Key Information File on Spent Fuel Repository
Sweden’s Linköping University has created a 42-page booklet called the Key Information File (KIF), aimed at preserving information on nuclear waste, since the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB or SKB) announced the start of construction of a geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel next to the Forsmark nuclear power plant.
The Key Information File produced on behalf of SKB contains the most important information on the spent fuel repository that a future reader may need. Currently available only in English, the booklet is divided into three parts: summary, critical information, and instructions for the future.
The KIF document is the result of three years of work, in which the researchers collected opinions from many sources: young and old, experts, and the public. The work is part of an international initiative in which several countries, such as France and Switzerland, are working on similar documents for their repositories.
According to Linköping university, during their work, researchers tried to create a document that will entice the reader to reread it and share it with others. Professional illustrators were hired to make the document aesthetically pleasing, and while the text is easy to understand, there are mysterious characters on the cover—a coded message for the reader to try to solve. Through playfulness, the researchers want to create curiosity.
Scientists state that language changes over time, as does the interpretation of images and symbols, because the future reader may not even be a human, but a more technological object.
The document therefore tasks future generations with updating the information and transferring it to new storage media if necessary. It also provides suggestions on how knowledge can be kept alive, for example, by including it as a subject in school curricula or creating stories and other cultural expressions around it.
The researchers have named this method SHIRE (share, imagine, renew). It is an invitation to the reader to share the content and become actively involved in figuring out how it can be renewed so as not to be forgotten.
The researcher team has proposed that the document be updated every 10 years, but it is not yet clear who will be responsible for this in Sweden. For now, the idea is that it be kept at the Swedish National Archive.
In addition, Linköping University said that it has already been decided that the document will be part of the major archiving project Memory of Mankind, founded in Austria in 2012. The Memory of Mankind archive aims to preserve humanity’s collective knowledge for posterity on material that will last for thousands of years. Thus, the Key Information File will be printed on ceramic tablets and placed in an old salt mine in the mountains in Austria.