The Secret of the Copper Box: public experiments and the prospects of living archives of Swedish nuclear waste

This paper approaches the question of nuclear safety in relation to the prospects of living archives, and in particular, it explores two public events where sociocultural aspects of nuclear waste management in Sweden were enacted. Drawing on an ongoing research collaboration with the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB), the paper examines (1) a grass-roots play entitled Kopparkistans hemlighet (or The Secret of the Copper Box), and (2) a drawing competition hosted by schools located near a nuclear waste storage facility in the Östhammar municipality, considering how these events help reproduce certain kinds of social and cultural responsibility. Contributing to critical debates in the social sciences and humanities intersecting questions of memory preservation, nuclear waste, and post-nuclear natures, we consider how the forms of responsibility produced through these public experiments inform important, albeit unconventional, modes of nuclear waste management insofar as they suggest how long-lived nuclear waste sites might become living archives without assuming a narrow notion of heritage and human memory preservation for all time and space. To conclude, we evaluate how the legacy of the two events might be incorporated into wider strategies of nuclear waste management.