Into Eternity directed by Michael Madsen (review)

Nuclear fission generates a substantial fraction of the electricity consumed by the nations of the industrialized world. In a handful of nations—notably France and Japan—nuclear power plants are the principal source of electricity. Free of the noxious emissions of coal-fired plants and the geographic constraints of hydroelectric plants, nuclear plants continue—even in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima disaster—to be viewed as an attractive source of relatively cheap, relatively "green" electricity. The governments of Japan and Germany disavowed the use of nuclear power after Fukushima, but a number of developing nations, including China, India, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, have pressed on with planned building programs. Embracing nuclear power, however, saddles national governments—and, by extension, the entire human species—with the problem of dealing with spent nuclear fuel. The fuel, though no longer capable of efficiently powering a reactor, remains toxic to living organisms and dangerous to the environment and must be disposed of in ways that isolate it from both. Launching nuclear waste into the sun or depositing it in tectonic "subduction zones" where it will be pulled into the Earth's semi-molten mantle are prohibitively expensive and politically problematic. Plans for nuclear waste disposal have thus focused on burying it in specially designed repositories dug into geologically stable terrain.

Onkalo, funded by Finland's two nuclear-power companies and located on a desolate island off the country's southwest coast, is humankind's first attempt to meet that challenge. Under construction since 2002 and scheduled to accept its first shipments of waste in 2020, Onkalo is projected to remain open for a century—eventually storing 5500 tons of highly radioactive waste. Placed in copper canisters insulated with a layer of dense, impermeable clay and sealed using advanced welding techniques, the waste will be inserted into a network of horizontal shafts bored through solid granite 450 meters (1500 feet) below the surface. The individual shafts will be sealed once full, and when the facility reaches capacity, early in the twenty-second century, plans call for the access shafts to be backfilled, the surface facilities dismantled, and the site returned to its natural appearance. Onkalo is a Finnish word meaning "hiding place," and the complex itself—unique among the world's great engineering projects—is deliberately designed to remain hidden and forgotten.

Michael Madsen's Into Eternity is a film about Onkalo, but not a conventional one. It offers footage of the existing shafts and tunnels and shows workers drilling and blasting their way deeper into the rock, but it spends little time on technical details. There are few facts and figures, and—other than a passing reference to the depth of the lowest tunnels—no attempt to convey the scale of the project. Neither on-screen experts or off-screen narrators recite statistics on cubic meters of rock removed, tons of concrete poured, or miles of wire strung. Footage of waste-handling machinery in action is extensively used but rarely explained, and scenes of drilling and blasting likewise pass without comment. The film's numerous scenes of men and machines at work are accompanied by ambient sound or a delicate strings-and-woodwinds score, rather than by explanatory narration. The skepticism about Onkalo that runs through the film is palpable, but it is not rooted in technical questions about the stability of the rock, the permeability of the clay seals, or the durability of the storage containers. Into Eternity is far less about how Onkalo was built than about how the fact that it was built reflects on us, its builders.

Madsen explores the significance of Onkalo through questions that, by their nature, have no clear answers. What does it say about us that we believe ourselves capable of building a structure that will last twenty times longer than the pyramids have stood beside the Nile? What does it mean that our "legacy" to future generations is so toxic that it must be hidden away in a structure designed...