Vipunen warns Väinämöinen not to bring to the surface what is buried in his caverns. He speaks of the ‘grievous pain’ of excavation. Why have you entered ‘my guiltless heart, my blameless belly’, Vipunen asks, ‘to eat and to gnaw / to bite, to devour’? He warns Väinämöinen that he will end up visiting terrible violence upon humans if he continues on his course, that he will become ‘a windborne disease / wind-borne, water driven / shared out by the gale / carried by chill air’. He threatens to imprison Väinämöinen by means of a containment spell so powerful that it is unlikely ever to be broken. It will take nine ram lambs born of a single ewe, together with nine bull oxen born of a single cow, together with nine stallions born of a single mare, pulling together to free him.
But Väinämöinen will not listen to Vipunen. He sings of his conviction that the power buried underground should be returned to the surface:
Words shall not be hid
nor spells be buried;
might shall not sink underground
though the mighty go.
The Kalevala is fascinated by the underland; by the safe storage of dangerous materials and the safe retrieval of precious materials. At the poem’s heart is a magical object or substance known as ‘Sampo’ or the ‘Sammas’; constructed by the blacksmith Ilmarinen, another of the Kalevala’s supernatural heroes, and stored inside the ‘copper slope’ of a ‘rocky hill’, protected by a gate with ten locks. This enchanted artefact, most often figured as a mill or quern, brings power, wealth and fortune to whoever controls it. It is – in modern terms – a weapons system, a rich raw resource, a nation’s organized industry, or a nuclear power station. The Sampo grinds out flour, it grinds out money – and it grinds out time. One of its given tasks is to grind out the age of the world, causing epochs to yield to one another in an immense cycle of precessions. The world has changed too much . . . we are in the Anthropocene.
~
We approach the entrance to the Hiding Place through flat, cleared land. The birches, pines and aspens have been felled and their stumps drilled out to make a square glade in the forest, close to the roadside. A doubled chain-link fence surrounds the site, to keep out moose, trespassers and terrorists. Snow settles on grey gravel. The blizzard has eased. In the yellow corrugated-steel central building a vending machine sells energy drinks with the brand name of Battery.
The landscape below which the Hiding Place is sunk has been flattened by the glacial ice that has rolled repeatedly over it in the past 2 million years. Erratic boulders big as buildings lie among trees where the last ice left them. The glaciers do not feel long gone, as if they will be back soon.
The mouth of the Hiding Place is a ramp blasted down into the gneiss. Lichen has already begun to colonize the exposed rock around the entrance: orange lipstick-kisses of Xanthoria. A shutter-gate locks off the ramp in case of accident. Now the gate is raised – and below it a tunnel angles down into darkness.
Shotcrete walls, unnaturally smooth. Green side-lights diminishing in size. Signs declare the speed limit at the end of the world to be 20 kmh. Utilities cables droop between brackets. A gurgle of water runs down a gutter. Air moves coldly up from below, stirring stone dust. The earth is our tabernacle, a receptacle for all decompositions . . . From the threshold the tunnel leads down and around in a steady crooked three-mile spiral before levelling out at the burial chambers themselves.
Seen in abstract, as if the rock that encases it does not exist, the Hiding Place has an elegant simplicity. There are three central shafts dropping vertically downwards from the surface: ventilation in, ventilation out and an elevator. Around these shafts the transport ramp turns in its helter-skelter, descending at last to a complex excavated space nearly 1,500 feet deep. Outwards from the central space extends a network of storage tunnels, into the floor of each line of which are bored the receptacle wells for the fuel rod canisters. When Onkalo is ready to receive its first deposition, there will be more than 200 storage tunnels, which together will hold the 3,250 canisters. In their form these tunnels resemble to me the chambers and galleries that boring beetles make under tree bark, creating space in which to lay their eggs and rear their larvae, before they kill the tree that feeds them.
Sometimes we bury materials in order that they may be preserved for the future. Sometimes we bury materials in order to preserve the future from them. Some kinds of burial aspire to repetition and re-inheritance (storage); others aspire to oblivion (disposal). At the Barbarastollen underground archive near Freiburg im Breisgau, a disused mine has been converted to a safe-house for German cultural heritage. More than 900 million images are stored there on microfilm in caskets, more than 1,300 feet below ground. The archive is designed to survive a nuclear war, and to preserve its contents for a minimum of 500 years. At Spitsbergen the Global Seed Vault freeze-stores an immense variety of seeds and plant matter, anticipating an epoch after catastrophe when the Earth’s flora and biodiversity may need replenishing. Both of these vaults look forward to a time of future scarcity; both implicitly read the present as a time of plenty.
Onkalo, by contrast, is constructed with the desire that its contents never be retrieved. It is a place that confronts us with timescales that scorn our usual measures. Radiological time is not equivalent to eternity, but it does function across temporal spans of such breadth that our conventional modes of imagination and communication collapse in consideration of them. Decades and centuries feel pettily brief, language seems irrelevant compared to the deep time stone-space of Onkalo and what it will hold. The half-life of uranium-235 is 4.46 billion years: such chronology decentres the human, crushing the first person to an irrelevance.
But to think in radiological time is also, necessarily, to ask not what we will make of the future but what the future will make of us. What legacies will we leave behind, not only for the generations that succeed us but also for the epochs and species that will come after ours? Are we being good ancestors . . .?
The tunnel curls around and back. The air hums oddly. Unseen machines undertake obscure tasks. At a depth of 1,000 feet we enter a series of big side-chambers. In the first stands a yellow drilling engine, unmanned but with its eight halogen eyes glaring, its drill arms still drooling water. The keys are still in the ignition. The shotcrete chamber roof is slotted with silver and red bolt-plates. New drill holes in the roof weep onto us. The halogen casts hard shadows. I think of the lizard-machines in the drift-labyrinth at Boulby, waiting to be enveloped in their halite shrouds.
The bare walls of the chamber are covered in cave art: spray-paint markings in blue, red, apple green, nuclear yellow. The rock is adorned with numbers, pictograms, lines, arrows and other codes I cannot decipher, as remote in their meanings to me as the Bronze Age dancing figures of Refsvika.
~
The Greek word for ‘sign’, sema, is also the word for ‘grave’. Around 1990 the research field of nuclear semiotics was born. As plans developed for the burial of radioactive waste, so the question emerged in America of how to warn future generations of the great and durable danger that lay at depth. It became important, the US Department of Energy decided, to devise a ‘marker system’ that could deter intrusion into a repository ‘during the next 10,000 years’. The Environmental Protection Agency founded a ‘Human Interference Task Force’ charged with the imagining of such a system for the entombment sites under construction at Yucca Mountain and in the New Mexico desert. Two separate panels were convened to consider the issue of the ‘marker system’, reporting to an overall Expert Judgment Panel. Among those invited to express interest in joining the panels were anthropologists, architects, archaeologists, historians, graphic artists, ethicists, librarians, sculptors and linguists, as well as geologists, astronomers and biologists.
The challenges faced by the panels were formidable. How to devise a warning system that could survive – both structurally and semantically – even catastrophic phases of planetary future. How to communicate with unknown beings-to-be across chasms
of time to the effect that they must not intrude into these burial chambers, thus violating the waste’s quarantine?
Several proposals developed by the panels involved forms of what is now known as hostile architecture, but which they referred to as ‘passive institutional controls’. They suggested constructing above ground at the burial site a ‘Landscape of Thorns’ (fifty-foot-high concrete pillars with jutting spikes that impeded access and suggested ‘danger to the body’), a ‘Black Hole’ (a mass of black granite or concrete that absorbed solar energy to become impassably hot) and ‘Forbidding Blocks’ (the bulks of which might intimidate a visitor into turning back).
The panel members realized, however, that such aggressive structures might act as enticements rather than cautions, suggesting ‘Here be treasure’ rather than ‘Here be dragons’. Prince Charming hacked his way through the briars and thorns to wake Sleeping Beauty. Howard Carter excavated Tutankhamun’s tomb despite the multiple obstructions placed in the way of access, and the warnings given in languages other than his own.
Other proposals from the panels involved versions of a transcendental signifier. Human faces could be carved into stone: pictograms or petroglyphs conveying horror. Munch’s The Scream might be taken as a model, it was suggested, on the grounds that it could still somehow communicate terror to whatever being approached it in the distant future. Or a durable aeolian instrument might be constructed that tuned the far-future desert winds to a minor D, the note thought best to convey sadness.
The semiotician and linguist Thomas Sebeok argued on grounds of futility against the search for a transcendental signifier that could outlast all corruption and mutation. Such a sign did not exist, he said. Instead he proposed working towards what he called a long-term ‘active communication system’ that relayed the nature of the site using story, folklore and myth. Such a means of transmission – perpetuated by an elected ‘atomic priesthood’ – would be flexible, allowing retellings and adaptations to occur across generations. In this way what began as a simple set of warnings might be reconfigured as, say, a long poem or folk epic, made narratively new for each society in need of warning. Those ordained into the priesthood would have the responsibility of ‘laying a trail of myths about the [burial sites] in order to keep people away’.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico is currently due to be sealed in 2038. The plans for marking the site remain under development. Among those advising the project now are social scientists and writers of science fiction. Present plans for what Gregory Benford has called ‘our society’s largest conscious attempt to communicate across the abyss of deep time’ include the following measures.
First the chambers and the access shafts will be backfilled. Then a thirty-foot-high berm of rock and tamped earth with a core of salt will be constructed, enclosing the above-ground footprint of the repository. Buried in the berm and the earth around it will be radar reflectors and magnets, discs made of ceramic, clay, glass and metal, engraved with warnings: ‘Do Not Dig Or Drill’. The berm itself will be surrounded by an outer perimeter of 25-foot-high granite pillars, also bearing warning texts.
Set flat near the berm will be a map measuring 2,200 feet by 600 feet. The map will be slightly domed so that it sheds sand in the wind, and does not itself become buried. The continents will have granite edges, the oceans will be represented by caliche stone rubble, and marked on the map will be the world’s significant radioactive burial sites. An obelisk will indicate the WIPP site: You Are Here.
This map at the Earth’s end has echoes of Jorge Luis Borges’s cautionary story ‘On Exactitude in Science’, which imagines a world in which the art of cartography aspires to such representative perfection that the Cartographers of the Empire construct ‘a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire’. But of course this one-to-one scale map proves both unusable and overwhelming. The ‘following Generations’, perceiving the danger of such a map, leave it to erode. ‘In the Deserts of the West,’ ends Borges’s story, ‘still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars.’
Close to the WIPP map what is called a ‘Hot Cell’ will be constructed: a reinforced concrete structure extending some sixty feet above the earth and thirty feet down into it. ‘Hot’ because it will house small samples of the interred waste, in order to demonstrate the radioactivity of what is buried far beneath.
Within the curtilage of the berm an information chamber will be built of granite and reinforced concrete, designed to last a minimum of 10,000 years. The chamber will carry stone slabs into which will be inscribed more maps, timelines, and scientific details of the waste and its risks, written in all current official UN languages, and in Navajo.
Buried directly below the information chamber will be a ‘Storage Room’. This room will have four small entrances, each secured by a sliding stone door. In the room will be messages of warning cut into stone and simply phrased:
We are going to tell you what lies underground, why you should not disturb this place, and what may happen if you do.
This site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Site) when it was closed in 2038 AD.
The waste was generated during the manufacture of nuclear weapons, also called atomic bombs.
We believe that we have an obligation to protect future generations from the hazards that we have created.
This message is a warning about danger.
We urge you to keep the room intact and buried.
That configuration of berm, map, Hot Cell, information chamber and buried Storage Room – all set atop the casks of pulsing radioactive molecules entombed deep in the Permian strata – seems to me our purest Anthropocene architecture yet, and the greatest grave that we have so far sunk into the underland. Those repeated incantations – pitched somewhere between confession and caution – seem to me our most perfected Anthropocene text, our blackest mass.
But I know also that even those words will decay over the course of deep time – blasted from the stone by desert wind, eaten from it by atmospheric moisture, or lost in translation. For language has its half-life too, its decay chain. The written history of humanity is only around 5,000 years old, when cuneiform first emerged. Our language systems are dynamic, our inscription systems vulnerable to destruction or distortion. Most ink is perishable in direct sunlight, fading within months towards invisibility. Even if lettering is inscribed in durable substances, there is no guarantee that it will be legible to future audiences. Today perhaps a thousand people in the world can understand cuneiform.
Those in charge of the burial chambers at Onkalo are largely unconcerned about how to communicate warnings to future generations. They know that, at their latitude, the forest will soon begin to grow over abandoned land, concealing the above-ground presence of the site. They know too that once the forest has grown it will not be long, in terms of Earth time, until the glaciers return to this region. They know that the passage of the ice will smooth out all signs of what has been done here, placing the whole terrain under erasure.
~
We reach the lowest point of Onkalo. An arched side tunnel leads off the terminal chamber. The tunnel’s floor is flat and screeded. Sunk into that floor are two cored-out cylindrical spaces. These are burial holes awaiting their bodies. Each hole is eight feet deep and five feet in circumference, protected by a circular yellow guard-rail.
At the tunnel’s mouth sit a grey melamine table and a brown plastic chair. Until the lethal canisters arrive this is a workplace, and as in all workplaces there are forms that require filling in and legs that need resting.
A series of brown plastic panels are bolted to the side of the tunnel, and on them an unknown finger has sketched pictures in the stone dust that clings to the plastic. There are three panels. On the left-hand panel the finger has drawn a landscape with a storm, a tree, a house. On the centre panel, a rabbit sitting on a cloud. On the right-hand panel is a human face with a crinkled smile.
The be
lly of Onkalo is not the deepest place that I have been during the years of underland travel, but it seems at this point the darkest. I have a strong sense of the weight of time above and around us, bearing down on veins and tissue.
Far above us, waves crash eastwards through the Gulf of Bothnia, the sea shifts under its cracked jacket of ice, a multinational workforce prepares a turbine housing to receive the largest blades ever fitted in a nuclear power station, the sun swings over a shattered Syria, atmospheric CO2 increases its parts per million and the Knud Rasmussen glacier hastens its calving into the fjord.
It all feels very distant, the busyness of another planet.
‘There was a joke among the designers and engineers at Onkalo during the early years of its construction,’ says Pasi abruptly, rapping the stone with his knuckles, ‘that as they began drilling and blasting, the first thing they would uncover would be a copper canister, containing spent fuel rods . . .’
I think with a jolt of the Kalevala, with the powerful Sampo grinding out its epochal changes, with its embedded warnings from centuries ago about the dangers of disinterral from below ground, about the need for copper to insulate from harm, and about the dreadful disease that will ravage air, water and all life if it is brought in untimely fashion to the surface.
Underland Page 35