Movie Review SSJ

The Danish documentary “Into Eternity”, directed by Michael Madsen, is about a nuclear waste disposal project in Finland. Since the radioactivity of nuclear waste takes thousands of years to disappear, the goal of the underground burial project is to ensure that it will not leak for at least 100,000 years, and to warn future generations not to go near or open it.

(Before the Japanese nuclear crisis) The film itself is far less concerned with the subject matter than the “Rainmakers” that won the environmental protection award at the Sheffield Doc Fest, involving a lot of professional data and knowledge, while the main image of the film is just a dark tunnel under construction and interviews with the scientists involved.

But the director puts this single project into the context of the entire history of human civilization, giving the film a philosophical and historical depth that is very heart-warming. Hypothetically, if there is a break in human civilization in the future, how will future humans be able to understand the information we left behind? Will the nuclear power invented by mankind eventually destroy humanity? Are the pyramids and other historical monuments that we have not been able to fully decipher what our predecessors were trying to tell us? A letter to the future of mankind is used as a narration throughout the film, read out by the director, and the director lights a match in the dark to start the narration at the beginning of the film, and the match is extinguished at the end of the film. In addition, through the slow-motion, animation and other hand orders the picture is not monotonous. Interviews with scientists are usually done in one sentence, with different people with different views staggered and edited to avoid large narratives.

On a side note: the Danes are thinking about the Earth and human civilization 100,000 years from now, while the Chinese are thinking about how many days from now? It’s a boring but interesting documentary.

No doubt boring, of course, as a documentary this is probably unavoidable. Hardly any images exist to stimulate the senses, except for the last part of the video, where I seem to see a woman bending her arms on the ground on the uneven rock wall of the cave …… However, in terms of content, I again found it very interesting. I spent over an hour watching it, and although I was a little distracted by having to pause for the machine-turned subtitles, I couldn’t get enough.

Onkalos, so they named a buried nuclear waste cemetery, is located in a deserted area of Finland, with the first ever nuclear waste depot just 5km underground. I probably found this documentary after watching several videos about Chernobyl, expecting it to be a different kind of documentary, one that tends to be about “cemeteries”, but apparently it’s not, but this is good too.

Back to what I said before, one of the most interesting things about it is that the engineers and scholars involved in the project put a lot of effort into what I thought was the nitty-gritty – how to prevent future generations from digging the grave. I can’t help but think of a joke in Western academia that goes something like this: they hold a whole week of seminars to come up with constructive ideas about those problems, and when it’s all over, the problems are still there in their original form, and nothing has been solved. I don’t want to be critical, it’s really interesting, isn’t it? They envisioned a lot of problems that I never thought about and tried to come up with some solutions.

For example, in many years, will humans understand today’s words, will they be able to read the warnings to avoid intrusion? Are symbols more appropriate than words? Would the discoverers have excavated it all as a religious place of worship or as a treasure? Similar to the Egyptian pyramids. Yes, the pyramids, this scenario is particularly interesting. Think about it, suppose the pyramids were a mere tomb, with no mystery, and the ancient Egyptians buried certain radioactive substances along with the most honored mummies to punish those who tried to intrude, hence the archaeologists who died in bizarre ways. And imagine, those novels or films, there are always ancient texts that discourage people from entering the catacombs, is it not that we ignore those warnings to explore the treasures there? What if that treasure was hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste? A succession of explorers, grave robbers, archaeologists and historians have died in strange ways, and a mysterious, dangerous and cursed ancient treasure has been born.

However, these jokes of mine aside. I am in favor of the Finns’ plan to permanently seal their nuclear waste. They clearly have a better sense of human capabilities and are willing to take the initiative and assume responsibility for future generations, rather than leaving the mess of solving the nuclear waste problem to future generations, as most countries do. While we all know how indispensable energy is in a developing country, especially one that is emerging at a rapid pace, nuclear energy use is still an ongoing battle with the world. But nuclear energy use is still a deal with a witch, and hopefully we will not leave future generations a cursed tomb.