The Atom & Us: Cornelius Holtorf

"Nuclear waste does not only represent a significant hazard for the future … it is also an archaeological asset."

Jan 21, 2025

Thanks for reading ‘The Atom & Us’, a series of interviews in which I’m spotlighting the work and insights of some of the incredibly interesting individuals I've been privileged to get to know through making & distributing my own nuclear history film, 'The Atom: A Love Affair' - from scholars and artists, to industry professionals, campaigners and more.

Together, I hope their shared ideas & experiences of the atomic age will help us all deepen our understanding of one of the most vital & urgent - yet in my view also one of the least well-discussed & understood - topics of our 21st century world.

Hello again dear friends. I'm writing this to you amidst numerous piles of neatly stacked, but not-yet-filed-away, paper, having been overtaken by an abiding urge to sort through and properly look at the frankly preposterous number of tabs I had open on my laptop and PRINT STUFF OUT.1

It feels quite apt to be surrounded by these tangible traces of my recent online adventures in curiosity and learning, as I introduce this next instalment of my atomic interview series. Because the subject today is someone who thinks deeply about the physical remnants left behind from deep in the past – as well as those that we will leave behind us and on into the far future, hundreds if not thousands of years hence.

But before I tell you more about him, first a quick reminder of the format:

In every post, my guest will respond to the same set of questions I'm posing to all the interviewees in the series, allowing them each to share and reflect upon their experiences of, and ideas about, all things atomic - informed by their own particular connection, whatever that may be.

Then I'll jump back in at the end with some of my own responses to their words, before inviting you, my thoughtful readers, to join in the conversation too.

And don't forget, if you want to make reading and commenting a breeze, you might want to try the Substack app. It seems more and more people are finding their way over to the platform right now, especially with all the uncertainty around TikTok in the US, not to mention ongoing qualms about the respective empires of Messrs Musk and Zuckerberg…

It really is a different kind of space to those increasingly brutal algorithmic jungles, so if you'd like to find/support more long-form and considered writing, but with the possibility of connection and community in the comments too, then why not have a look. Or just hit reply from your email inbox and we can be in touch that way too😊

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And so on to the main business of the day and I'm delighted to introduce you to today's interviewee:

Cornelius Holtorf

Cornelius is a Professor of Archaeology, originally from Germany but now based in Sweden. But in an unusual twist, his work doesn't focus on the past, but instead, on the future. And more particularly for our purposes, on the legacy of nuclear waste and what we in the present can leave behind to empower generations far in the future to manage this legacy safely.

I'm fascinated by his work as these questions of nuclear knowledge and deep time have been a preoccupation of mine ever since I first got interested in nuclear issues back in the mid 2000s – and of course, they remain a live and pressing issue now, not just in the UK where I am, but in places across the globe who've experienced the footprints of nuclear activity, be they military or civilian.

I find his perspective on this as an archaeologist insightful and stimulating. And on top of that, he also has a vivid tale to tell about his own personal relationship to the atom, shaped by the particular time and place he grew up in, as well as impactful encounters later in life.

I'm sure you're gonna enjoy this one – so with that, Cornelius, it's over to you 😃

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Who are you and what's your connection to 'the atom'?

My name is Cornelius Holtorf, and I am a future archaeologist. I am studying not what present society has inherited—and now values—from the past but what we leave behind and expect, or hope, humans will value in the future. In a sense, I am interested in prospective memories.

Since 2017, I have been holding a UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. Heritage futures is about the roles of heritage in managing the relations between present and future societies.

For more than a decade, our team has been working with long-term memory of repositories for nuclear waste in Sweden and beyond. For several years, my colleague Anders Högberg and I have been representing Sweden in topical expert groups of the Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management run by the Nuclear Energy Agency at the OECD in Paris.

Can you remember when and how you first encountered anything atomic – something you read or saw on the news maybe, or encountered some other way? Tell me about your early memories, thoughts and feelings about nuclear.

I grew up in Southwest Germany during the late 1970s and 1980s which was the time when the peace and environmental movement, and with them the Green Party, came of age. At that time, many people, also from our school, were demonstrating against plans to deposit nuclear waste at Gorleben as well as against the American Pershings which were nuclear missiles to be based on German territory. I was not directly involved but certainly following the developments.

I also remember when Germany in late spring 1986 was hit by the fallout from Chernobyl, just as I was leaving for a school trip to Rome and wondering at that moment if it would be safe to return home a week later (if not, I agreed with my parents to stay in Rome!). That year, they told us that due to radiation it would never again be safe to eat wild mushrooms. But I did return from Rome and have eaten many wild mushrooms since then.

Also around that same time, I was driving with some class mates to take a closer look at the nuclear power station in Cattenom, France. We had been intrigued by all the controversy about the safety of nuclear power stations. There was a lot of security there. We got stopped by the French police who were enquiring what we were up to… After returning home, I wrote a reportage for our school newspaper about this trip.

When did you first become actively engaged in working in/thinking about nuclear and what did that look like for you?

A real turning point was in 2003 when I read Gregory Benford’s account of Deep Time (1999). One of the chapters, on “Ten Thousand Years of Solitude”, discussed his experiences from participating in the 1980s in one of the two expert panels which the National American Sandia labs had run to discuss solutions for long-term memory of nuclear waste storage sites in the US.

I was hooked, and immediately I saw the relevance of archaeology to the question. This question (and some of the other case-studies Benford was discussing in his book) was what I wanted more than anything else to get involved in, too!

After moving to a University position in Kalmar in Southeast Sweden in 2008, I started building contacts to the Swedish nuclear waste facilities operating in the area. After two years of lobbying, Anders and I were able to start, in 2011, a research project entitled “One hundred thousand years back and forth – archaeology meets radioactive waste,” financed by the Swedish Nuclear Waste and Fuel Management Co. (SKB).

Is there an event or experience from your personal involvement with nuclear that particularly stands out in your memory and why?

There are two events that I am particularly fond of thinking back on. One was a trip to Hiroshima in 2013 where I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. This museum is aiming primarily not at commemorating what happened there in 1945 but to convey to the world the horrors and the inhumane nature of nuclear weapons more generally. Now here I really could see heritage futures in action!

Another highlight of my nuclear experiences was a day in March 2014 spent with Abraham Van Luik (1944-2016) taking Anders and me to various sites around the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. This was just weeks after a significant incident had occurred, which meant that we could not visit the site itself. Abe shared with us the history of the WIPP and the full context of the topical discussion in the US, impressing us deeply with his humanistic values and wide-ranging knowledge.

Why do you personally find it a compelling topic?

What I appreciate particularly is that nuclear issues raise some very profound concerns that are not only of existential significance for humanity but also calling for a deep engagement with really long-term futures of up to a million years in the future. This is considerably longer ahead then the time that has passed since the oldest finds of Homo Sapiens! With my theoretical interests in the meaning of archaeology and the distant human past in contemporary societies, these topics were (and are) extremely compelling to me.

What is more, the nuclear waste sector demonstrates that it is actually possible to engage in an open-minded and transdisciplinary way with highly complex questions regarding long-term futures and memory across many generations. This has become especially pertinent in the aftermath of the 2024 UN Pact for the Future in which the nations of the world pledged their intention to protect the needs, interests, and rights of future generations. The cultural sector and many other sectors have much to learn from the nuclear waste sector for addressing the future!

I have also learned that nobody doubts the possibility and significance of my interest in ‘heritage futures’ when I mention that we work with the memory of deep geological repositories for nuclear waste.

Why do you think it has always been such a polarising issue and do you have any thoughts on if/how the discourse can be expanded to move beyond a simplistic pro- or anti- binary opposition?

The polarisation has been varying in time, place, and extent but when it occurs in politics and public opinion, it often involves lumping together several rather different domains and events of ‘the nuclear’ into a single complex of nuclear energy/waste/weapons and their impacts on human and non-human lifeforms. As a result, all possible nuclear issues are seen through the lenses of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, and Fukushima — which understandably raises emotions including fear.

We must respect these concerns in society and adopt a very cautious attitude to nuclear technologies, just as we do with the existing concerns many people have concerning other technologies and their possible consequences. It is useful to involve citizens in decision-making, not the least at the local level. One way of diffusing some of the strong feelings people have might be to make more efforts for prohibiting the world’s militaries to stock and threaten to use nuclear weapons.

What's the most interesting or important thing about nuclear you'd want to tell people that they might not already know?

I would like to share three little known insights about nuclear waste issues that I have picked up over the past decade or so.

Nuclear waste does not only represent a significant hazard for the future but, seen through the lens of cultural heritage as one part of the legacy of the contemporary world, it is also an archaeological asset.
Nuclear waste can help future generations tell the story not only of modern energy technology, production, and consumption but also of the modern environmental and peace movements. Nuclear waste has been engaging many sections of civil society, generating civil unrest as an expression of bottom-up citizen initiatives. In that sense, nuclear waste can still produce a lot of energy for society! In a future age when civil engagement could be critically low, this past experience might be valuable knowledge. Yes, people can take on governments, entire industries and the military!
It is widely known in the nuclear waste sector around the world that the toughest challenges of nuclear waste management are not geological or technical but social. They are very aware that, in the end, nothing will be achieved unless the sector can gain and maintain trust and political support in society. The social sciences and humanities, understanding people and society, have a large role to play in nuclear waste management!
Nuclear semiotics and the efforts of long-term preservation of the awareness, records, knowledge and memory of deep geological repositories tend to address anything from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years in the future. But what has not been adequately considered is the mutability - within the timeframe of as little as a single generation - of even the most basic understandings of nuclear energy and nuclear waste.
Many people’s and politicians’ perception of nuclear energy has changed dramatically over the past few decades: from a liability for human survival in the light of long-lived and highly toxic radiation, to a guarantor of human survival due to the possibility of drastically reducing global CO2 emissions and thus preventing the worst of the climate crisis to come. Even Green Parties are no longer by default against nuclear power!
By the same token, the message deemed to be transmitted over many thousands of years to prevent inadvertent interference with nuclear waste repositories changed dramatically from the 1980s (“this is not a place of honour”, “nothing valued is here”) to the 2010s (providing factual information for informed decision-making). In my view, it is reasonable to assume that this mutability of perceptions of ‘the nuclear’ will continue over time rather than stop after as little as one or two generations—however self-evident our current thinking may appear to be.

Do you have a favourite bit of atomic culture (song, film, book, video game – anything else!) you'd like to share?

I love the idea of “7,000 year old water”, given away by SKB in little bottles filled some 500m below the surface at the research facility for the Swedish repository for nuclear waste. It is stated to come from the brackish Littorina Sea that existed after the Ice Age. As an archaeologist, I am asking myself: what does it even mean for water to age and be dated?

My kitchen happens to contain several nuclear objects. I am very fond of my nuclear tea-egg hanging from the lamp above my eating table and evoking ironically the German notion of “abwarten und Tee drinken” (wait and drink tea). Ironically, the tea egg is guaranteed to leak.

Bright yellow nuclear waste barrel hanging from a chain against a white kitchen wall — Image/Cornelius Holtorf

I also love my drinking glass shaped like a radioactive waste barrel which I bought at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque, New Mexico, US. The other glass I had unfortunately broke but without spilling anything that was inside. The museum’s slogan also applies when I use the glass: reactions welcome!

Clear beaker on a kitchen table with nuclear trefoil printed on the side — Image/Cornelius Holtorf

One wall of the kitchen is adorned by a beautiful Atomteller (nuclear plate) produced in Germany. It is illustrating very poignantly the inbuilt tensions between nuclear energy production and cultural heritage.

Blue & white china plate with reactor chimneys in a landscape hanging on a white kitchen wall — Image/Cornelius Holtorf

Outside my kitchen, the Danish Director Michael Madsen’s 2010 documentary film Into Eternity is a topical classic which I appreciate very much. It discusses very technical issues and their challenges nearly exclusively through the personal perspectives of some of the key people behind managing these issues, recorded while talking straight into the camera. This perspective renders the complex nuclear issues addressed in the film into something deeply human.

What do you think I should ask other people about their experiences and thoughts around nuclear?

The nuclear threat was once considered the single major risk for human survival on Earth. Now the biggest threat is widely believed to be climate change, after a short intermezzo when many where mostly concerned with the risks of pandemics. What will be next? By when and under what circumstances will ‘the nuclear’ have become somewhat of a marginal issue?

Thanks so much to Cornelius for answering my questions with such generosity and sharing his wisdom and experiences in this space. There's much for me to pick up on, but I'll start with the personal. I too have visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, in my case back in 2004, soon after my brother moved to Japan. Other than a teenage visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, I think I can safely say it was the most profound and powerful visit I've ever made anywhere.

I've been told that the museum isn't as graphic in its depiction of the violence of the atomic bomb now, but certainly when I went it was a huge shock. I was utterly unprepared for the depictions of flailing skin, melting eyeballs and the many, many painful physical reminders of the lives that were instantly obliterated, including those of young children. And I was haunted for a long time afterwards by a shadow etched into the steps of a bank building, all that remained of an unknown man, vaporised by the nuclear blast.

A burnt toddler tricycle; blast shadow left by a man on the steps of the bank

The Hiroshima Museum is a uniquely heavy reminder of the value of physical artifacts in telling atomic stories. So I was very happy that Cornelius also shared some much lighter fare in the shape of his fab nuclear-themed kitchenalia. I absolutely adore the 'Atomteller' – I've been slowly ammassing a collection of blue and white crockery from charity shops and flea markets for years but now I really want to get my own nuclear plate to add to my collection! The website is here (in German) for anyone who fancies checking it out.

I definitely second his recommendation of ‘Into Eternity’ - and may well return to discuss the film at some stage here in the future. In the meantime, I’ll also mention my own small contribution to films about nuclear waste in the shape of a short 2 minute animation I produced back in 2010 based around the text Cornelius mentions (“this is not a place of honour”, “nothing valued is here”). I'm mindful that this is already a long post so I think I'll upload the film with a bit more context as a separate bonus post for you later in the week.

Last of all I just want to take a moment to highlight again what Cornelius says about how quickly and substantially atttiudes to nuclear can and have changed over the past decades (very much the theme of my own film of course) and thus how likely it is that they will keep on shifting in the years, centuries, even millennia to come.

Taking the long view, as archaeologists do, to me only reinforces the feeling that we must view nuclear issues through as wide a social and political lens as we possibly can - since a narrow technical view simply misses out far too much of the picture.

And that, of course, is what I’m humbly trying to do in my own work, both here and in my filmmaking.

Thanks so much as always for reading. Please DO let me know what you think. And look out for a little follow up post with my nuclear waste animation coming your way very soon.