RK&M PRESERVATION: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Chapter 3. RK&M preservation: Challenges and opportunities

The question of “How can we continue to remember and understand across generations where, why and how hazardous waste is disposed?” is set against the background of certain challenges related to long-term radioactive waste management (RWM). Records, knowledge and memory (RK&M) preservation offers opportunities to address these challenges, but it poses new challenges too. This chapter outlines some of the most prominent challenges and opportunities of RWM related RK&M preservation.

3.1. Information life cycle management

How can we communicate with future generations and will they understand our messages? In an ideal communication situation, the sender and the receiver share a similar lifeworld and are able to interact, ask questions and give feedback to each other. For the case of radioactive waste disposal and taking into account the extended time frames of RWM, this opportunity is missing. Moreover, much of the available information is specialised and technical, causing communication challenges even in the present. To tackle these challenges, it is useful to identify the various steps of the RK&M preservation process. Three life cycle sub-processes have been identified (Dumont et al., 2017).

1.“Memorisation”, at the producer level, where the information to be preserved is identified, collected, organised and expressed (i.e. made explicit). Memorisation will be based on existing information, which will need to be adapted and elaborated (e.g. with contextual information) to serve various audiences today and in the future, and on new information produced throughout the duration of the disposal project.

2.“Preservation”, at the curator level, where the potential durability of “information carriers” (media) is extended both in the technical (tangible) sense (e.g. transferred to permanent paper) and in the social (intangible) sense (e.g. taken up in education), where the preservation and transmission conditions are optimised (e.g. entrusted to archiving institutions or shared among international organisations), and where information may be restored (e.g. if information carriers are becoming degraded or stories have become incomplete) and adapted to varying needs, findings and possibilities over time. The phases of “memorisation” and “preservation” thus partly overlap.

3.“Access”, at the receiver level, where the receiver has to be aware of the existence of the information, has to be able to find the relevant pieces of information, and has to interpret and understand them in a meaningful way that is not in conflict with the fundamental RK&M preservation objectives of protecting and informing future generations. Future readers/interpreters “may be confronted with information because it has been continuously preserved, but they may also have rediscovered it and then try to make it understandable. Both of these possible situations must be taken into account” (Wikander, 2015: p. 120).

The time gap and the potentially different lifeworlds of the producer and the receiver cannot be addressed directly, but a multidisciplinary and participatory approach can at least serve as an access “pilot test” in the present (see Section 4.6 on actors and Section 6.5 on the participatory process). This is where RK&M preservation starts. If the present society is unaware of RWM practices, this is also more likely to be the case for the future society. RK&M preservation is not just a question of handing down a message, but of keeping that message