Onkalo, on the other hand, is supposed to last 20 times as long as the pyramids have so far — so long that the builders of the site have to take into account the next ice age, when the weight of two miles of ice on top of Finland will be added to the stress on the buried waste containers, copper canisters two inches thick.

It might seem crazy, if not criminal, to obligate 3,000 future generations of humans to take care of our poisonous waste just so that we can continue running our electric toothbrushes. But it’s already too late to wave off the nuclear age, and Mr. Madsen’s film comes at a perfect time to join a worldwide conversation about what to do with its ashes. On June 3, administrative law judges from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will begin hearing arguments about whether the Department of Energy can proceed with shutting down development of the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, where the United States had been planning since 1987 to store its own nuclear waste.

If the Obama administration prevails, the United States will be back to square one in figuring out how to get rid of its own 77,000 radioactive tons, including 53 million gallons left over from the dawn of the nuclear age sitting in leaky tanks in the Washington desert near the Columbia River. There are somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste already in the world, much of it in pools on the sites of nuclear power plants where the rods have to cool for years before they can be put into containers.

Onkalo is being built to do its job without human intervention or maintenance. Once it is done and sealed back up a hundred years or so from now, the problem is less with keeping all the radioactivity in than keeping people out. Unfortunately, nothing in history suggests that humans will actually keep out. Indeed the builders themselves, according to their environmental impact statement, have not ruled out the possibility that future technological development will make it feasible to dig all this stuff back up and reprocess it to create more fuel or weapons material, in which case Onkalo will be like buried treasure

The pyramids, after all, are not an auspicious precedent. They have been looted and their inhabitants dispersed to the museums of the world by intrepid archaeologists and grave robbers not at all deterred by rumors of the Curse of the Mummy.