Nuclear Information Centre
At One with the Waste (2024).
[NIC/GD/014]
You find yourself deep underground in the bedrock, at one with our most hazardous and long-lived nuclear waste.
Why did you come here?
How long will you stay?
What will happen once you leave?
Perhaps you arrived by train via the Encapsulation Plant with a highly engineered comfort blanket of bentonite clay pellets to surround yourself with in the welcoming darkness.
The radioactive waste containers that you now find yourself next to make for strange bedfellows but somehow you feel a close connection.
You feel so protected here. Why would you ever want to leave?
Why did you come here?
How long will you stay?
What will happen once you leave?
Perhaps you arrived by train via the Encapsulation Plant with a highly engineered comfort blanket of bentonite clay pellets to surround yourself with in the welcoming darkness.
The radioactive waste containers that you now find yourself next to make for strange bedfellows but somehow you feel a close connection.
You feel so protected here. Why would you ever want to leave?
You have vague memories of a consent-based siting process, engagement opportunities for those with the time and inclination to engage and a neat and tidy solution on offer at the end of the uranium paved road.
A test of public support was passed so you must surely be an active member of a willing community, right?
“A Geological Disposal Facility or GDF involves isolating nuclear waste deep underground in suitable geological formations and placing it in highly engineered vaults and tunnels”.“The facility works by using a multi-barrier approach in which engineered and natural barriers work together to contain and isolate the UK’s most hazardous radioactive waste, keeping it safe and secure over the many thousands of years it will take for the radioactivity to naturally reduce”. (Nuclear Waste Services).
Simultaneously floor-based and up to a kilometre underground, the bentonite clay-soaked string of At One with the Waste assumes the form of an altogether more organic and mycelium-like version of a GDF. By taking a less than highly engineered approach to its construction and operation, this re-imagined model has also managed to escape the confines of its hazard-taped edges in places.
As we entrust the buried waste to the long-term stewardship of the earth we are asked to place our trust in the human engineering behind a GDF and its much-modelled, multi-barriered safety features.
Ultimately, this installation imagines an altogether more inseparable relationship with the radioactive waste that we have created; merging the human and geological to the extent that we find ourselves permanently at one with the waste.
Artist impression of a potential future GDF (image credit: Nuclear Waste Services).
As a UK GDF does not yet exist, At One with the Waste could be thought of as an artists impression of an artists impression or perhaps a non-site of a non-site.
Information last updated: Sun 26 Jan 2025
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