Making the Bedrock Valuable: (Re)Producing Conditions for Taxation and Branding within the Final repository Landscape in Finland

The revival of nuclear power is fundamentally entangled with matters of waste management. As the nuclear renaissance emphasizes the sustainable nature of nuclear power as a “fossil-free” investment, it simultaneously must show how the question of nuclear waste is being actively solved, constructing nuclear waste management as a clean technology (Anshelm, 2006). This process requires the embeddedness of nuclear waste management into a local territory, making this an inherently geographical question.

While the siting of the final repository was a crucial moment in the legitimization of continued nuclear power production in Finland (Kojo, 2006; Kojo et al., 2010), the process of embedding the final repository into the municipality goes beyond the immediate siting process. To garner a strong political support, and to depoliticize the deposition method (Anshelm, 2006), the continued support of the local community is integral. Thus, as a continuation of the initial process of negotiating approval from the municipality of Eurajoki, operations, as conceptualized by Mezzadra and Nielsen (2019), between the municipality and the nuclear operators are examined as an ongoing process wherein both actors negotiate the value of the repository.

Three operations are identified. Firstly, the continued struggle over real estate tax that circulates from the repository into the municipality. Secondly, the partnership between the operators and the municipality, where the technical expertise of the nuclear operators is emphasized and highlighted by the municipality in a move towards branding the municipality as specialized in energy production. Lastly, the nuclear operators and the municipality negotiate the order of the waste management landscape into an above and a below. In turn, this order is crucial in reproducing the conditions for a ‘valuable’ repository by positing the underground as a discrete and limited territory far away from the lively above. The distance and homogeneity of the bedrock removes the repository from the natural (romantic) landscape of the municipality, while simultaneously embedding the facility as an item containing high-technological infrastructure and expertise within the cultural landscape of the municipality.