UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

When Nuclear Waste Becomes Archaeology

2026-08-25

By Claudio Pescatore

Most archaeological sites are places where the past resurfaces. Nuclear waste repositories may become places where the future does.

Deep geological repositories are usually described as engineering projects designed to isolate radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years. But from a heritage perspective, they are also something else:

  • deliberate structures meant to outlast civilizations
  • physical archives of technological activity
  • long-lived material inheritances left by the present for societies that may no longer remember why they were created.

The repository is not an archaeological site in the ordinary sense. It is not a ruin, a monument, or a cultural treasure. Yet it shares one troubling feature with archaeology: it depends on the survival, loss, and possible reconstruction of meaning over long periods of time.

Future societies may not recognise these sites as we intend. They may intersect them through mining, drilling, construction, land use, or curiosity. What was meant to remain isolated may be brought back into history.

1. The paradox of disposal

Geological disposal promises closure. Once a repository is sealed, the waste is meant to disappear from human affairs. The site is meant to pass from politics into geology.

Yet this aspiration sits uneasily with human history. Buried things do not always remain buried. Mines are reopened. Landscapes are reworked. Ancient structures are excavated, misread, reused, damaged, or turned into resources. The surface and the subsurface are repeatedly reconnected by human action.

This is the paradox of disposal. The repository is designed to leave history, but history has a way of rediscovering what was placed underground.

The safety case therefore depends not only on geology and engineering, but also on memory, meaning, and the possibility that future societies may no longer understand what lies below.

2. The drilling scenario: when isolation is bypassed

In nuclear safety assessments there is a scenario called inadvertent human intrusion. A future driller accidentally intersects the repository and brings radioactive material to the surface.

Technically, this scenario is treated as a test of repository robustness. It asks whether a localised disturbance would compromise the disposal system as a whole. From a heritage-futures perspective, however, it also marks something else: the point at which a deliberately isolated material inheritance is reactivated.

This is not archaeology in the narrow professional sense. The future actor may not be an archaeologist at all, but a driller, miner, builder, land user, or technician. The analogy lies elsewhere. Archaeology reminds us that buried human traces do not necessarily remain outside history. They can return under new conditions, with meanings very different from those intended by their creators.

Human intrusion is therefore not simply an encounter with the past. It is a bypass of isolation. It is the moment when material intended to remain outside surface life is brought back into soil, water, work practices, land use, and possible future memory.

And this moment may be closer to us than the phrase “deep future” suggests. In safety assessments, loss of memory is often assumed, for modelling purposes, only a few centuries after closure.

3. Where the safety model stops

In current safety assessments, the drilling scenario is usually resolved through a short-term radiological exposure calculation for selected receptors. The model may estimate the dose to drilling workers, residents, farmers, or other stylised individuals.

But the material brought to the surface does not disappear when the calculation ends. It remains present. It can be dispersed, diluted, leached, handled, forgotten, remediated, reused, or incorporated into the landscape.

At that point, the waste is no longer only an isolated technological object within a repository model. It has become surface material again: part of soils, waters, biota, land use, and possible future stewardship.

This is where the safety model often stops precisely as environmental history begins.

4. Continuity with nature

Heritage scholars often think about the continuity of human traces through time. Nuclear waste asks us to think about another kind of continuity: the continuity of hazardous materials within Earth systems.

Once brought to the surface, substances such as uranium, plutonium, neptunium are not only entries in a dose model. They are persistent materials. They can remain in soils and waters for very long periods, interact with living systems, and raise chemical as well as radiological concerns.

The issue is therefore not only whether the repository remains robust after a local disturbance. It is also what happens to the material that has crossed the isolation boundary.

This is what I call continuity with nature: the need to follow the material beyond the repository model, into the ordinary environmental systems from which geological disposal was meant to isolate it.

5. What this means for heritage thinking

Seen from this perspective, nuclear waste is not only a technological problem. It is also a cultural and temporal one. It raises questions about:

  • how societies transmit knowledge across generations
  • how responsibility persists when institutions disappear
  • how material traces of the present shape distant futures
  • how hazardous materials may re-enter landscapes and ecologies
  • how future societies may interpret, ignore, disturb, or inherit what we have buried.

Geological repositories may therefore become among the most consequential heritage sites humanity leaves behind. Unlike most archaeological sites, however, this inheritance would not only tell the story of our civilization. It could continue to shape the environments encountered by those who rediscover, disturb, or live with it.

Thinking about nuclear waste therefore requires more than engineering foresight. It invites a broader reflection on heritage, responsibility, environmental continuity, and the material traces we leave to the deep future.

For readers interested in the technical and social sciences dimension of this question — particularly how nuclear safety assessments model future drilling scenarios and where those models end — I explore the issue in more detail in my recent paper, “From Model Closure to Continuity with Nature: Reframing Safety in Deep Geological Disposal.”

Pescatore, Claudio (2026) From model closure to continuity with nature: Reframing safety in deep geological disposal. Energy Research & Social Science 138, 104810. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2026.104810

Meaningful dose in geological disposal safety cases: human intrusion and normal evolution as competing exposure pathways

Front. Nucl. Eng., 24 August 2026, Volume 5 – 2026 
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnuen.2026.1921673

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

UNESCO80 Initiative

2026-08-18

Cornelius Holtorf listened to a first dialogue of the Director-General (DG) of UNESCO, Professor Khaled El-Enany with some 600 UNESCO Chairs (more than half of the total!), held in two sessions on 29 January 2026. El-Enany emphasized the significance of the UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN networks as well as the need for UNESCO of utilizing the “priceless” expertise, knowledge, and research of the UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN networks. This important meeting was intended as the beginning of a series of meetings during the DG:s entire mandate. In the framework of the UNESCO80 initiative: Shaping UNESCO’s Future Together, El-Enany asked the Chairs for observations, aspirations, ideas and suggestions to build together the strategy for the future of UNESCO, at the same time identifying or improving synergies between UNESCO and the Chairs. The DG concluded by calling for a more efficient and better coordinated way of collaborating with the UNESCO Chairs and UNITWIN networks, offering them a win-win deal: “Lets start a new era of a real partnership between UNESCO and every one of the Chairs.”

I submitted the following suggestions:

To Professor Khaled El-Enany
Director-General of UNESCO

7 July 2026

Dear Professor El-Enany,

During your first dialogue as DG with UNESCO Chairs at the end of January, you invited Chairholders, in a spirit of intellectual collaboration, to contribute ideas and aspirations for UNESCO’s future role in an evolving world. You encouraged us to reflect on how UNESCO can respond to emerging realities, including climate change, digital inequalities, threats to human rights, and other global challenges.

Since 2017, I have held the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Sweden. The Chair explores the role of heritage in shaping relationships between present and future generations. I was also pleased to meet you briefly during your much appreciated participation in the Chair’s reception on World Futures Day in Paris on 2 December 2025.

In response to your invitation, I would like to offer a few reflections that may contribute to UNESCO’s work in the context of UN80 and support greater effectiveness, coherence, and impact across the United Nations system.

1. Strengthening long-term thinking

The 2024 UN Pact for the Future highlighted the importance of long-term thinking in addressing global challenges. UNESCO is uniquely positioned to advance this agenda. The cultural heritage sector as well as the humanities and social sciences offer rich resources for understanding long-term societal change, while futures literacy and foresight provide tools for imagining and preparing for alternative futures.

Closer collaboration between these domains could strengthen UNESCO’s contribution to anticipatory governance and intergenerational fairness, while also fostering synergies across the UN system. The UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures would be pleased to contribute to such efforts.

2. Understanding our shared human heritage

Culture shapes how people make sense of the world and relate to one another. Addressing global challenges, including climate change, emerging technologies, pandemics and nuclear risks, requires trust, solidarity, and a sense of shared responsibility.

UNESCO could further strengthen its leadership by promoting awareness of humanity’s common heritage and shared destiny, complementing its important work on cultural diversity. Greater attention to what unites human beings across cultures, histories, and regions may help foster mutual understanding and strengthen global cohesion for the benefit of people living now and in the future. This effort could draw productively on expertise from both the social and natural sciences, including research on our shared human origins and our genetic heritage.

3. Reimagining heritage and change

In a world increasingly characterized by rapid change and transformation, heritage remains an important resource for individuals and communities seeking continuity and resilience. Yet heritage is not only something to be safeguarded against identified threats; it can also be a catalyst for desirable positive change and transformation.

UNESCO could lead a broader conversation on how changing and emerging heritage practices can contribute to human happiness, equality, justice, and human rights. This may involve complementing traditional preservation approaches with perspectives that recognize heritage as a dynamic concept reflecting past and present people’s choices while informing future ones in pursuit of both human well-being and people’s own aspirations.

4. Expanding UNESCO’s leadership on human–environment relations

UNESCO emerged from intellectual traditions grounded in humanism and cooperation between peoples. Today, all of humanity faces planetary challenges associated with environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change that affect both human and non-human life.

Building on UNESCO’s recent leadership in areas such as the ethics of artificial intelligence, the Organization could further advance reflection on human–environment relations through fields such as the environmental humanities and interdisciplinary approaches on planetary cohabitation, interspecies care, and related topics. UNESCO is exceptionally well placed to foster dialogue on the wider implications of post-human thinking.

I would be pleased to elaborate on any of these ideas, adapt them in light of UNESCO’s priorities, or contribute to future initiatives in these areas.

Thank you for inviting UNESCO Chairs to share their perspectives and suggestions in the framework of UN80. I greatly appreciate this opportunity to contribute to UNESCO’s future work.

Yours sincerely,

Cornelius Holtorf
Chairholder, UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University, Kalmar Sweden, http://lnu.se/en/unescochair

P.S. As a Chairholder based at a university, I may not always be fully aware of the institutional and political considerations that shape UNESCO’s priorities and programmes. It is therefore possible that some of the ideas outlined above overlap with ongoing initiatives. If so, I would welcome opportunities for stronger communication and exchange between UNESCO and its Chairs, helping us better understand and contribute to the Organization’s work.