Deep memory vs. deep secrets
Up at Popular Mechanics, my essay on Onkalo, Finland's extraordinary underground high-level nuclear waste storage facility. (Thus this post on deep secrets and deep memories is centered on a deep hole.)
I came to the story in a roundabout way, wondering how our perception of history would change if humans lived for many thousands of years, instead of at best little more than a hundred.
When we think of what's called geologic time, we tend to think that the observable world only ever changes slowly; far too slowly for any single person or generation of persons to see it happening. But that is not always the case. It's true that mountain ranges take millions of years to thrust upward, and millions to wear down again; and it takes millions of years for the tectonic plates to slowly swirl around the globe. But some huge geologic changes happen quickly, and some have even happened while people were there to watch. The fjords of Norway, for example, formed quickly at the end of the last Ice Age. So did the strange Channeled Scablands in Washington and Oregon.
What's more, in some cases memories of those events have survived to this day. The oral tradition of the Kalapuya tribe of Oregon, for example, includes a story about an enormous flood chasing their ancestors up a hill — quite possibly a reference to the bursting of Glacial Lake Missoula that created the Scablands. Even more amazingly, the neighboring Clackamas tribe gave the name Tomonowos, or Heavenly Visitor, to what most people now call the Willamette Meteorite. They evidently understood it came from above, perhaps through observations of other meteorites, even though it fell to Earth long before North America was settled by humans and far from its eventual resting place in the Willamette Valley. (It was in fact transported there by the same flood that created the Scablands.)
So, although the human lifespan is fairly limited, the lifespan of human memory can be vast. And where, as in the cases above, memories are kept alive for many thousands of years, they can offer rational explanations of distant events — of why the world is the way it is — rather than myth or speculation (or simple ignorance or incuriosity). In a sense, deep memories like these function like a single, vastly extended human life. And they retain much of their original integrity even after passing through hundreds of relays over the centuries, like a long, long game of telephone. Imagine the integrity that would be retained if the original observers were still around to tell us what they saw.
These musings got me wondering how we might design things (buildings, machines, texts) that last for many, many thousands of years, and whether anyone was actually trying to do so, and why; and that led me pretty quickly to Onkalo, which is designed to safely store highly radioactive waste for 100,000 years. It's one of the longest-term projects the world has yet seen.
But Onkalo is at heart an attempt to answer two basic questions: where can we safely sequester deadly toxins, effectively forever? And how can we make sure nobody ever digs them up? The first is a fairly straightforward engineering question. The second question forces considerations of human behavior, and of timescales far beyond the human experience.
The Finns' answer to it is elegant, bordering on poetic. Also wryly humorous. First you bury the stuff in really boring rock. Then you hide the door. Then you wait for everyone to forget it was ever there.
I actually think it'll work. Onkalo won't leave a trace. It's not a flood or a meteorite; its physical presence will be unmarked, unremarkable, and likely unremarked upon once the surface scars are healed over with new topsoil and vegetation. Onkalo's planners think the memory of it will quickly fade. On balance, that strikes me as a better bet — safer, wiser, likelier to pay out — than the American plan, which is to ring nuclear waste sites with vast, comically overwrought KEEP OUT signs. We might as well stick up signs saying DIG HERE. (Details in the PM article.)
But if, ten thousand years from now, someone does stumble across the doorway to Onkalo, they're going to wonder what was so important underneath harsh, unarable Oikiluoto Island that people dug a huge tunnel to get to it. And without the memory of the awful truth to warn them off, they may well decide to dig down and see for themselves. It's one thing to forget where the door is, and another to forget where it leads.
Image: Looking down a tunnel bore at Onkalo. From Posiva, the Finnish consortium constructing the storage facilities.
