UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Gamma Fields: The Industrial Legacy We Cannot Afford to Forget

2025-04-28

By Claudio Pescatore

What if the true monuments of the nuclear age are not vaults, vitrified blocks, or warning markers—but fields of invisible light?

  • Gamma radiation is insidious. It leaves no ruin, no ash, no wound you can see. You don’t need to touch it. You don’t need to breathe it in. You simply pass by—and it passes into you. No trace is left on the soil. But a trace is left in you. And when the next person passes, they too receive the signal. Yet the source remains—unchanged, unweakened.
  • Most poisons are spent as they harm. Gamma radiation is not. It accumulates elsewhere, silently, without diminishing its source. A kind of ambient inheritance.

In a recent study, I calculated the gamma radiation field unleashed by humanity’s Uranium-238 (U-238) legacy. The results show that this field is not temporary. It is already present, slow to mature, but geologically assured and radiologically significant, beyond safety thresholds.

  • Mill tailings scattered across continents emit gamma radiation through uranium’s progeny. This signal will slowly fade over the next half a million years—but it will reach a baseline, unsafe value and will continue indefinitely.
  • Meanwhile, depleted uranium stockpiles—which emit almost no gamma today—are quietly maturing. From a few thousand years onward, their gamma output will rise steadily, eventually overtaking significantly that of tailings, peaking in two million years, and continuing unabated into geological time.
  • Most U-238 residues lie close to the surface—mill tailings, depleted uranium (DU) stockpiles, weapons testing sites, contaminated soils from mining and from exploded DU munitions. Even when their radiation does not cause immediate harm, it defines a long-term environmental signal whose meaning we have barely begun to grasp.

This raises questions not only of science, but of ethics, inheritance, and imagination:

  • What does it mean to leave behind a hazard that grows in potency over time?
  • How do we warn future beings of a danger concealed in ordinary soil or dust?
  • Should gamma radiation be seen not only as threat, but also as a marker of human agency?

Nuclear waste lasts a long time. But U-238 isn’t just persistent—it performs. It changes. It regenerates. It returns. And surprisingly, we don’t call it waste. We call it an industrial by-product.

And now we are not just leaving behind a signal—we are leaving a body.

  • About 4.5 million tonnes of U-238, mostly in oxide form, now reside in uranium tailings, DU, and spent fuel. It is a real, physical legacy—not symbolic, not speculative. This body must be put away—not forgotten, but deliberately placed and traced. Shielded, marked, and remembered.
  • We can still act. We can treat uranium’s gamma legacy not as an afterthought, but as a defining part of our industrial inheritance. This won’t undo the past—but it may shape how future generations understand what we’ve left them.

We often speak of the nuclear age as bracketed—confined by Cold War dates or the operational lifespan of reactors. But its material consequences are just beginning. Care begins by acknowledging and tending to what endures.

Claudio Pescatore
Claudio Pescatore is a member of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University

Read more: http://www.nukleonika.pl/www/back/full/vol70_2025/v70n2p031f.pdf 

Miras Gelecekleri

2025-04-14

Miras Gelecekleri is “Heritage Futures” in Turkish!

I was interviewed by Erman Ertuğrul for the popular Turkish website arkeofili.

In the interview I am talking, among others, on how I got into archaeology at age 10 and then, much later, into future archaeology.

See for the English version: https://arkeofili.com/on-future-archaeology-an-interview-with-cornelius-holtorf/ and for the Turkish version: https://arkeofili.com/gelecek-arkeolojisi-uzerine-cornelius-holtorf-roportaji/

Thank you, Erman!

New article on urban transformation, heritage and social sustainability

2025-04-03

Bebyggelsehistorisk Tidskrift (Nordic Journal of Settlement History and Built Heritage): Urban transformation, heritage processes and social sustainable futures by Ulrika Söderström & Anders Högberg.

Short summary:

In this study, we use three case studies to discuss heritage processes as future-building practices. Through examples from urban regeneration processes in three Swedish cities, we discuss how these processes have contributed to social sustainability. The case studies are the Caroli neighbourhood in Malmö (transformed 1967-1973), the Valnötsträdet neighbourhood in Kalmar (transformed 2008-2018) and the ongoing transformation of Kiruna city. Our findings show that the cultural heritage processes activated in urban regeneration processes do not always promote socially sustainable future-making practices. We conclude that an engagement in different forms of future-making is crucial for heritage processes to contribute to long-term sustainable urban development. We suggest that this requires a way of thinking and acting that includes change and transformation. Our findings are conceptualised in a model that we hope can be used to understand heritage processes as future-making practices in urban transformation projects.

Bebyggelsehistorisk Tidskrift is a Nordic forum for research and debate on the history of the built environment. It is the Nordic region’s leading academic journal on the history of the built environment. The periodical presents the latest research on the history of the built environment, and also provides a forum for discussing the discipline in practice when buildings and heritage environments are being conserved.

https://bebyggelsehistoria.org/en/bebyggelsehistorisk-tidskrift-english/

Open access (Doctoral Thesis by Ulrika Söderström) https://lnu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1901953

————————

POSTSCRIPT 13 April 2025. Here is a graphical summary of the paper prepared by ChatGPT:

Various activities January – March 2025

2025-04-02

Cornelius Holtorf took part in the first meeting of the Heritage and Climate Change Working Group of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Interpretation and Presentation (ICIP) (14 January 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf lectured on “Communicating Cultural Heritage with the Future” for 15 students reading the course “Cultural Heritage and Communication” as part of the Undergraduate Programme in Cultural Heritage in Present and Future Socities at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden (5 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf lectured on “Unesco världsarv: vad kommuniceras för framtida generationers skull?” for 15 students reading the course “Cultural Heritage and Communication” as part of the Undergraduate Programme in Cultural Heritage in Present and Future Socities at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden (10 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf participated in a short survey on the illicit trafficking of cultural property, with a particular focus on its online dimension, shaping discussions at the upcoming UNESCO Conference “Addressing Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property in the Digital Era” to be held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 26 June 2025 (15 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf had an informal meeting with Ulrik Brandén, Deputy Mayor of Mörbylånga, Emma Rydnér, World Heritage Coordinator at Mörbylånga Municipality, and Örjan Molander, Director at Kalmar County Museum, on various ideas for collaboration regarding development of the UNESCO World Heritage property Agricultural Landscape of Southern Öland (20 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf took place in the regular meeting of the International Scientific Committee on AeroSpace Heritage of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) which discussed, among others, the recent listing of the sites on the Moon on the World Monuments Watch List 2025 by the World Monuments Fund (21 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf attended the 8th Annual Heritage Lecture of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre on ”Changing concepts Future of the and the ’Ethics of Repair’”, given by Aleida Assmann, Professor of English Literature and General Literary Studies, Universität Konstanz (28 February 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf presented a keynote lecture on “Time Travel – More than Learning About the Past” for ca 50 listeners in the room and another 20 online, coming together for the conference Re-Action: Time Travels in a Changing Worl – Bridging Ages 20 Years in Kalmar, Sweden (4 March 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf had an informal meeting with Steven Hartman, Executive Director of the BRIDGES Sustainability Science Coalition in UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformations Programme (MOST), on ways of future collaboration (7 March 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf met with Shanti Morell-Hart of the Dept of Anthropology at Brown University in Providence, USA, for an informal conversation about seeds and heritage futures (14 March 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf met in Providence, USA, with Philip Segadika of the National Museum of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana, for an informal conversation about collabloration on heritage futures (16 March 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf participated actively discussing heritage processes and futures literacy in the first Plenary Meeting of the Expert Group on Archiving and Awareness Preservation (EGAAP-1) of the Nuclear Energy Agency held online and at the OECD in Paris (19-20 March 2025).