James' World 2

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IGNACE, Ontario, C.E. 51,500—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. Two lakes remain liquid year-round, held open by hidden taliks—oases of water in a frozen land. 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 fuel—the 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 years—sealing them away from war, disaster, neglect, sabotage, and curiosity for as long as human foresight could reach.

NWMO issued reports with titles such as Postclosure Safety Assessment of a Used Fuel Repository in Crystalline Rock. These studies modeled future boreal forests and tundra ecosystems, simulating the waxing and waning of vast glacial ice sheets across successive ice ages. They envisioned the lifeways of self-sufficient hunters, fishers, and farmers who might one day inhabit the region—and even the remote possibility of a far-future drill crew inadvertently breaching the buried canisters.

Feloo was born into a world that has remembered none of this. Records of the repository were lost in the global drone wars of C.E. 2323. All that endured were the stories of Mishipeshu, the horned water panther said to dwell beneath the lakes—and to punish those who dig too deep. Some of Feloo’s companions dismiss the legend; others whisper that the earth below still burns with poison. Yet every step she takes is haunted by choices made tens of millennia before—when Canada undertook the Promethean task of safeguarding a future it could scarcely imagine.

In 2024, NWMO announced that Canada’s deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel would be built in the granite formations of northwestern Ontario, near the Township of Ignace and the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation. The decision capped off a 14-year siting effort that solicited volunteer host communities and guaranteed them the right to withdraw at any stage of the process. NWMO is now preparing for a comprehensive regulatory review, which will include a licensing process conducted by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. This means the development of impact assessments that will be specific to the Ignace site. NWMO has also pledged an Indigenous-led regulatory process alongside federal oversight, with the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation conducting its own assessments to ensure the project reflects Anishinaabe principles of ecological stewardship. If approvals proceed, construction could begin in the 2030s, and the repository could go into operation in the 2040s.

A deep-time repository, like a deep-space probe, must endure without maintenance or intervention, independently carrying human intent into the far future.

A deep geological repository can be seen as a reverse ark: a vessel designed not to carry valuables forward in time but to seal dangerous legacies away from historical memory. Or it can be understood as a reverse mine: an effort returning hazardous remnants to the Earth rather than extracting resources from it. Either way, it is more than just a feat of engineering. Repository projects weave together scientific reasoning, intergenerational ethics, and community preferences in decisions that are meant to endure longer than empires. As messages to future versions of ourselves, they compel their designers to ask: What symbols, stories, or institutions might bridge epochs? And what does it mean that we are trying to protect future humans who may exist only in our imaginations? I am a cultural anthropologist. From 2012 to 2014, I spent 32 months living in Finland, conducting fieldwork among the safety assessment teams for Onkalo—an underground complex that is likely to become the world’s first operational deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel. The teams’ work involved modeling far-future glaciations, earthquakes, floods, erosion, permafrost, and even hypothetical human and animal populations tens of millennia ahead. That research became the basis for Deep Time Reckoning, a book exploring how nuclear-waste experts’ long-range planning practices can be retooled as blueprints for safeguarding future worlds in other domains, from climate adaptation to biodiversity preservation.

During the Biden administration, I joined the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Spent Fuel and High-Level Waste Disposition, where I helped advance participatory siting processes modeled on approaches that had proven successful in Finland and Canada. I served as federal manager of the DOE’s Consent-Based Siting Consortia—a nationwide coalition of 12 project teams from universities, nonprofits, and the private sector that were tasked with fostering community engagement with nuclear waste management. Through it all, I came to see repository programs as civilizational experiments in long-term responsibility: collective efforts to extend the time horizons of governance and care so that shared futures may be protected far beyond the scale of any single lifetime or institution.

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Federico Tramonte

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