How to bury radioactive waste
And how can future civilisations remember where we put it?
BBC Inside Science · BBC Radio 4
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Show Notes
A small but mighty problem: what to do with the radioactive waste we have already made? Professor Clare Corkhill from the University of Bristol gives us the run down on how radioactive waste is created.
In Onkalo Finland, Victoria Gill visits the first national facility able to provide a long term solution to nuclear waste by burying it deep underground, which is due to begin operations this year.
But how can you stop future civiliations from digging it up again? Journalist Mark Piesing has written on the issue, and artist Gair Dunlop at the University of Dundee has for several years co-convened an international, interdisciplinary collaboration known as the Nuclear Culture Research Group looking at the best ways of deterring trespass over hundreds of millions of years hence.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton and Victoria Gill Producer: Alex Mansfield Editor: Martin Smith Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth