Managing Eternity? A study of accountability in the deep time management of Final Repositories for Nuclear Waste

The proposed project studies Final Repositories for Nuclear Waste (FRNW) that must last 100,000-years by contributing in-depth qualitative empirical research about how accountability is managed from a social science perspective – a project focus that has never been deployed before. FRNW are now under development in Sweden and Finland.

However, we know little about how accountability for managing these sites over 100,000-years is today being understood in practice.

Responding to this sizeable research gap, this three-year project uses interviews, ethnography and document analysis to investigate how accountability is being organised by experts to construct FRNW designed to exist across millennia.

The purpose and aim of this project is thus to provide new knowledge about how experts are in practice managing FRNW in the transfer of accountability through time.

In approaching this aim, we will study how human (nuclear engineers, risk assessment experts etc.) and non-human (waste storage technologies, repository materials etc.) actors are positioned as accountable in practices of managing FRNW over deep timeframes.The importance of this study is threefold: (1) it conceptualises currently missing notions of accountability in FRNW management; (2) it identifies how accountability relationships are used in applied settings of FRNW; and (3) it evaluates the suitability of these accountability relations, which have implications potentially spanning thousands of years into the future.