Building a Plutonium Memorial

edsonw writes: "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is giving $3,000 in prizes in a contest which will select the better ideas about how to handling and storing plutonium.. In their words, "We're inviting artists, architects, and general visionaries to submit their artistic work for what we're calling the "Plutonium Memorial," a facility that would house the world's unwanted weapon plutonium. We see the memorial, were it actually ever to be built, as a grand and visible emblem reminding the world that short-sighted paths to power can lead to a big pile of problems"."

Comments

Re:Playing devil's advocate...

[stx23]

The question is, "Who on earth would want a pile of plutonium in their back yard?"

Me. How else am I supposed to get superpowers?

Random number generator

[vs]

Why, you could of course use it as the world's largest hardware random number generator.

Preferably located deep in some desert, though.

Coal Waste Memorial

[MobyDisk]

They don't want to build a memorial to the waste produced by coal plants, because there is about 5 million times as much of it, and it all seeps into the atmosphere anyway. That way, the public doesn't have to think coal waste is a problem.

Nuclear tombstone: the warning function

[imipak]

I think this was in Scientific American a few years back, although the piece was concerned more with waste from power generation. Some of that waste (a relatively small amount, perhaps a mere few thousand tons in the US) is radioactive enough to still be dangerous in 100,000 years. Pretty sobering thought when you consider that our present civilisation is only a few hundred years old, earliest recorded history is about 4,500 years ago, and we've had a good dozen ice ages in the last 100K years.

Wherever the stuff is stored, therefore, needs to be signed in such a way as to:

• Frighten people away, rather than attracting them with the idea of buried treasure, archeological relics or whatever;
• communicate this in a way that is culture-neutral. In other words, the third civilisation after us, in say 50,000 years' time (after the catastrophic collapse of ours (due to massive climate change and population growth the planet can no longer support) and the next (caused by brain damage resulting from the accidental translation of a fossilised Dummy's Guide to Windows) must be able to comprehend the message of whatever markers we erect despite having very different language, religious traditions, taboos, social structures, etc etc.;
• Do so reliably for geological periods of time.

Consider further that the oldest known human structures are about 5000 years old (in central America, IIRC.)

I'm sure this story will be full of posts from the pro-nuclear lobby; I'm somewhat sympathetic to that PoV, with the exception of the hand-waving that goes on with regard to waste disposal (including defunct power stations themselves.) I grew up within 20 miles of the largest concentration of nuclear power in Western Europe (Oldbury, Berkeley, Hinkley Point) - the former stations were built in the mid 60s, had a design life of 21 years, were kept up and running for 30, and are now testbeds for decommmissioning. It's going to take a century *just to get the buildings into a safe state for long term storage* - a huge block of concrete containing the reactor core, sitting right on the edge of an enormous river with the highest tidal range in Europe. Hmmmmm. Was it worth it for 30 years of slightly-more-expensive than coal electricity? Well, hindsight is a wonderful thing... I suggest we learn from it.

Incidentally the UK Govt. just approved the first UK complex of off-shore windfarms. Another interesting experiment - might work, might be a white elephant, no way of telling without trying... but at least we know that cleaning them up afterwards will be nbd.
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"