100.000 years
NOTICE ARCHIVE - 13/02/2022
How do you do to make up your face to look like you're taking nonsense seriously? Do you nod thoughtfully? Do you come up with a clever question? Or are you so fit that you no longer must pretend? 100.000 years…One hundred thousand years is a long time. At least three thousand generations with common ways of counting. Backwards, 100.000 years is just over 95.000 years past the point when an ancient Greek came up with the word "history". It is 90.000 years beyond the beginning of agriculture. A little less than halfway on the way back, we encounter the Neanderthals. And once again, 100.000 years back, we can follow the first, but not the last, human emigration from Africa.
Which is the reasonable reaction when someone shows tables, exploded views and calculations that are supposed to plan 100,000 years ahead in time? How about grinning? It is obvious that it is pure rubbish. New age in social engineering costume. As serious as the charts that astrologers use.
Yes, it's about nuclear power. Nuclear power is physics and technology. It's politics and planning. But it has also become a confession of faith. It has been so long, ever since the left wing won the critical branch of society. Then it became an obligation for the right wing to be a tenacious technology optimist. And that meant to defend any argument for nuclear power. Everything else was suspicious. Nuclear power was rational. The fear of nuclear power is irrational. Breakdowns and meltdowns, from Harrisburg via Chernobyl to Fukushima, yes shit happens, but they were manageable. Worse with the waste.
Politicians in Europe are talking about planning for nuclear waste with a certainty 100.000 years ahead, as if that were possible to plan for. It's imbecility, but few questions it, not even among opponents of nuclear power. We take it again: the task of guaranteeing security for 100.000 years is completely crazy. Still, we pretend it can be done. Engineers calculate, bureaucrats judge, politicians decide. No one has any basis for any of that.
It is absurd to see how the beloved rationality is transformed into a kind of radiant new spirituality. There are even researchers who have suggested that the state should cultivate a cult, a religion, that trades the story of the dangerous final repository from generation to generation, so that no one will put the shovel in the ground there. Our world religions, which have slightly greater claims, are admittedly only a few thousand years old, but what else is to be invented? Signs are not enough. A skull may mean "dance tonight" in 40.000 years from now. How shall pressure impregnated wood fencing or galvanized steel be in order to survive for 100.000 years? What kind of additive to put in concrete so it does not shrink and crack over the time? So what's the conclusion?
That we should not have nuclear power? Perhaps. Maybe not. But if we are to have nuclear power, we should at least stop cultivating public lies. No matter how careful we are with the waste, the price of nuclear power is simply that we take a risk with the lives and health of future generations. There is nothing like hundred thousand years security. For another public lie is that there would be a way of living our lives, without consequences for future generations.
