Cloud boils up and around Apusiajik. The late sun is bright and hard. A storm is coming. Gulls land in the water, sheet white in the storm-light. A single low-slung iceberg wanders the bay. Two men and a woman are hunched in the lee of a bay-side shack, drinking cans of Heineken.
We launch the kayaks from among boulders. We paddle out over cod heads and seal flukes, Nuka racing ahead with short fast strokes, then Matt accelerating after him, both men grinning with delight at being out on the water.
‘This is where kayaking was invented!’ shouts Matt.
He paddles directly at the small iceberg, hits it fast at its lowest point, and laughs as the kayak’s front half ramps up onto the berg. Then he scooches himself off and splashes back into the water.
‘Look!’ Nuka is calling. He is holding up a dripping object, long and thin, with a wooden haft and a spear-point at one end.
‘He’s found a harpoon!’ says Matt. Nuka takes aim at Matt, and throws the harpoon at his kayak. It drops safely short, Matt paddles over, grabs the floating harpoon and hurls it at me.
I have never played harpoon water-polo before, and I am not convinced that it is a traditional Greenlandic sport, but the rules seem clear enough: aim but don’t maim.
We hurl the harpoon at one another, chase around the bay, paddle in bursts. Other boys from the village come out in their motor dinghies to buzz us, ripping their Evinrudes and cutting across our bows. To the north the Apusiajik glacier gleams its way down to the tideline. After a while we raft up and bob on the chop, looking back at the little village of Kulusuk perched on its bedrock, the white crosses of the shore-side cemetery showing clear in the sun.
When we return to shore, Nuka shows the harpoon proudly to Geo.
Geo shakes his head.
‘This is not a harpoon,’ he says to Nuka in Greenlandic.
He looks at us, takes it, grips it by its wooden haft like a walking stick with the point lowermost, and makes a downwards jabbing motion, stepping cautiously forwards as he does so, looking enquiringly ahead of himself as he presses the point against the earth.
It is not a harpoon, not a weapon at all, but rather a tool used to probe the depth of the sea ice ahead. It is a means of telling if it is safe to proceed – of testing the near future.
When I return to Britain, I learn that during the weeks we have been on the glaciers the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphers has recommended the formal adoption of the Anthropocene as the current Earth epoch, with a start date of 1950 – coinciding with the dawn of the nuclear age.
12
The Hiding Place
(Olkiluoto, Finland)
Birches, birches, pines, birches, clearing, blue farmhouse. Low river valley, wooden bridge. Everything frozen: rivers, trees, turf, fields. Pink crag of granite, yellow ice-fall spilling from it. Boulders big as houses between the birches, among the pines. Black crow pulling red flesh off the white ribs of a dead fox. Jackdaw, jackdaw.
This is not a place for you.
The pirate radio station plays Blondie’s ‘Atomic’.
Snakes of spindrift race on the blacktop. Snow whirls in the headlights. Grey air that will not brighten. A boy riding a bike with sit-up-and-beg handlebars, his back very straight, fast past a blue letter-box on a white pole. Gneiss, silver-grey, quick with mica and ice.
This place is not a place of honour.
Over the bridge to the island. Salt marsh to either side of the bridge. Sea in shattered slabs of ice. Wind skittering stiff reeds, and starlings moving black above the reeds. The sea is frozen for half a mile offshore. Far out in the gulf, beyond sight, there are thirty-foot-high waves moving west through the half-light.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Snowfall like static when the wind drops, like warp-speed when it blows. Double-layer chain-link fencing. Three huge structures showing through the blizzard, across the bay, towards the island’s tip. Great grey outlines emerging and fading: dome, tower, slabbed walls. The sea has melted clear around them; the sea should not have done so. Two trucks crunch past on ice tyres.
Nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.
The pirate radio station plays ‘Disco Inferno’ by the Tramps.
Snow flurries in the headlights. I have come to see a burial site and to bury something of my own. It will be dark when I reach the end of the world and it will be dark when I return to the surface.
Pay attention. We are serious. Sending this message was significant for us. Ours was considered an important culture.
We are going to tell you what lies underground, why you should not disturb this place, and what may happen if you do.
~
Deep in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island in south-west Finland a tomb is under construction. The tomb is intended to outlast not only the people who designed it, but also the species that designed it. It is intended to maintain its integrity without future maintenance for 100,000 years, able to endure a future Ice Age. One hundred thousand years ago three major river systems flowed across the Sahara. One hundred thousand years ago anatomically modern humans were beginning their journey out of Africa. The oldest pyramid is around 4,600 years old; the oldest surviving church building is fewer than 2,000years old.
This Finnish tomb has some of the most secure containment protocols ever devised: more secure than the crypts of the Pharaohs, more secure than any supermax prison. It is hoped that what is placed within this tomb will never leave it by means of any agency other than the geological.
The tomb is an experiment in post-human architecture, and its name is Onkalo, which in Finnish means ‘cave’ or ‘hiding place’. What is to be hidden in Onkalo is high-level nuclear waste, perhaps the darkest matter we have ever made.
For as long as we have been producing nuclear waste we have been failing to decide how to dispose of it. Uranium was created in supernova explosions around 6.6 billion years ago, and is part of the space dust out of which the planet formed. It is as common in the Earth’s crust as tin or as tungsten, and it is dispersed within the rocks on which we live. Slowly, expensively, miraculously, injuriously, we have learned how to convert uranium into power and into force. We know how to make electricity from uranium and we know how to make death from it, but we still do not know how best to dispose of it when its work for us is done. Over a quarter of a million tons of high-level nuclear waste in need of final storage is presently thought to exist globally, with around 12,000 tons being added to that figure annually.
Uranium is mined as ore in Canada, Russia, Australia, Kazakhstan and perhaps soon in the south of Greenland. The ore is crushed and milled; the uranium is leached out with acid, converted to a gas, enriched, consolidated and then processed into pellets. A single pellet of enriched uranium one centimetre in diameter and one centimetre long will typically release the same amount of energy as a ton of coal. Those pellets are sealed within gleaming fuel rods, usually made of zirconium alloy, which are bundled together in their thousands and then placed in the reactor core, where fission is initiated. Fission produces heat which is used to raise steam; the steam is ducted to turbines, turning their blades and producing electricity.
Once the fission process has slowed below a horizon of efficiency, the rods must be replaced. But they are still intensely hot and lethally radioactive. The unstable uranium oxide continues to emit alpha and beta particles, and gamma waves. If you were to stand next to an unshielded bundle of fuel rods fresh from the core, radioactivity would plunder your body, smashing cells and corrupting DNA. You would be likely to die within hours, vomiting and haemorrhaging.
So spent rods are slid out of the reactor by machine, kept always under water or another shielding liquid as they are moved, then typically stored in deep spent fuel pools for several years, before being sent for reprocessing or dry cask storage. Down in the fuel pools the water patiently absorbs the particle hail from the rods. Because this hail heats the water, it m
ust be continuously circulated and cooled in order to prevent it boiling off and leaving the rods disastrously unshielded.
Even after decades in the pools, however, the rods are still hot, toxic and radioactive. The only way for them to become harmless to the biosphere is through long-term natural decay. For high-level waste this can take tens of thousands of years, during which time spent fuel must be kept secure: segregated from the air, from sun, from water and from life.
The best solution we have devised for securing such waste is burial. The tombs that we have constructed to receive these remains are known as geological repositories, and they are the Cloaca Maxima – the Great Sewer – of our species. Into low- and intermediate-level repositories go the lightly radioactive materials that are the by-products of nuclear power and weaponry: the items that will remain harmful only for scores of years – the clothes, the tools, the filter pads, the zips and the buttons. All are barrelled up and lowered into holes in silos that have been sunk below ground at storage sites around the world. Each new layer is packed in concrete, ready for its supercessor. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) – the intermediate-level repository dug into the salt beds of New Mexico – is intended to receive 800,000 fifty-five-gallon soft-steel drums of military-origin transuranium waste, holding among other substances the radioactive shavings from US nuclear warhead manufacture. The WIPP drum chambers will in time form neat strata, standing as highly organized additions to the rock record – another taxon of Anthropocene future fossil.
The most dangerous waste, though – the toxic and radioactive spent fuel rods from reactors – requires even more secure burial: a special funeral and a special tomb. We have only ever attempted to construct a few such high-level waste repositories. Belgium has sunk a test site to research future deep repository possibilities, and has named the facility HADES. America’s attempt at a high-level repository took place at an extinct super-volcano called Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, but construction was suspended after decades of controversy and protest, and the caverns tunnelled into the ignimbrite currently stand as empty halls. Among the reasons for the suspension of the project is Yucca Mountain’s proximity to a 900-foot-wide earthquake zone, the Sundance Fault, which is itself undercrossed by a deeper fault called Ghost Dance. If Yucca Mountain were ever to be filled to capacity it would hold, writes John D’Agata, ‘the radiological equivalent of two million individual nuclear detonations, about seven trillion doses of lethal radiation’, enough to kill every human on Earth 350 times over.
By far the most advanced of all these deep storage facilities is Onkalo, the Hiding Place, set 1,500 feet down into 1.9-billion-year-old rock on the Bothnian coast of Finland. When the burial chambers of Onkalo are full with waste from the three power stations of Olkiluoto, they will hold 6,500 tons of spent uranium.
~
This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends – not with a bang but a visitors’ centre.
‘Welcome to Olkiluoto Island,’ says Pasi Tuohimaa. ‘You made it!’
I have come to Onkalo the winter after the summer of great melt in Greenland, after the autumn of the moulin.
The reception area is clean and well funded. There are free-standing wardrobes, veneered on the outside with high-definition photographs of forest vistas. In the bathroom there is no piped music but there is piped birdsong. People piss to the calls of nuthatches, or perhaps they are tree-creepers.
Pasi takes me outside. A stepped boardwalk leads down from the back of the reception area to the sea marsh. Reeds brittle in the wind. The sea is frozen solid, yellow plates of ice piled among the bulrushes. Across the bay, passing in and out of visibility as the blizzard moves, are the outlines of three nuclear power stations. The third and most distant is mosque-like: a terracotta dome from which rises a minaret tower.
‘The third is still under construction,’ says Pasi. ‘Not long now.’
The wind is very cold. We retreat to consider the scene from behind glass. The wide viewing windows have grey stickers of raptors on them to prevent bird-strike: generic falcon, generic hawk. The pressed timber frames of the windows present the scene of the bay beautifully. When the blizzard hides the power stations, we might be contemplating an early twentieth-century painting by Gallen-Kallela.
Pasi shows me around the permanent exhibition that explains how the nuclear power supply chain works from mine to consumer, and proves how radiation is a hazard only if incorrectly handled.
‘People think nuclear waste is harmful for eternity,’ says Pasi. ‘It isn’t! After 500 years, you could take spent uranium into your home.’
He opens his arms towards me. ‘You could probably embrace it!’
He pauses, reconsiders.
‘You would not want to keep it under your bed, but in your living room – no problem.’
He pauses again.
‘You would not want to kiss it, but hugging is fine.’
He sounds like a father laying out the terms and conditions to his daughter’s date.
‘This is how we encapsulate the fuel rods for long-term storage,’ he says, pointing to an eight-foot-long copper cylinder, a foot and a half in diameter. He raps it with his knuckles. It clunks.
‘No fake – this is the real thing. Do you know how much copper trades for per kilogram? It is the best insulator: so inert.’
Inside the copper canister is a cast-iron canister which has been internally partitioned so that it resembles a noughts-and-crosses board, with gaps for the squares. Into these gaps will be slid the zirconium alloy fuel rods containing the spent uranium pellets. Each canister will weigh around twenty-five tons when complete; each canister will be nested in a bed of water-absorbing bentonite clay, inside a cored-out tube of gneiss, 1,500 feet down into the gneiss and granite bedrock.
I murmured the nesting order to myself, working outwards: uranium, zirconium, iron, copper, bentonite, gneiss, granite . . . I think back to the beginning of my journeys in the underland, and to the beginning of time, down in the dark-matter laboratory at Boulby Mine. At Boulby they encased xenon in lead in copper in iron in halite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to see back to the birth of the universe. At Onkalo they encased uranium in zirconium in iron in copper in bentonite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to keep the future safe from the present.
One of the exhibits in the display area has a life-size model of Albert Einstein sitting behind a desk, pen in hand, paper on desk.
‘See who’s here!’ says Pasi, leading me to Einstein.
Einstein looks the worse for wear. His rubber face, which would be a poor likeness under the best of circumstances, has come unstuck from his neck. There is a gaping hole in his throat, through which I can see metal struts and hinges.
‘Push the button,’ urges Pasi, pointing at a red button on our side of the desk, designed to facilitate audience interaction with the exhibit.
I push it.
Einstein’s upper body lurches towards us and stops with a jerk that dislodges the right-hand half of his grey moustache, which droops slowly forwards over his upper lip. A recorded voice that I do not take to be Einstein’s begins to speak to us in Finnish.
Pasi frowns, then leans across the desk and tenderly presses Einstein’s moustache back into place with his thumb.
~
The day before I go to Olkiluoto Island and down to the hiding place, I wait in the little nearby town of Rauma, reading the great folk epic of Finland, the Kalevala.
The Kalevala is a long poem of many voices and many stories which – like the Iliad and the Odyssey – grows out of diverse and deep-rooted traditions, from Baltic song to Russian storytelling. It existed chiefly as a mutable oral text for more than a thousand years, until in the nineteenth century the Kalevala was collected, edited and published by the Finnish scholar Elias Lönnrot, giving us the mostly fixed version we now have. Lönnrot’s Kalevala is made up of many intertwining narratives that combine the mythical and
the lyrical with the mundane and the logistical, and that together dramatize a northern people’s engagement with a hard, beautiful landscape of forests, islands and lakes. In its layering of different ages of origin, the Finnish scholar Matti Kuusi compares the poem’s own history of making with ‘the numerous strata of a burial mound in which many generations . . . and their artefacts have been buried’.
The Kalevala is a haunting epic that has preoccupied me for some years, obsessed as it is with the power of word, incantation and story to change the world into which they are uttered. Its heroes are language masters and wonder-workers – and the greatest of them is called Väinämöinen, whose name translates memorably as ‘Hero of the Slow-Moving River’.
In the room in which I read the Kalevala that day is a wall-sized photograph of Rauma, taken on a market day at some point in the late nineteenth century. The photograph has been blown up, so it is grainy. All the men have dressed for market day: they are wearing black suits and shoes and hats. They stand out clearly. All the women are wearing blinding white dresses and hats. The plate-camera’s long exposure has drunk too deeply of the women’s whiteness, though, so that they appear as ghostly, burned-out presences. I count the traces of eighty-seven of these overexposed women. They are leaning out of horse-drawn carts. They are clutching headscarves around their necks with one hand, while carrying shopping with another. Their dresses are ankle-length, and their hats are tall straw boaters with double bands. Here and there they have moved too fast and are blurred to the point of invisibility, lost in the blast.
I read the Kalevala for two hours in view of that photograph, and as I read I come to realize something so unsettling that the back of my neck prickles: despite its great age, the poem seems to possess foreknowledge of what is presently being undertaken on Olkiluoto Island.
Partway through the poem, Väinämöinen is given the task of descending to the underland. Hidden in the Finnish forests, he is told, is the entrance to a tunnel that leads to a cavern far underground. In that cavern are stored materials of huge energy: spells and enchantments which, when spoken, will release great power. To approach this subterranean space safely Väinämöinen must protect himself with shoes of copper and a shirt of iron, lest he be damaged by what it contains. Ilmarinen forges them for him. Clad in these insulating metals Väinämöinen approaches the tunnel mouth, which is disguised by aspens, alders, willows and spruce. He cuts down the trees to reveal the entrance. He enters the tunnel and finds himself in a deep ‘grave’, a ‘demon . . . lair’. He has stepped, he realizes, into the throat of a buried giant called Vipunen whose body is the land itself.
Underland Page 34