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'Into Eternity': Effort to store nuclear waste Printer friendly page Print This
By G. Allen Johnson
SF Gate
Sunday, May 29, 2011

Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen, appearing in his documentary "Into Eternity," discusses the complexity of nuclear waste.
Photo: International Film Court

"I told the crew in the beginning: We have to think of this as a science fiction film that's shot today. I want the audience to experience a kind of afterworld, in a sense."

So says Michael Madsen - the Danish conceptual artist, not the American tough-guy actor - about his unique approach to his visually striking and thought-provoking documentary, "Into Eternity."

See the movie:  
What To Do With All The Nuclear Waste Environment and Nature. Axis of Logic
It is a peek inside an amazing underground facility being built in Finland to store nuclear waste, called "Onkalo" - the Finnish word for "hiding place." The project first broke ground in the 1970s and will not be completed for 120 more years. It is designed to last 100,000 years - the time it takes for nuclear waste to become safe.

"It's the first time we're knowingly building a post-human structure," Madsen said by Skype from Denmark. "This problem of a hundred thousand years, and how to act responsibly may exceed what is possible for us humans to grasp."

Consider that the Egyptian pyramids are less than 6,000 years old. The oldest known man-made structure, a stone cave wall in Greece, is 23,000 years old. "There's maybe an expectation that civilization as we know it will cease to exist within this time span," Madsen said. "Therefore we cannot expect people in the future to know what radiation is. Therefore (Onkalo) has to be able to operate by itself."

The Finnish and Swedish governments are collaborating on the project because they believe it would be irresponsible to keep hazardous nuclear waste above ground, as we do currently, a fact the Japanese have paid dearly for since the earthquake and tsunami in March. The Onkalos are designed to be invulnerable to above-ground dangers such as natural disasters, war or terrorism.

"If the expansion of nuclear energy were to stop today, then when this Onkalo is finished in 120 years and sealed off, you will need another 99 facilities of the same capacity" to store the rest of the world's waste, Madsen said. "But if conservative estimates of the continued use and expansion of nuclear energy are correct, you would need 500 such facilities."

Madsen approaches the film as if he were a man of the future who has stumbled upon Onkalo. His camera drifts and probes around the facility and the surrounding barren, wintry forests. His visual style recalls the chilly fetishization of technology versus nature in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Madsen also interviews scientists and philosophers. One of the unresolved debates about Onkalo is what, if any, markers to leave for future humans. Any known language might not be spoken then. Even if Onkalo is clearly marked as a dangerous place, human nature is to investigate, and those signs might be ignored, so one option is to leave no marker at all.

"I'm just wondering," Madsen said, "what this is telling us about our own time."

Starts Fri. at the Roxie Theatre, 3117 16th St., S.F. (415) 863-1087. www.roxie.com.

E-mail G. Allen Johnson at ajohnson@sfchronicle.com.

Source: SF Gate

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