservation commission alongside members of the community as well as historians, architects, archivists and other specialists, the issue of permanence or at very least persistence comes up in discussion. This often reflects an assumption that things worth preserving in our community have a kind of material persistence or permanence that connects them physically with the past. This is reinforced by an interpretation of National Register of Historic Places standards that emphasize “integrity.” While the National Park Service interprets integrity in a relatively broad way that goes well beyond the physical or material character of the building or structure, there is a tendency to conflate the material or even architectural integrity of a building with its ability to convey its historical significance. 

This, in turn, contributes to an assumption that the persistence of the old buildings and features into the present connects the present with the intentions of the past builders. (One can see how connecting the intention of those seeking to mark out the site of nuclear waste disposal with future groups would be a vital concern for the committees studied by Joyce). Of course, the understanding that people in the past and the present worked to maintain and adapt buildings to a wide range of needs complicates any view that past structures preserve a kind of physical integrity that persists over time (even if this is a narrow and overly literal reading of the National Register criteria). That said, it also pushes our committee to view more favorably structures built of materials perceived as being durable. In this situation, we sometimes imagine that the durability of the material itself communicates the persistence of the builder’s intentions. This, in turn, creates the illusion that we can experience a past that is not complicated by myriad episodes of subsequent interventions. 

The role of materiality, our interest in origins and intention, and our tendency to inscribe the (experience?) of the pastitselfon durableobjects created the conditions that shaped the various approaches to the future on the committees tasked with marking out the nuclear waste deposits. While the book will not break any new ground for people who think about heritage, materiality, and the past in the present, the careful attention to the work of these committees will serve as an important reminder that these matters are not settled (even if they feel settled among archaeologists) and our discipline continues to serve an important role in informing not just what we know about the past, but how we mediate between the past, the present, and the future.