My strong recommendation for this evening’s entertainment is to watch a documentary about nuclear waste in Finland – it’s on More 4 at 10pm and will be available on the Channel 4 website for a while after that (and north American readers can find dates of cinema showings here). It’s much more interesting than it might sound.
I happened to see it a few months ago, when it did a brief run in obscure cinemas, and wrote about it then:
The Finns are digging a very big hole in which to store their nuclear waste. They won’t finish filling it up while any of us is still alive, but once it is full, they plan to fill in the hole and keep the waste secure for 100,000 years. To put it mildly, that raises some interesting questions.
Those questions include how to communicate over thousands of generations, how to approach decision making for issues of such moment, and whether secrecy may be a better gift to the future than openness.
Since I assume readers of this blog have a fairly strong interest in public strategy and decision making, I can recommend it even if you think you have no particular interest in apparently recondite issues of nuclear waste management. My earlier blog post has more about all that and the film has a trailer, though it’s not the greatest come on in film history:
This should be an interesting movie. You also might be interested in the work of the Long Now Foundation.
I hate to say it, but for some reason this reminds me of a Simpson’s episode.