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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how final disposal is less a definitive end state than a heuristic managed through the Safety Case and a series of discursive and organizational practices. The research draws on a site visit to Onkalo, informal conversations with Posiva staff and readings of company reports.

Paper long abstract

This paper studies the ways in which Onkalo (Finland’s spent fuel repository) is described to the visitors of the construction site, alongside conversations with communications personnel, and analysis of Posiva public documents. This geological disposal facility manufactures security and finality through a multi-barrier containment. Both are enacted through a boundary work that couples engineered hurdles (copper canisters, bentonite, bedrock) with discursive and organizational practices.

The research describes how the need to isolate spent nuclear fuel unsettles conventional understandings of finality and safety, while transforming the underground from a historically negative space into a controlled and safe environment for radioactive waste. Safety and finality are heuristically produced and managed as a ceteris paribus condition, sustained by years of meticulous planning and stringent regulations, as well as by scenarios that must be periodically re-actualized when novel knowns emerge.

The paper shows how deep-time infrastructures rely on rolling recalibration, speculative opacity, and a performative construction of the future, rather than once and for all assurances. This reframes safety as a spectrum rather than a binary, and positions Onkalo as an epistemic capsule that hybridizes laboratory logics with real life uncertainties, evidencing the key role of both technical frames and social practices in the construction of a nuclear waste container.

This is more than engineering; it is myth‑making, reflecting the Anthropocene’s belief that humans can script Earth’s rhythms. In this light, the subterranean future is not found as a fate but manufactured, and its making is a site of social struggle in the present.