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Containment Filmmakers Go Into the Future to Read the Warning Signs
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of PBS
Posted: January 16th, 2017
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/containment-filmmake...
Harvard professors and filmmakers Peter Galison and Robb Moss have been collaborating for a decade. They co-directed Secrecy, a 2008 feature documentary about the moral, political, and technological controversies surrounding national security secrecy. Their new film, Containment ... grew first out of work Peter was doing (in print) on the strange new lands that are at once our wild, biodiverse landscapes, and at the same time some of our most radiologically contaminated, they told us. The two of us were utterly taken aback by the ambition of the Department of Energy to mark one of these sites against digging for a period of 10,000 years. When Congress [authorized] the nuclear repository near Carlsbad New Mexico - the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) - it was to be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency which did what it always does: it ascertained how long the materials would remain toxic. Since the half-life of plutonium was 24,000 years, the Department of Energy had to envision how to protect people from accidentally intruding into the site ... for some 400 generations. So ... the Department of Energy [called on futurists] to explore why people might dig into the waste in the year 6,000 AD or 11,000 AD. And here, in this story, what a possibility! We had the American government itself ... commissioning a science-fiction-infused sketch of a future in order to open a nuclear waste repository.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing nuclear power news articles from reliable major media sources.
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