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

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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.

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Notes

  1. Plutonium can be a component of MOX (mixed oxide) nuclear fuel, which is usable in some nuclear power plants. After enrichment, the uranium recaptured through recycling can be used in conventional nuclear power plants. But only a small part of the material involved is actually reused.

  2. Acronym for “Agence Nationale pour la Gestion des Déchets Radioactifs” (French National Waste Management Agency). See http://www.andra.fr/international/.

  3. A geological survey of the site was carried out between 1994 and 1996. In 1998 the government chose the Meuse/Haute-Marne site to construct the underground laboratory following a public inquiry and after consultation with the municipalities in the vicinity candidate sites (which led to an authorization to construct and operate the facility in 1999).

  4. Geology alone is not the sole criteria for selecting the site of the future storage facility. Several sites were seriously considered because of their geological characteristics, but the final choice of Bure also had to do with social and political considerations (and the willingness of the local population to accept the site). The socio-economic dimension is often a decisive factor in the choice of a site, as Vari and Ferencz (2007) showed in the case of Hungary.

  5. Law of June 28, 2006 (no 2006-739). See ANDRA (2009).

  6. Nowadays the question of the reversibility seems less linked to retrievability than it was in the beginning of the twenty-first century. See NEA-OECD RWMC (2011). See also Markku Lehtonen (2010) for a comparison of the debates in France, Finland, and the UK on the issue of retrievability and reversibility.

  7. See for example the Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory across Generations (RK&M) program, Monitoring of Geological Disposal Facilities—Technical and Societal Aspects, NEA/RMW/R (2011, 72p).

  8. For example within the “Preservation of records, Knowledge and Memory across Generations (RK&M)” international focus group (2011, Expert group on Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory across Generations.).

  9. We can see a new attitude here: we should count on human institutions to deal with scientific and technological uncertainty and the inability to plan ahead for very long timescales. The vision of the future life of institutions, as presented by an overview report (NEA/RMW/R 2011) incorporating the work of social scientists and experts, seems to forget that conflicts and controversies lie at the heart of how institutions function and, especially of the collective memory processes. However, our experience in Bure shows us that, even if they are not present locally in great numbers, the activity of opponents and radical environmentalist is a matter of concern and has a significant presence in the collective representations of most of the people we met. The risk is to conceal that collective memory may be manipulated (Hartog and Revel 2001) and politically-determined.

  10. The proposal made by Luis Aparicio, head of social science research at ANDRA, of looking at the problem in terms of dilemmas, seems relevant: “An alternative demonstration would consist of approaching the memory issue in terms of dilemmas. And dilemmas, by definition, cannot be solved. Taking dilemmas seriously and assuming that we have to deal with an uncertain world, means to examine the whole range of possibilities, with their respective pros and cons, in depth and in a creative manner” (Aparicio 2011, p. 23).

  11. “Le rôle de l’ANDRA, est de faire des projections qui soient raisonnablement gérables sur le temps le plus long possible. Alors, où s’arrête le gérable, où s’arrête le possible? Ce n’est pas fixé aujourd’hui… La question à se poser c’est combien de temps ce peut être gérable”.

  12. “Sur un siècle, on peut concevoir, engager les choses, sur un million d’années, on ne peut pas!”

  13. CIGEO = Centre Industriel de Stockage Géologique (Industrial Geological Storage Center), which was supposed to be set up near the laboratory in early 2013.

  14. “300 ans, oui, même si… mais on a des traces de ce qu'il y avait il y a 300 ans. Avec CIGEO, on nous dit: 100 000 ans, 1 million d'années !!!! ça cause pas.”

  15. “Si on garde la mémoire 200 ans c'est déjà bien… après 200 ans, on ne s'adresse plus à notre civilisation.”

  16. “Trois siècles pour conserver la mémoire, cela ne pose aucun problème. Trois siècles, vore quelques millénaires, cela ne pose aucun problème.”

  17. “Le projet a commencé à être formalisé en 1991 pour aboutir en 2025, pour entrer en exploitation du projet en 2025. On est sur 30 ans pour que, de l’idée à l’acte, le projet se réalise, entre ceux qui l’ont imaginé, entre ceux qui ont conceptualisé le projet et la forme à laquelle il aboutira en 2025, sous sa forme définitive. Sur le projet, ceux qui ont accepté le projet ne seront plus là quand le premier colis ira au fond. Ce sont déjà les successeurs des élus qui ont accepté le projet qui reprennent le projet maintenant” “ici, pour construire le stockage, il faudra dix générations d’ingénieurs. Déjà ça, les gens ne peuvent pas se le représenter.”

  18. See for example Charton and Ouzounian (2008).

  19. There are also sapphire disks (that a manger in charge of memory keeping showed us), which can store information for (possibly) 2 million years (which opens up a horizon that is not manageable because it is not measurable in terms of generations or historical events).

  20. “Vous garderez la main, même quand l’ANDRA ne sera plus là. (…) On a créé l’OPE, et quand l’ANDRA mourra l’OPE continuera, … ce  sera leur terre, leur environnement…”

  21. “Si on met les déchets dans la couche géologique, c’est qu’on ne peut pas faire autre chose. Et c’est une forme d’honnêteté que de reconnaître qu’on ne sait pas faire autre chose.”

  22. Even though the samples that the OPE collects in the natural environment, and then stores, also reveal another aspect of contemporary society: the pretense of being able to control the environment (and nature), when in fact such control has never seemed as uncertain as it does at present.

  23. Filmed by Michael Mardsen in Onkalo’s geological waste storage site, Finland.

  24. That is why, for society, the difficulty (or impossibility) of accepting a permanent storage facility that is irreversible is perhaps (also) the expression of the impossibility of representing technoscience outside of the paradigm of progress (see Raineau 2012).

  25. We think we are controlling the future by building it, but as Adam and Groves (2007) point out, we are actually breaking the cause and effect link that connects us to the future.

  26. Nietzsche, F. [1873–1876]. 1997. Untimely Meditations [Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen]. In Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Daniël Breazeale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  27. Another example is Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” proposed as a means of warning people about the danger of the site.

  28. “Des Espaces Autres,” Lecture reprinted in Dits et Ecrits, vol. IV, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p.752–762, (translated as Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias), web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf.

  29. Olivier (2008, p. 265): “accumulations naturelles dans lesquelles ils sont immergés”.

  30. Olivier (2008, p. 71): “la mémoire ne se manifeste jamais d’elle-même, elle peut rester latente des millénaires, et elle peut tout aussi bien ne jamais se révéler, comme ces vestiges archéologiques auraient pu ne jamais revoir le jour. Il faut l’intervention d’un accident pour que la mémoire se redéploye”.

  31. The reference is to the idea of a “timescape” developed by Adams (1998).

  32. As Topçu (2013) shows in the case of France.

  33. As Laes and Schröder (2010) pointed out.

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  1. CETCOPRA (Centre d’étude des techniques, des connaissances et des pratiques), Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris, France

    Sophie Poirot-Delpech & Laurence Raineau

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  1. Sophie Poirot-Delpech
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  2. Laurence Raineau
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Correspondence to Laurence Raineau.

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Poirot-Delpech, S., Raineau, L. Nuclear Waste Facing the Test of Time: The Case of the French Deep Geological Repository Project. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 1813–1830 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9739-9

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