"Feloo, a hunter, chews a strip of roasted caribou flank, washing it down with water from a nearby lake. Her boots press into thin soil that, each summer, thaws into a sodden marsh above frozen ground. Caribou herds drift across the tundra, nibbling lichen and calving on the open flats. Hooves sink into moss beds; antlers scrape dwarf shrubs. Overhead, migratory birds wheel and squawk before winging south."
"Beneath it all lies the Canadian Shield: a billion-year-old granite craton, a basement of rock, scarred by ice, that has endured glaciation after glaciation. In 10 or 15 millennia, Feloo's world will vanish beneath three kilometers of advancing ice. Feloo is unaware that 500 meters below her feet rests an ancestral deposit of copper, steel, clay and radioactive debris. Long ago, this land was called Canada."
"Here a group known as the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) built a deep geological repository to contain spent nuclear fuelthe byproducts of reactors that once powered Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. The vault was engineered to isolate long-lived radionuclides such as uranium 235, which has a half-life that exceeds 700 million yearssealing them away from war, disaster, neglect, sabotage and curiosity for as long as human foresight could reach."
Feloo, a hunter in Ignace, Ontario, lives on tundra where seasonal thaw creates marshes above permafrost and supports caribou herds and migratory birds. Two lakes remain liquid year-round because of hidden taliks. Beneath the landscape lies the Canadian Shield, a billion-year-old granite craton scarred by repeated glaciations. In 10 to 15 millennia advancing ice will cover the area by kilometers. Five hundred meters below the surface rests an ancestral deposit of copper, steel, clay and radioactive debris. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization constructed a deep geological repository there to contain spent nuclear fuel and isolate long-lived radionuclides such as uranium-235 for as long as human foresight can reach.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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