Spectres of Seppo: the afterlives of Finland's nuclear waste experts

Abstract

This article examines how Finland's nuclear waste repository safety assessment experts summoned memories of Seppo: a deceased colleague whose ‘spectre’ was said to still ‘haunt’ their workplace. First, it tracks how Seppo appeared in predecessor parables: cautionary tales told about his death, which conveyed value judgements about how experts ought to act, engage, and aspire. Second, it explores how Seppo's long‐time ‘right‐hand man’ Gustav still felt haunted by his colleague's affective intensities, scientific vision, and sharp tongue. This led Gustav to prod his workmates to reconsider how they modelled Finland's ecosystems many millennia into the future. Studying this ethnographically revealed how traces of Seppo's past life infused living experts with emotions, opened them to alternative futures, and spurred them to rethink their professional values. This article concludes by introducing expert afterlives as a temporal, epistemic, and affective nexus that can shape how technocratic projects are organized and how expert knowledge is made.

Adaptive Governance of Disaster Preparedness? The Case of Regional Networks in Finland

“…Another observation on sharing responsibility concerns the handful of key people that play major roles at multiple levels of the nested preparedness system. While this may support the flow of information between levels of governance, a single person having an irreplaceable role is also likely to be risky, as proven by the problems that emerged in Finland's nuclear waste disposal project after a key expert passed away [35].…”

Deep Time Horizons: Vincent Ialenti’s Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

“…It speaks to his own experience as an anthropologist returning from fieldwork in Finland to the US: from a socio-political context in which a strong trust in 3 is about zooming in, into safety case experts' workplace as sites for the projection of multiple futures, and about zooming out, into human, ecological and geological histories in which their work is embedded. Chapter 4 discusses the case of a deceased safety case expert and his afterlife, revealing the problem of expert mortality and the inherent fragility of knowledge this implies (see also Ialenti 2020). Each of these chapters culminates in an outline of a 'practical toolkit for educating publics, experts and lay alike' (8) for reckoning (with) deep time: the first two offer tools for ' amateur analogizers' (59) and amateur modellers that can inspire thought experiments, structure thinking, multiply lines of reasoning, and encourage reflexivity.…”