How to tell future humans where we keep our nuclear waste

• WILLIAM OF THE PALACE

• JUAN C. SANCHEZ

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  @_juancsanchez_

Updated Monday, November 28, 2022-00:25

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So far this year, nuclear energy has contributed around 20% of all the electricity generated in Spain.

In a 2022 marked by the high price of gas, the reactors have worked almost without interruption and in summer they have come to compete with a wind farm that was badly affected by the heat wave and the lack of wind.

Despite this, his days are numbered;

.

With the dismantling comes a complex debate, what to do with the waste, which is not only environmental.

The worldwide consensus is that the best solution is

, but an almost philosophical complication arises: how to send a message of danger that can be understood thousands of years from now.

Initially, when that end came, Spain was going to opt for a Centralized Temporary Warehouse, which was going to be located in Villar de Cañas (Cuenca).

Finally, according to the seventh general plan for radioactive waste, seven temporary storage facilities will be created -one for each plant- from which the fuel will then be sent to a centralized deposit that

.

What is known as Deep Geological Storage (AGP) will be used, which combines engineering barriers with physical barriers: the waste is buried in the hope that it will be totally inaccessible for thousands of years, until it loses its radioactivity.

"What it is about is a combination of a geological barrier and an engineering barrier that delays the fact that this element - which, in turn, when this occurs will already have decayed to very low levels of radioactivity - can migrate to the biosphere and that it does so in practically innocuous, trivial conditions", sums up

, Enresa's technical director.

Obviously, it is not an easy process, far from it.

Host rocks are sought - granite or clay - with the capacity to house the material, but also

to prevent water from corroding and reaching the waste over the years.

Because we work with our eyes set on the next, not just centuries, but millennia.

In the same way, the ground must be "

, so that the possible courses of the water do not change" or to avoid earthquakes that could release the residues, explains Beceiro.

The galleries in which the works are carried out are sealed until, finally, the entire installation is buried.

All this, for "

The fuel pill, for its part, is stored in its metal casing and it is inserted into a metal container.

All this is surrounded by a bentonite barrier, a plastic clay that absorbs the pressure of the rock and makes it difficult for water to reach the metal parts.

"In the end it is the story of a drop of water that will take a radionuclide from where the fuel element is to the biosphere and all the processes that will be encountered along the way, which are difficulties for this", illustrates the technical director of Enresa .

That is to say, it is assumed that

, which has in its favor that it will be able to continue competing long after the process has concluded.

The installation, therefore, must be as stable as the earth's crust itself.

Or at least get closer.

Despite this, there are several places in Spain that could house the AGP in 2073. "In the 10 years that we have worked, we have identified many, both in granite and clay," Beceiro details.

But he warns that "you have to get to work."

This period of

has been established because it is considered to be the time it will take to carry out all the stages required by the project.

At the moment, the first is to "define the procedures and the regulatory legal framework" to find the location, which, once chosen, should be final.

"It's forever".

"It is a complex project, long in time, but strictly necessary", admits the technical director of Enresa, who explains that "there is an international consensus that this is the solution".

The work can last between six and 10 years, depending, among other things, on the type of rock.

There are several projects underway, although none as advanced as the one in Finland,

Finnish word that could be translated as 'pit' or 'cavity'-, which, in principle, will come into operation in 2025. France and Sweden will follow later, although already in the 30s. The location of all of them must be public and be transmitted from generation to generation so that once they are sealed they will not be reopened.

message to the future

In any case, engineering is not the only challenge.

There is an additional complication:

.

The debate is somewhat philosophical and has brought proposals ranging from pictograms to genetic modification.

The International Atomic Energy Agency and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency are working on it, but they are not the first to raise it.

In 1981, a commission of experts called the Human Interference Task Force - something like the Human Interference Working Group - made up of nuclear scientists, engineers, experts in human behavior and anthropologists tried to find the best way to convey this message.

It must be borne in mind that something as close, on this scale, as the first edition of Don Quixote

.

With an eye on several millennia, not even symbols as universal today as a skull can be understood in the future, since throughout the history of humanity there have been cultures that have venerated death, a concept that is highly charged emotionally, and they might see it as something positive.

were also raised

, like a vertical figure that, after approaching the container, passed to a horizontality that could give the idea of ​​death.

However, this assumption is based on a reading direction -from left to right, for example- that is not even global today.

Hence, more ethereal options were also launched, such as managing to create a kind of animal - there was talk of cats - that changed color when exposed to radiation.

The idea was to get

to take care that this idea would survive over the centuries.

At the moment there is no definitive approximation.

"In principle, it would be necessary to opt for a simple language; it would also be necessary to opt for a language that is univocal (that is, that is not ambiguous, that is not subject to more than one interpretation)", explains

, a researcher at the Institute Culture and Society from the University of Navarra and an expert in language and cognition.

"Recourse only to the verbal code can be a problem because languages ​​change, they are transformed," she concedes.

Thus, he proposes "a combination of few words that he anticipates will change little for some reason -for example, cultisms, words inherited from Latin that remain the same in English, German or Spanish- and visual codes that are not outdated".

These, he notes, may be "colors and their associations,"

.

"But no syntax or much interpretation," she warns.

In any case, he also remembers that "when you use iconic language from pictograms, you lose a certain interpretative security, because verbal language can be tied down much more".

"Although how you interpret it can change later, body-based pictograms - that is, they show a part of the body doing something - usually work well, because that bodily experience, in principle, is not going to change," Olza also details.

Natural phenomena would also take advantage of this immutability.

"If you go

, physical perceptions, phenomena and natural disasters, there is a certain consensus there," he describes.

A vital message in a bottle that is, at the same time, a Pandora's box.

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