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in this special episode I'm joined by two anthropologists talk about nuclear waste and what implications it has for local communities as well as what connections the process of glass making also known as vitrification might have with Society so Penny please introduce yourself I'm Penny Harvey I'm professor of social anthropology at the University of Manchester I also set up a research group called The Beam several of us including Petra have been working on the
social understanding of nuclear power I am also Deputy chair of Quorum which is the committee on radioactive waste management an independent advisory body that offers scrutiny and yeah independent advice to government about nuclear waste management and Petra your background is a little bit different my name is [Music] social Anthropologist at the University of Manchester and over the past five years I've done research in West Cumbria on the nuclear industry and how it's
entangled with the region nuclear waste is often seen as quite a dangerous thing but it's not an easy thing to Define there are lots of different types of waste vitrification is one way of immobilizing a liquid waste into a solid form that is suitable for disposal is the official term and the idea behind the disposal concept was that it will be very deep underground surrounded by all these seals that will be far away from people the radioactivity will naturally
Decay away over a very long time frame and in theory it shouldn't pose a hazard to people on the surface of the Earth could you tell me more about what the disposal of nuclear waste means for society yes well what I would be interested in thinking about as well is what what it does to the environment because as you say yes everything is focused on trying to get nuclear waste away from from people but it's also interesting I think to to think about what it means if you put this very
vibrant stuff into the Earth and also what that does to human imagination about what happens to the planet but if you you think about planning for a disposal of nuclear waste it's very difficult of course to to involve the environment in that discussion because we're always talking with people about this we're trying to bring in intergenerational ethics for example people in later generations and how they would have to live with uh with the disposal site but how do you get the
environment into it that's one of the questions I have we do have 70 years worth of waste in the UK and it's costing well over three and a half billion pounds a year to maintain safely at the moment so we do need some kind of even if we were never to generate another inch of it we do need to find some way to keep it safe Quorum this committee on which I work back in 2006 actually made the recommendation that it should be buried deep underground and that was the safest option given our
current knowledge they did the wonderful Research into should it go into space or be sunk into the deep ocean or you know what were the other options and one other option that has been chosen in other places notably Scotland is it should be just kept on the surface I think that's also an option that's been taken up in other countries maybe keep it on the surface for 100 years but of course that in itself does imply a lot of extra costs so that in Britain the
the decision was taken well let's just try let's just try and deal with it once and for all work out where it is and once we've worked out what we've got and how we can contain it what kind of packaging and the vitrification process is very much part of that then that would be the optimal solution so that's why that decision was taken but I did want to also mention this statement that was made in the flowers report so Brian Flowers headed up a royal commission
about nuclear contamination in the 1970s and he made this very important statement in that report that was published in 76 and he said there should be no commitment to a large program of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated Beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived Highly a radioactive waste for the indefinite future so this statement has been very important in guiding the gdf those who are closely involved and who are very
supportive of the gdf do believe that Beyond reasonable doubt they have a method but that isn't the same as saying that they know exactly how everything is going to go because we're talking 150 years before this program is going to be finished if you think back 150 years we didn't even have computers but other people say that in fact we haven't got to that stage of being Beyond reasonable doubt that the method exists and they feel very concerned that if we're going
to start generating new nuclear waste and then this is really going against the recommendation that flowers made in the 1970s there are kind of two issues here about what we absolutely have to do with what we've already got and then whether we should be generating more nuclear waste before we've really got underway with dealing with what we've already got so I think those two questions do need to be thought about together but they're not the same they're not the same issue no and I
think the key thing you were saying is the very long time scales involved it's 150 years until the gdf the geological disposal facility will be sealed off yeah well the current expectation is that we're in very early days the developer is still looking for a site and the site has to involve a suitable geology and a willing community and neither of those things have been settled upon yet even once they find a site and get started it's going to be at least about 50 or 60 years before it's
actually going to start being operational and then it'll be like another 100 years or so after that until it would be closed and each stage got to go through huge loads of regulatory scrutiny so that's a long long process so the knowledge that's going to be gleaned along the way and comparative Knowledge from other parts of the world because there are several other gdfs being built in other places notably in in Scandinavia in Canada in Netherlands France Belgium so there's a lot that
people are going to be learning from each other what I find interesting to think about also as an anthropologist is there's all these practical issues around potential gdf around what hazardous ways to do or how we can deal with it but there's also the imaginary of people around you that I find interesting I remember going to an early information session and back then the national parks were not excluded yet from the exploratory venture to look for a place to site in gdf and someone was
saying well should it be buried close to a national park or even under the national park here in here in Cumbria it would taint our imagination of the national park and I thought that that was a really interesting thing to pay attention to as well that it's not only about the hazards that are there but it's also about associations that come up with waste and perhaps nuclear waste in particular that we should pay attention to there seemed to be a lot of different ideas about what waste is and
what that means to the environment Penny you mentioned in particular there are currently isn't the site for the disposal facility so what are some of the challenges involved inciting and transporting the waste the main problem is that people are afraid of it I mean I think there is this sense that nuclear has this Association very deeply embedded with total Destruction and Annihilation is this you know we first knew about nuclear through the dropping of bombs in the second world war and
then we've had some major International accidents which have always caused more alarm than any other kind of accident whether or not they've killed more people it feels as it's a kind of material that is just apocalyptic in the public imagination and that's been kind of Amplified by the excitement that can generate for all kinds of Dramas you know film dramas and novels it's the kind of ultimate a destructive force the industry itself hasn't really helped because it also has been it's very State
controlled it's a very secretive after many kind of different incidents it's actually gone quite a long way to shut public out from understanding what actually goes on and straightforward lying at times you know saying there's absolutely nothing happened when things have happened and people know that so there's also a lack of trust to come in from a slightly different angle perhaps I think indifference might also be a challenge because yeah as Penny says um people
um tend to become very excited in different ways about the nuclear and nuclear waste but I think there's also a lot of um indifference around or people that are not at all aware that this big infrastructure project might might be happening at one point so I I would be hoping that because there's a long time involved in in getting this going I I would like to think that rather than a challenge it could also be an opportunity to think about Futures more deeply it's an opportunity for people to
um to think about what they really want for their Futures in energy terms um in in in waste terms in societal in environmental terms so so I would be um I would hope really that that uh rather than only a challenge it could also be an opportunity really to open up thinking about Futures which is a very diff difficult thing to do really people find it um hard to think about the future just further than the the Next Generation and here we're talking about a long long project with with um with um
extremely long repercussions on geologic time skills I'm also like patch and anthropologists of materials I'm very interested in Industrial Waste more generally and in fact nuclear waste they're not the most enduring they're not necessarily the most toxic which doesn't mean to say they are enduring and they are toxic but there's lots of other things that people don't feel that level of panic about but I think there's something about nuclear which is people feel that it's absolutely out of air
control that was you know it's going to be something that they're not going to be able to themselves manage and it has this capacity to destroy and the industry kind of also makes it worse because not only is it secretive but it's absolutely safety obsessed which is fine and you should think it should be but it means that something that isn't even really particularly dangerous gets treated as if it's like the most dangerous thing in the world so you teach people with how dangerous it is
and the cynical you know cynical arguments that sometimes that's been done to ensure that humongous amounts of money keep getting poured into the industry in order to keep it all safe I think someone referred to it once to me as a you know a seller field it's a five-star hotel for these nuclear wastes and it comes out of a history of Cold War paranoia and that's where a lot of these ideas started from and how when that got turned into a source of civil energy it carried all that resonance
with it so it is bound to those kinds of issues which I think make it very emotional but other people find it very exciting because it's very technology is very super interesting it is a kind of viable energy source in one way it is offering an answer to fossil fuel but is it an answer that brings a bigger problem with it or is it an answer that makes it less problematic in ways we're all kind of complicit as we use energy and expect we can turn the light on and
we can expect that everything can use more and more energy as we as we go forward and this idea of total progress never step back never do without anything that's you know nucleus bound into all those stories as well an awful lot of really interesting stuff to let people go away and think about there so I'm kind of summarizing that as the nuclear industry has quite a long history already that sometimes being shrouded in secrecy in potential nefarious applications and now there's
an opportunity to look to the Future and say well what does this mean for every single person in the nation that's benefited from that nuclear power and then need to think about what happens in their future there's been several attempts to try and cite a gdf and they fail for different reasons but mainly each time they were basically trying to impose visit on a community in the last time technically they weren't technically it was a voluntaristic process but people didn't feel that they
really did have a voice they felt that they were being told what to do I was thinking about what Petra was saying about environment the national park played a huge role in the failure of the previous citing process because people were concerned and could imagine the total Destruction of an environment that they really cared about so that this idea about environmental Futures is actually at the core of a lot of people's protests about having the nuclear facility near them there's a
fear about the radiation but I think environment comes up more strongly as people are thinking about Futures in a way there's an irony there because of course again as you talk about the time scales there was no such thing as a national park even just over 100 years ago it's a kind of human concept and a human imaginary of something which is the real nature that's away from things it's very very recent and very kind of specific little idea of our time we're thinking of hundreds of thousands of
years you know we don't even know what environment could possibly mean there's a sense in which the connection of everything between the water tables the Rocks the air the soils this idea that this material is going to affect them people do really worry about that of course the barrier method is all about precluding that so that the vitrification is quite an important element in this story The key thing of this latest project is that this idea of a willing Community if it works is
precisely supposed to be the kind of catalyst that Petra's talking about to say there's all kind of ways in which this facility could become part of the future of a place it could be a very negative future or it could be something that's very imaginative and that you're thinking about differently it's really about whether any particular Community is going to have the capacity and the strength in a way to really imagine something and demand how this facility
could make where we live a better place to be and it will be a compromise it could be something that could be very transformational but it is going to require a lot of Engagement and again if people are going to not to engage it's going to be very difficult and it'll start feeling like it's being imposed if there's a way that the developer can really have the energy to draw people in and try and get a discussion going without telling them what the answer is
that could be very exciting it could be very creative so I think I agree this really is a massive opportunities but obviously there's also lots of local concerns and people not surprisingly think about the immediate future so it isn't really a national conversation at all as yet it's a very local conversation and a very important one the exhibition that was kind of the Catalyst for this conversation is being held in Copeland which is one community that formed a partnership but what does
that mean in the policy for the geological disposal facility as I said they need to find a willing community and the mechanism to do that it starts with could just be a single person who's got some kind of interest and then if they can find other people particularly including at least one member of a local Council then they were able to form a working group and then once the working group starts talking to more people if there seems to be a genuine possibility
that there could be a willing Community forming over time and that there could be a suitable geology so all this in conversation with the developer then they can form a partnership the purpose of the partnership is to really try to find ways to engage people who live in the ward who will then ultimately after several years have the right to vote in a test of public support whether they would be willing or not so this idea of the willingness is absolutely the core of it there's currently four
Partnerships in the UK and within about three years they're going to make that down to two Partnerships so at the minute they're just trying to really gauge initial interest Copeland is an interesting one because a lot of people in Copeland work in seller field or have family members and so they're very familiar with nuclear materials and nuclear power and there's very strong levels of support at the moment um within Copeland however there's also a history where in the previous sighting
process there was a concern about whether the geology was suitable and So currently there's a lot of enthusiasm for thinking about the possibility of building a gdf under the seabed rather than doing it on land they call it an in-shore facility so that's currently what's being explored to see whether the geology inshore could be suitable the Partnerships really does have this obligation to try to engage as many people as possible so they do exhibitions they're doing lots of
different activities to try and have those conversations so that the key thing at the moment is to have the conversations is to try and get people to think about it and to openly discuss things things that they might want for their Community things that they don't want imagining how you would draw in young people how you'd think about the environment all those other issues that are being discussed so it's very much about having conversations around what the opportunities could be and the thing
that keeps coming up is what that means to the environment as well yeah I think there are any particular questions that this community might have given pre-existing relationship with the nuclear industry and how that might differ from some of the other communities I think they have us a much stronger starting point they understand in general what nuclear power is and what the waste involves because they've been living in with it that all the high level waste is currently in sellafield
in Britain so the one community in Britain that actually has experience of living with nuclear waste is Copeland other communities who are who are considering who are forming Partnerships have never had anything to do with nuclear and don't have any experience of what it might mean so they're using their imaginations more than their experience there's also of course the interesting matter of Transport if the decision would be for a site elsewhere the general concerns about transport on
the whole in the conversations I've been partying to is much more about cost than it is about safety often people don't realize how much nuclear materials are moved around on the UK on a routine basis at the moment but the cost they'd have to be building new Railways and possibly New Ports if they were going to transfer it any distance out of West Cumbria that would be a huge investment but it would be possible and ports when you talk about transport also for other
matters ports would be very interesting I think to to think about generally in in future making because we do we don't use the C much here which is the shape which we're an island so that's a bit of a waste so even if they were transporting the waste from seller fuel to a different community that would still have benefits for the community around seller field if it improves transport links which to my mind is someone that lives here could do with some investment the community around
sellerfield will be involved in this process for at least another 150 years whatever happens because they have the waste if it's going to stay here or if it's going to be moved somewhere else yes it will definitely involve the seller field region but of course people will mention blight also in the short term because you you mentioned benefits Laura but during the process of all the building constructing transport ways of course there will be lots of upheaval
too so that's often mentioned also as a as a negative issue it will be a huge construction project but unlike any other huge construction project this one will have the community at its heart and they can set terms and conditions in ways that have not usually been possible if they choose to if they really go for it if they choose to and if you get everyone on board as I said before indifference is a really difficult to deal with if people are indifferent they've only got themselves to blame
when it happens so you need to get people on board definitely completely completely important yeah the exhibition concentrates on vitrified ways the stuff has been turned into glass that's the really radioactive still the reason for vitrifying it is because that is fairly radiation tolerant compared to other things you could do to it and it's classed as high level waste because the amount of radioactivity it gives off means it gets hot so should this particular material have any more
special considerations of its Society well one thing that that I was really quite excited about is is when I read a bit about possibilities of capturing heat from high-level nuclear waste in fact a few years ago a prospectus for Cumbria mentioned that at nnl the national nuclear laboratory there had been a research into trying to capture I think it was a byproduct of a plutonium and they managed to make a light bulb glow with that and of course it's a very small skill example but the the heat in
nuclear waste is something that might give an opportunity to to do something about our energy issues and energy transition over times otherwise there's this high level activity waste there's been some interesting social science research about the vibrancy of waste and how that's interesting from a point of view of materiality which is the relationships that people have with materials what we want to do of course is tame this vibrancy of nuclear waste because it is hazardous but it's also
interesting to think of ways to live with wastes like that there's always the risk of humorous that we think well it's all engineerable we can do something about it and I'm reminded of something that the former CEO of seller field said at one point uh Paul froster he was talking about seller Fields having to keep the genie in the bottle and I find that interesting because of course vitrification is about glass and incorporating waste into glass and you want to keep that Genie indeed in that
bottle I see vitrified waste as perhaps an Ode to human hubris thinking that it's engineerable but also a warning against human hubris thinking that you can actually capture it for many years to come and the exhibition shows that research is ongoing going into vitrification that there might be crystal forming in vitrification and you want to know all about that because of course you want the glass to remain durable and not become brittle over time you want to engineer it in such a way
that it is safe over time and that's an ongoing process of research when I first learned about the vitrification I was really fascinated to read about how it's a process I mean I think a lot of people maybe think that it's about kind of being contained in glass well instead of actually becoming glass and in this kind of whole change in the molecular structure a lot of the ways in which the gdf is really thought about one of the reasons it's put deep underground is
actually it is a kind of capture I do agree with that word but it's also about slowing it down it's about materials that move really really fast and if you can re-engineer them such that they become part of an environment that moves incredibly slowly and that's where the rock becomes really interesting because rock moves rock moves all the time but you know a hundred thousand years which would be really really significant up on the surface it's just like a millisecond
in the geological time frame I'm really interested in how this idea of the very fast moving fissile matter into a time frame where the movement is made completely other I don't think anyone really thinks that the glass is going to contain it forever but it was going to change the rhythm of the movement in relation to what else gets engineered around it so the engineering in a way is this fabulous series of slow-moving barriers and I think the glass is seen as being more effective than concrete
there's a wonderful phrase that someone told me about at ceterfield you know if in doubt grout the idea in the quick and easy method is to kind of shove some concrete onto things um but of course that makes everything very bulky and it also hasn't got this same um it does have a slowing down capacity massively but not the same as the as the vitrification which is really changing the molecular structure of the waste itself and I find that very fascinating I really like that so talked about the
idea that we're finding ways to sort of slow down what could be a fast process glass is quite good for doing that it can be radiation tolerant it can be quite durable which means it doesn't immediately fall apart or dissolve into water humans have been making glass for thousands of years it comes up in art and it's got practical uses so it seems that Society has a long relationship with glass do you think back for example to the the Roman period we still have
glasses from that period of time and and even long before that glass was being produced by humans for all kinds of different uses and also for for its Aesthetics I was reading this piece by uh Rosemary trentinella who works for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and she talks about how suddenly glass making flourished in Rome in the second Century A.D and how that made glass makers and glass Artisans flock to what was of course a very powerful economic and powerful military Center so you get
these communities of Artisans getting together there and glass becoming widely used in Roman society recently I've been very interested to hear various friends say that they're no longer using the cut crystal that they've inherited from their grandparents and because in fact the ways in which glass has been made traditionally has got quite a lot of lead in it or other kinds of materials that make it not very advisable to drink out of over an extensive period of time
so I quite enjoy the history of the aesthetic of glasses something which is so beautiful and highly valued and yet can also hold this toxicity invisibly because it kind of appears to be this lovely transparent beautiful thing so I think that's quite a kind of an analogy when we're thinking nuclear waste the Beauty and the hidden hazards yeah and there's also these other uses of glass in the nuclear I'm thinking of leaded glass which is used to enable people to
look at contaminated materials whilst it he protects their eyes so glass is really interesting to think within in so many different ways and also when you think of the transparency or the translucency I I find it interesting Penny mentioned earlier on that the nuclear industry has struggled with being transparent that's an interesting one to think with too you hear people saying now that glass packaging so glass milk bottles and the like are more sustainable than materials we've been
using quite a lot like Plastics so this is the idea that glass is more sustainable than I guess more modern forms understand that glass making as such leaves a long environmental Trace as well and of course requires Great heat so it's a great consumer of energy yeah it's interesting to see how these things plastic has generally seen as a bad thing because of plastic pollution but there's a more nuanced conversation to have around that it's fascinating how we think of the durability of plastics
as a huge problem whilst we're talking here about it the durability of glass is something that's interesting it can go to a museum and see glass from that Roman or even from the Egyptian period so we we tend to associate that with with very different things and of course now in vitrification it's seen as an asset to slow down and to incorporate those radio nuclides foreign [Music]