Ialenti, Vincent (2020) Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now

Abstract

Some energy policy choices have implications for decades into the future. Some choices have impacts centuries, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years from now. How can current planners know what these impacts will be? Vincent Ialenti’s book Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now examines professionals that forecast far-future geological, hydrological, and ecological events in nuclear waste storage. His fieldsite is in Finland: a country famous for its nuclear power programme and as a host for the world’s first anticipated deep geological nuclear waste repository, called Onkalo. This is a disposal option where the spent nuclear fuel is stored deep underground inside the Finnish bedrock. Onkalo is to open in 2023-2024 and contain the nuclear waste during the hundreds of thousands of years to come. Deep Time Reckoning studies deep time: timescales that concern geological events at much greater than human timescales. Ialenti writes not primarily for an academic treatise but for the educated expert and lay publics. He presents nuclear waste disposal to facilitate learning i.e. “deep time reckonings”. Ialenti deems these reckonings crucial at a moment when societies face a dual crisis: an ecological crisis and a putative intellectual crisis, a “deflation of expertise”, which indicates a generalised mistrust of expert authority and knowledge. The Finnish nuclear management expertise and its long perspectives “the world’s most long-sighted experts” (p. xiv) offers fresh insights in this situation. The book is empirically vast, including fieldwork that lasted 32 months (2012-2014) and covered 121 informants from nuclear waste management and its public regulation to research, companies, NGOs, and politicians. As an anthropologist, Ialenti adopts the famous maxim of “following the actors” and treats his informants as “humans with dreams, hobbies, anxieties, hopes, frustrations, quirks, passions, gossip, regrets, kindnesses, and opinions” (p. 20). His observations range from offices and seminars to even free time activities (including a family summer cottage). The educational contents include exercises that form a practical toolkit in deep time thinking. The sheer amount of material is and would be impressive for any academic or popular science work. The book’s introduction focuses on the key actors: the Finnish nuclear waste management company Posiva and the radiation and nuclear safety authority STUK. Between them is the Safety Case, a repository safety assessment report that is a precondition for the government-approved construction license for Onkalo. The Safety Case becomes a main topic for the ethnographic analysis, offering a window into the far-future Finland that is produced in the myriad of technical reports that constitute it. The first empirical chapter examines a key element of the Safety Case: analogy studies, where analogies of various sorts from Finnish prehistory to modern-day glaciers in Greenland are drawn upon to anticipate future Finland. The second chapter moves into computer modelling