SUMMARY

• There is a repository located near the village of Forsmark, Sweden, buried 500 meters underground. It contains materials that are dangerous to humans and other living organisms.
• The materials are spent nuclear fuel, which are waste leftovers from energy production. They are dangerous because they are radioactive, and radioactivity is not possible to detect with human senses.
• This document contains crucial information about the repository and how to prevent its content causing harm today and in the future.

Countries with nuclear facilities are considering ways to safely store radioactiveleftovers from their nuclear activities over long timescales, including spentnuclear fuel. In Sweden, this work has come relatively far with the constructionphase now beginning for a deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel at Forsmark. In parallel to the development of storage technologies, work is being carried out internationally to develop ways of communicating the long-term hazards of the radioactive remains to future generations. One such approach for communicating information about repositories and their content is called the Key Information File (KIF), a concept advanced through international expert groupsled by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

This is the concluding report about the work to write a Key Information File for the prospective Forsmark Spent Fuel Repository, in a project commissioned by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) over theperiod 2021-2024. It outlines project activities, insights gained, and recommendations for further work. In the report, it is argued: (1) for the KIF tosuccessfully work as tool for information transfer to future generations means accepting it is a document aimed at the widest possible audience, and therefore must be presented in a manner open to various readers; (2) that there is a need for a mechanism that supports the continuous renewal of the KIF, and here the projectuniquely proposes the SHIRE method, which stands for Share-Imagine-Renew; and (3) that the KIF also has an important role to play in contemporary conversations around memory transfer concerning nuclear waste repositories. This is because the work to rewrite a given KIF will in itself form a social practice, which could keep complex and critical questions about the memory of underground repositories relevant through time.

In Europe, increasing efforts on climate change mitigation, a sudden focus on energy independence after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and reported breakthroughs in nuclear fusion have sparked renewed interest in the potential of nuclear power. So-called small modular reactors (SMRs) are increasingly under development, and familiar promises about nuclear power’s potential are being revived. Nuclear power is routinely portrayed by proponents as the source of “limitless” amounts of carbonfree electricity. The rhetorical move from speaking about “renewable energy” to “fossil-free energy” is increasingly evident, and telling.

Despite the ongoing efforts towards Cold War heritage-making in Europe, the ambiguities in meaning and the cultural status of certain materialities from the second half of the 20th century across different national contexts highlight a heritage dissonance at play. Focusing on the case of the Baltic states, we analyse the engagements with Soviet military remnants since the early 1990s in the context of changing political regimes. We approach the prevailing practices of disinheritance along the same conceptual lines as heritage-making and highlight how disinheritance has contributed to shaping national identities and future-oriented landscape relations. We argue that disinheritance can be a legitimate alternative strategy for dealing with difficult legacies. In addition, we shed light on how the fragmented attempts to preserve and re-narrativize certain Soviet military remnants reflect the constrained relations between the political agendas of post-1990s nationalism and European integration.

The relationship between nuclear power and nature is saturated with ambiguities and contradictions emerging from the different technological, scientific, and socio-cultural understandings of the two terms. Stemming from Nuclear Natures, an ongoing research project at Linköping University in Sweden, this article provides six takes—or briefs, as we call them—on nuclear natures in the form of analyses of environmentalist anti-nuclear campaigning, uses of natures surrounding operational nuclear power plants, nuclear waste management, and afterlives of denuclearised environments. The article supports the view that a type of situated environmental writing is called for in attempts to understand the disparate histories and futures of nuclear natures.

This article assays geographical research into nuclear cultures, and cognate conversations in atomic heritage, toxic waste studies, and memory and landscape studies, as one way to develop the notion of nuclear memory. In doing so, we survey how geographers and social scientists have sought to think and communicate memory of nuclear things through three specific modes: the archival, the aesthetic, and the speculative. Our central argument is that nuclear memory provides a theoretical orientation for geographers to engage with alternative possibilities for thinking nuclear waste futures besides anthropocentric notions of common sense.