How can knowledge of high-level radioactive waste existence, nature and history be passed on to future generations? The NEA Expert Group on Awareness Preservation (EGAP) has been focusing on this question and is working on new concepts and alternative approaches to be taken into account in a comprehensive strategy.
In order to disseminate and discuss first results, receive feedback and broaden the discussion to include various stakeholders, the EGAP organised a workshop Remembering the past in the future: Building awareness of radioactive waste repositories together.

Cécile Massart - Consciousness of the Landscape

The first part of this presentation focusses on a series of photos taken at radioactive waste sites, with a summary of exhibitions and videos designed to reflect the link with respective reports. Whether in a gallery, museum, cultural centre, enterprise, these works present the possibility to perceive the publics’ ignorance at times, discuss environmental issues, technologies used, future changes in the landscape, transformations, migrations, and politics. These elements represent the main triggers outlined in a study which started in 1994.
Cécile Massart’s research on memory transmission for the future started in this context. Her book entitled “COVER” is a compilation of drawings created during her travels to historic sites throughout the world, a testimony to vanished civilisations, and her markers intended for low-level radioactive waste sites. Projects based on these markers were studied for France’s National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management (ANDRA) CSM Manche site.
Following an artistic residence at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) and at Beatty, Nevada next to Yucca Mountain, Cécile drew 7 concepts entitled “LABORATOIRES”. These drawings are of environmental structures situated near high level radioactive waste repository sites under construction, and visible to everyone in the landscape. “BatLab” – a marker with unprecedented architecture, fits into this plan to unite researchers from various disciplines to discuss modes of transmitting memory (e.g. film, wandering, songs, markings, tools, technology) in connection with universities, art schools, rural associations, communities, in order to imagine an unavoidable regeneration.
This landscape structure opens the path towards forming a new way of oversite, monitoring by everyone for everyone, and learning to live with waste.
Art is a powerful vector, and a nuclear culture can help to understand challenges