nuclear-news

Films awaken Indian audiences to the dangers of the nuclear industry

Uranium Film Festival: Capturing Fallout   Tehelka Blog, 17 Jan 13 Author: Ajachi Chakrabarti “I am now in this place where you should never come. We call it Onkalo. Onkalo means ‘hiding place’. In my time it is not yet finished, though work began in the 20th century, when I was just a child. Work will be completed in the 22nd century, long after my death. Onkalo must last 100,000 years. Nothing built by man has lasted even a tenth of that timespan.But we consider ourselves a very potent civilisation. If we succeed, Onkalo will most likely be the longest lasting remains of our civilisation. If you, sometime far in the future, find this, what would it tell you about us?”

Thus begins Into Eternity, Danish director Michael Madsen’s documentary about the Onkalo spent nuclear waste repository on the island of Oikiluoto in Finland. In 1994, the legislature amended the Finnish Nuclear Energy Act to specify that all nuclear waste produced in Finland must be disposed of in Finland. The solution was the repository, a deep cavern to be filled with radioactive waste that is designed to hold for ten half lives – in some cases, as long as 250,000 years – the accepted timespan for such waste to be considered safe.

Obvious geological fears aside, the fear that Madsen taps into in this film is that of communicating to future civilisations that the contents of this cavern they would find are very toxic.“What if a future generation thinks there’s something nice in that hole?” asks Norbert Sucharek, a German environmental journalist working in Brazil, who is the director of the Travelling International Uranium Film Festival, at whose Delhi leg the film was shown. “You could put up a sign, but what if there’s someone who says, ‘It’s all lies. There’s gold buried in there.’? The best way is to keep the knowledge about radioactivity alive. To save future generations, we should not forget it. The ancient societies, such as the aboriginals in Australia, they have their legends which say ‘do not touch this stone. A rainbow snake lives here, and if you touch it, it will destroy the world.’ That was a way of transporting information to future generations that something is wrong there; we should not touch it.”

The story of the aborigines’ struggle against uranium mining is told in Dirt Cheap: 30 Years On, an updated version of the 1980 Dirt Cheap, which reported how uranium mining was imposed on the aborigines of Kakadu in northern Australia, as the government subverted the will of the traditional owners of the land by buying off the body that was supposed to protect their rights to the land. In the 2011 film, the aborigines express their dismay at the Fukushima disaster, tinged with guilt at the fact that the uranium causing the radiation was mined in the lands they failed to defend against the Europeans.

“It’s interesting,” says Sucharek, “We have the same legends in Brazil. In the northern part of Brazil, we have one of the biggest uranium deposits in the world. These are untouched, because the Yanumami people, whose land it is under, are the keepers of the deposit and don’t let mining companies touch it, as they believe it is dangerous. But these legends don’t work anymore in our modern society. Nobody respects them now. So we have to find new ways to transport this information to the next generations. Our way is filmmaking.”…. http://blog.tehelka.com/uranium-film-festival-capturing-fallout/

January 19, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Resources -audiovicual