UNESCO

Nuclear waste in a cultural perspective

2025-09-20

Claudio Pescatore (affiliated with the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures) and I took part in the 2025 Interdisciplinary Research Symposium on the Safety of Nuclear Disposal Practices (safeND 2025) held by the German Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management BASE (Bundesamt für die Sicherheit der nuklearen Entsorgung) in Berlin 16-19 September 2025.

The overall theme was “Time as a safety factor: opportunities and challenges of timely nuclear waste disposal“. It quickly became clear that this focus was inspired by the perceived need to accelerate the decision-making process to identify the site location for Germany’s repository of high-level nuclear waste. But the topics discussed during the symposium were much wider and covered perspectives from many different disciplines bringing up a wide range of issues, not the least the issue of radioactive waste resulting from uranium mining that has not always been formally included into the discussions of nuclear waste. Claudio Pescatore led a workshop on this latter topic, based on his recent research.

One highlight was the keynote lecture by Andrew Stirling, University of Sussex and formally a Board Member of Greenpeace. It turned out he was originally an archaeologist! He also made a powerful argument suggesting that the objective of finding “the best possible” solution for safe nuclear waste disposal, which the German legislation requires, misses the question whether “the best possible” solution can ultimately be satisfactory.

In my talk (in front of cirka 50 participants), I adopted this question asking whether what many think is “the best possible” way to plan for uncertain future needs is ultimately satisfactory. My point was that taking a cultural perspective linked to the capability of futures literacy can get us further…

Nuclear waste disposal is not only about physical time, safety, technology and social and political acceptance but it is also about long-term thinking, embracing cultural change, and human values and identities that are shifting over time.

Holtorf, C.: Sustainability and long-term processes: a cultural perspective, Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-6, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-6, 2025.

ABSTRACT

Culture is about how people make sense of the world, of each other, and of themselves. It is diverse in scale, across space, and over time. By implication, expertise on the world, its inhabitants, and ourselves is culturally relative. Indeed, culture is often about managing difference: different ideas, different people, different languages.

Applied to the need to sustain a body of knowledge and guidance for action over the long term, a cultural approach will (have to) embrace the need to adapt to cultural changes and developments. All this means that regarding nuclear waste, what we are tasked with today is transferring to future generations, who will be living in their own cultural contexts, knowledge and guidance for action that will make sense to them, not to us. Proposed messages that lack futures literacy merely perpetuate our own frameworks of meaning and eventually become irrelevant and unsustainable. There are thus good reasons why they say that nothing ages faster than the future, and nothing is more difficult to predict than the past. In this paper, I will discuss some implications of this theoretical argument for geological disposal of radioactive waste.

Beyond fear of the future concerning heritage

2025-09-02

I listened today to the keynote lecture by Tatjana Cvjetićanin during the Opening session of the Annual Conference of the European Association of Archaeologists in 2025. She has been the Director of the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade (2003-2012).

In her lecture, Cvjetićanin asked whether archaeological heritage really always provides benefits for the future, whether it is sensible to do archaeological “hoarding” of finds in collections, and why we always have to fear the future for perpetual crises of endangerment of archaeological heritage.

Instead, she referred to the Heritage Futures project (Harrison et al 2020) and emphasized archaeologists’ responsibility to work with the public for the public, described the nature of their work as ‘heritage-making’, and insisted on the temporally and spatially variable value of archaeological heritage.

Very interesting to follow in lectures like this one how heritage futures are gradually becoming mainstream in Archaeology… 🙂

Claudio Pescatore: The Deep-Time Reality of Nuclear Waste

2025-08-21

Claudio Pescatore explains why high-level waste still needs shields—and memory beyond a million years:

When it comes to high-level waste repositories, the old reassurance — “radioactivity falls back close to or below natural levels” — is misleading. Yes, if you total up all the radioactivity in a repository and compare it to the original ore, the sum may look modest after ten to a hundred thousand years, depending on waste type. But people (and animals) don’t meet sums. They meet things: individual containers, cores, and fragments that concentrate radioactivity. What matters—ethically and practically—is the radiation dose at the surface of each piece as time rolls on.

*Total radioactivity vs original uranium ore in Swedish spent fuel. (Report SKB-TR-97-13)*

A new paper looks squarely at that reality. Rather than only computing dose, a concept for radiation specialists, it asks a tangible question: how thick must a shield be to meet modern radiation protection limit not just now, but at one million years and beyond? Using concrete as the reference, the answer comes in units anyone can picture: roughly 50–90 cm at a million years, depending on the waste and the protection target.

At one million years (and ignoring any container):

Spent fuel (SF) requires about 67–93 cm of concrete for a representative multi-ton package
Vitrified high-level waste (VHLW) requires about 53–72 cm of concrete for a full-size cylinder.

Beyond one million years, uranium-238 — lasting billions of years — makes the shielding requirement essentially constant: without containers, concrete thicknesses range from 7–42 cm for vitrified-waste cylinders and 62–87 cm for spent fuel.

Smaller isn’t safer. Even drill cores (say, 40 cm tall by 10 cm wide) or fragments still need shielding on the same order, because near-surface dose depends on what’s inside, not the item’s size. At a million years, unshielded drill cores still translate into about 48–67 cm of required concrete for vitrified waste and about 46–72 cm for spent fuel.

Scale matters. Numbers per item are only half the story. Program scale multiplies these requirements: for example, Sweden plans roughly 6,000 spent‑fuel canisters. In France, there will be more than 50,000 vitrified-waste cylinders.

***Concrete shielding thickness at one million years*** for spent fuel (full canister and drill core) and vitrified high-level waste (full cylinder and drill core). Results are shown for two protection targets: 0.02 mSv/h (brief, one-hour exposure) and 0.002 mSv/h (background-like)—***ballpark*** *in the absence of project-specific requirements*

What this means in human terms

Heritage, not waste alone. If descendants encounter these materials—by curiosity, drilling, erosion, or chance—they won’t face a vanishing hazard but an enduring one, beyond legal timeframes and planning horizons. Our commitment to protect future people “to levels comparable to today” becomes concrete—literally—in centimeters of real shielding.
Justice and foresight. Thinking “per item” reframes responsibility. Are we designing containers—and contingencies—that keep each piece safe, including broken pieces? The ambition is that we should.
Design humility. Landscapes move; encounters may occur. The ethical stance is not to promise a perfect fortress forever, but to equip future people with buffers that still work: robust, intelligible, possibly maintainable shields—and the memory provisions (institutional handovers, markers, archives, time capsules) to keep that knowledge alive. Also, acknowledge that these wastes never become harmless.

So what now?

Build for fragments. Don’t just model intact packages; assume cores, partial breaches, and erosion-revealed segments—and assign them shielding, too.
Specify the long-lived drivers. Make a standard reporting of the deep-time isotopic loadings, because they determine both the danger and the shield.
Design the message with the material. If safety demands 50–90 cm at a million years, our markings and archives should be designed to last—and be rediscoverable—on comparable horizons. Or that should be the ambition.
Expand the lens. Apply similar analyses to other long-lived wastes that carry significant uranium-238 loadings.

Takeaway: this isn’t a new fear; it’s a clearer ethic. We owe the future not only sealed vaults and clever signs, but credible buffers—thicknesses you can measure with a ruler—matched to how matter behaves over time. The shield is not a metaphor; it’s a promise we can make, and keep.

Archaeology of Garbage

2025-08-01

A new interview published in Brazil featuring the Chair’s affiliated researcher Dr Leila Papoli-Yazdi tells the significance of the archaeology of garbage, not the least for the future:

By connecting her research to the idea that archaeology can “build futures”, Leila reveals the potential of garbology as an interdisciplinary and transformative practice that illuminates not only the past but also the challenges of the present and the possibilities for a more just and sustainable future.

Full reference:

Papoli-Yazdi, Leila, Tiago Silva Alves Muniz, Camilla Agostini (2025) Archaeology of garbage: from disaster archaeology to social entrepreneurship. Vestígios – Revista Latino-Americana De Arqueologia Histórica, 19(2), 317-326. https://doi.org/10.31239/j677sr71

This interview explores Professor Leila’s pioneering work in the archaeology of garbage, tracing her journey from disaster archaeology in Iran to the establishment of Europe’s first start-up focused on garbology. Initially working in Tehran, Leila faced challenges linked to Iran’s political climate and the adaptation of traditional garbological methods to urban environments. Upon moving to Scandinavia, she encountered new professional and cultural dynamics, eventually co-founding Garbonomix – a company dedicated to analyzing consumption habits to support economic resilience. She discusses the interdisciplinary potential of garbology to improve both individual and community well-being, linking academic insights with practical applications. Furthermore, Leila reflects on the stigmatization of contemporary material studies in archaeology, noting the field’s often nationalistic orientation that overlooks recent histories. Her work advocates for a more inclusive, human-centered archaeology that addresses modern issues like poverty and environmental sustainability. Through her engagement with both academic and consulting roles, Leila demonstrates how archaeology can extend beyond traditional frameworks, encouraging practitioners to collaborate with marginalized communities and contribute to social resilience.

Various activities April – June 2025

2025-07-01

Cornelius Holtorf attended the Webinar “Archaeological Cultural Heritage in the UNESCO Mandate” organized by the Polish National Commission for UNESCO, the UNESCO-UNITWIN Network on Culture in Emergencies and the University of Poznan (4 April 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf contributed to the consultation of the Swedish Commission for UNESCO concerning Sweden’s future collaboration with UNESCO (24 April 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf, gave an invited talk on “The Climate Heritage Paradox” for ca 90 participants in the national conference Heritage Horizons: Pathways to the Future by the Heritage Council of Ireland, held in Dublin, Ireland (1 May 2025).

Anders Högberg presented the research programme InKuiS – Innovative Cultural Entrepreneurship in Collaborative Co-creative Research, including the future-related project Earth Logic Design, at a conference organised by the Småland in Academy organised at Linnaeus University in Växjö (16 May 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf participated in a webinar of the “The Path to MONDIACULT 2025” series which is part of the preparations for MONDIACULT 2025, the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development (19 May 2025). The 2025 edition of MONDIACULT in Barcelona will be pivotal in ensuring that culture is recognized as a standalone goal in the future United Nations development strategy.

Cornelius Holtorf contributed to a Consultation of the Heritage Adapts to Climate Alliance (HACA) on the UNFCCC process to develop indicators for measuring progress in adapting heritage sites and cultural practices to climate change (30 May 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf attended digitally a High level panel on future generations entitled “A Tribunal for Future Generations” held at the Hamburg Sustainability Conference 2025 and involving, among others, Guy Ryder (Under-Secretary-General, UN Executive Office) and Sophie Howe (The World’s first Future Generations Commissioner, for Wales) (2 June 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg held an informal meeting on heritage processes and futures literacy with Dr Anselm Tiggemann of the BGE Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung in Berlin to discuss future collaborations (9 June 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf attended digitally parts of The International Seminar on Heritage Interpretation and Presentation for Future Generations co-organized by the Institute of International Studies at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan; the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites, and the Our World Heritage initiative (14 June 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf ran a Future Workshop on “World heritage Southern Öland 25 years in the future” for 20+ students taking part in a course entitled “The World Heritage site of Southern Öland” at Ölands Folkhögskola, Skogsby, Öland, Sweden (18 June 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf arranged and participated in an exploratory meeting for future collaboration with Professor Tatsuyoshi Saijo, Kyoto University of Advanced Science (who has been developing Future Design) and Christine Kavazanjian, UNESCO Paris (representing UNESCO’s unit on Foresight and Futures Literacy), (19 June 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf took part in a meeting of the External Advisory Committee of the Flagship Initiative Transforming Cultural Heritage at the University of Heidelberg, Germany (20 June 2025).

Om framtidsskapande

2025-06-18

Artikel i tidskriften Byggnadskultur (som är svenska byggnadsvårdsföreningens tidskrift). In Swedish.

Anders Högberg, Professor of Archaeology UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures

Rethinking Futures

2025-05-22

In May, Anders Högberg was invited as keynote speaker at the National Library of Sweden. The invitation came from their Department for Research and Collection Management, which hosted a joint staff day. Högberg presented his research on heritage processes as futures-making practices. In his presentation Anders emphasised that we need new knowledge in order to rethink futures in novel ways. The discussion that followed on the presentation, largely focused on how we can create change to achieve this, what opportunities it might bring, but also which challenges we need to address in order to succeed.

National Library of Sweden. Photo Maria Aho

Relativism and communication with aliens

2025-05-15

Dr Michael Ranta gave a lecture for us today, entitled “On Communication with Remote Cultures and Questions of Relativism” (15 May 2025).

On the picture from the left: Cornelius Holtorf, Gustav Wollentz, Michael Ranta, Peter Skoglund.

Ranta raised some very fundamental issues on truth, representation, communication and aliens:
How would it be possible to communicate with (remote) future generations, which may have different or altered forms of communication, compared to current ones? Apart from language or other communication alterations over time, new semiotic resources (e.g. resulting from technological or medical innovations) may emerge. Moreover, and most probable, the accumulation and processing of knowledge as well as the emergence of altered world views and category systems, or of paradigm changes (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense), may obstruct the comprehension, transmission, and exchange of information. Future generations may thus be confronted with significant obstacles trying to understand or reconstruct our communicative habits. These topics, especially with regard to communication with pictures, will be further elaborated and discussed in this presentation.

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

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!