Clearings: Historical wounds are recalled, distorted, and even forgotten, but living with nuclear waste means remembering on a different scale.
Jacqueline Feldman, Real Life Mag, June 05, 2017

"On January 24, 1994, Michel Faudry, mayor of Chatain, in France’s Vienne Department, adjourned to his mother’s house and, later on, a hunting lodge. The French state had nominated the granite that underlay the Vienne as a candidate for the disposal of nuclear waste, and Faudry, endeavoring for consensus within his community, had paid himself, out of pocket, to hold a referendum. It seems the department’s prefect had told Faudry he could not fund it publicly and that Faudry had been, for his efforts, bombarded by eggs, tomatoes, and anonymous phone calls. Now, on a riverbank, he breathed. In one telling, he wrote two letters, one to his sister, one prescribing the care of his donkeys and canaries to a friend. It is said he requested that the town he loved reconcile and proposed it reunite at a party in his honor the following day. News reports about Faudry’s day that January 24 are not consistent with regard to the details. Faudry lifted a pistol and, sitting, or lying on a table, a cushion below his neck, fired one shot through his heart.

Andra, the public utility that handles France’s nuclear waste, did not build in the Vienne, but, in 1999, obtained authorization to sink a laboratory below Bure, a village of roughly 90 inhabitants in the Meuse Department, in the Lorraine, a region of fluctuating fortunes bordering Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. Pending experimentation and approval, it will bury 85,000 cubic meters of waste here, 500 meters below what’s now a forest, and, in 2150, seal the repository."

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