Location: Oregon, USA
Date: 2017
Programme: Site for Nuclear Waste
Client: Competition
Status: N/A
Area: N/A
Budget: N/A
Team: Traumnovelle (architect)
Nuclear waste is potent, durable, dangerous and should be treated as such. It is so potent that only brief exposure can cause uncurable diseases and durably affect the human genome. The price of nuclear energy is economic, ecological, social, technological and territorial. Our generation is responsible for nuclear waste and its long-term risks and impacts cannot be underestimated. The low cost of nuclear energy is more than compensated for in other ways.
The current strategy of nuclear waste management is to bury small amounts of waste of varying dangerousness in many different places worldwide. Yet imagine handing over a planet constellated with sites of terrible danger, insufficiently protected and marked with misleading signals. The more we multiply low-security sites, the higher the risks of these sites being breached in the future.
Our proposal is for a large-scale containment site, containing larger quantities and more potent waste, secured by the landscape itself. The language of the territory cannot be read, it can only be interpreted. It has no sounds, no symbols, but it has signs which have been tacitly understood by mankind and all other living species since the beginning of time. The burial site will be sealed and left unmarked, and an uninhabitable security perimeter will be established around it. Our proposal consists in defining, establishing and maintaining this terre brûlée.
