It’s early in the summer and cool. However, it seems considerably warmer at 1,500 feet (450 meters) below the undulating hills of northeastern France’s Champagne region.
The air in this facility is dry, and the fluorescent lights are bright. The dust is in the air, and I can taste it. I am reminded of the risks I may encounter thus far below ground by the bulky emergency respirators I must carry with me.
The underground laboratory’s uneven, winding rocky passageways, the hum of concealed technological equipment, and the absence of people then begin to confuse me.
How can I return to the elevator?
I round a corner and find myself in front of a massive room so big that I briefly believe I have wandered into a pharaoh’s tomb. That being said, the ancient Egyptians did not build it. Instead, it was carved out of the rock to serve as a graveyard for intermediate and high-level nuclear waste, some of the most hazardous materials on the planet.
How do you go about planning, constructing, and maintaining facilities that take decades to plan and even longer to build, that must endure for 100,000 years, that operate across centuries, and that contain some of the world’s most hazardous materials?
