UNESCO

Cornelius Holtorf presented a talk entitled for cirka 100 participants at the Symposium on Information, Data, and Knowledge Management for Radioactive Waste: Challenges Across All Timescales, organised by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the OECD and hosted by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization of Japan (NUMO) in Yokohama, Japan (7-10 October 2025).

Heritage Futures: Archaeological Insights for the Long-term Management of Radioactive Waste

Cornelius Holtorf, UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Linnaeus University

Managing radioactive waste is a challenge that extends across many generations, requiring long-term safety measures. Archaeologists, like myself, are familiar with time scales of thousands of years as we seek to understand the distant past. A key part of our work involves questioning assumptions rooted in the present and learning to imagine past worlds that were vastly different from today. This is very difficult, but only after doing so can we draw meaningful insights from the past to inform the present. The same principles should apply when communicating information, knowledge, and guidance about radioactive waste repositories to societies of distant futures. This calls for a strengthened capacity in ‘futures literacy,’ a concept developed and promoted by UNESCO.

Futures literacy consists of three core dimensions: 1. Becoming aware of the assumptions we hold about the future, 2. Learning to imagine multiple alternative futures, and 3. Reframing the original issue and developing new strategies to address it.

In this paper, I explore this argument and discuss its implications for a long-term, safe and responsible management of radioactive waste. The paper is based on extensive research conducted by the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. The research has been carried out in collaboration with the radioactive waste sector in Sweden and internationally, including through participation in several expert groups of the NEA.