This is not a partisan speech. Hardly political.

The Government has promised to announce the final disposal of nuclear waste within a few weeks. This has been investigated and decisions have been postponed for a long time. But now it’s going to happen. The debris from Sweden’s nuclear project so far will be buried somewhere. And somehow.

But the fact that you should now be able to find an arrangement that should be safe, so that radioactivity does not disappear into the groundwater, for a hundred thousand (!) years ahead, gives me vertigo. Existential vertigo.

Normally, surely, if you investigated something for forty years and had div researchers plugged into the problem, then surely you should be able to make a decision? It applies to almost anything! Build a ring road around Stockholm, demolish Slussen, move a whole small town (Kiruna), etc. Perhaps the next generation will fool us. That it got bad. Like sailors eradicating the terrible dodo for a hundred? years ago. But every time needs to act and dare to make decisions based on what you think you want at the time. Normally, it is reasonable. On almost any other issue…

What if humanity and the Swedes are still there in 10,000 years? The entire East Coast is uninhabitable, people need to get iodine intravenously, diseases… For a decision the ancestors made ten thousand years ago

I am completely uninhaposed about this. But they’d rather spend a few billion dollars on a solution that isn’t permanent instead. Wait for a decision for at least one or two generations. Just in case…

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/kopparkapseln-kan-spricka-redan-om-100-ar

I wonder if they had a philosopher involved in the investigation? We are talking about “philosophical practice”, as a complement to psychotherapy, the existential. I don’t know, I don’t know. But here would really be needed philosophical competence, someone who can look beyond numbers and probability calculations.