Sitting alone in the Rondo theatre on a cold and misty Monday evening in November, a few weeks before my 39th birthday, preparing to watch a documentary on nuclear waste disposal in Finland, I wondered what my life had come to.

The waste in the film has to be stored for 100,000 years before it decays to a non-radioactive substance. The experts say it can stay for around 100 years on the surface, but beyond that it becomes impossible to predict what might happen. The solution is to bury it deep in the rock so that it could only be exposed by people with the technology to understand the dangers of radiation.

My prediction is that we'll be able to transmute radioactive waste into harmless elements in a few decades. That shouldn't be relied upon though, and any company wanting to build a nuclear power station should be required to build a long term storage facility beforehand.