Assuntos
Demografia , Poluentes Ambientais/efeitos adversos , Poluição Ambiental/efeitos adversos , Poluição Ambiental/economia , Locais de Resíduos Perigosos/economia , Grupos Raciais , Justiça Social/economia , Política Ambiental , Poluição Ambiental/ética , Resíduos Perigosos/efeitos adversos , Locais de Resíduos Perigosos/ética , Nível de Saúde , Humanos , Modelos Teóricos , North Carolina , Política , Pobreza , Determinantes Sociais da Saúde , Justiça Social/ética , Fatores Socioeconômicos , Estados Unidos , Instalações de Eliminação de Resíduos/economia , Instalações de Eliminação de Resíduos/éticaRESUMO
The purpose of this article is to consider the socio-anthropological issues raised by the deep geological repository project for high-level, long-lived nuclear waste. It is based on fieldwork at a candidate site for a deep storage project in eastern France, where an underground laboratory has been studying the feasibility of the project since 1999. A project of this nature, based on the possibility of very long containment (hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer), involves a singular form of time. By linking project performance to geology's very long timescale, the project attempts "jump" in time, focusing on a far distant future, without understanding it in terms of generations. But these future generations remain measurements of time on the surface, where the issue of remembering or forgetting the repository comes to the fore. The nuclear waste geological storage project raises questions that neither politicians nor scientists, nor civil society, have ever confronted before. This project attempts to address a problem that exists on a very long timescale, which involves our responsibility toward generations in the far future.
