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This Place is Not a Place of Honor
macnigel writes "DOE tries to find a good warning sign for the nuclear waste dump out in Nevada. This is one of those scary yet true things our government actually does; research into finding what exactly can be interpreted as "dangerous" 10,000 years from now." I was sure we had run a story about this before, but I don't see it in the archives. The report on how to mark the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (complete version in pdf 19.5Mb) makes chilling, yet somehow inspiring reading, and IMHO is much less deserving of mockery than the Salon author makes it out to be.
if they can't detect the radiation i doubt a sign would help..
Karma: Bad (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)...Now i know why.
Simple! Just print out the collected works of Jon Katz at font size 72 and spread them around the whole area.
"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Run away. Fast.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
These effors were written about in more depth and detail by Gegory Benford here:r d.html
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benfo
People dying is a pretty good sign in my opinion. Or are they just looking for a lame road sign or something?
If you've seen the Red Dwarf episode "Quarantine", recall the 'Most Gross Danger' sign which featured an illustration of a man stick-figure grabbing his throat while his guts exploded from his abdomen.
I think that'd probably do.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
For a pure and simple "You're gonna die" motif, you just can't beat the tried and true skull and cross bones. We may evolve, but we know what our ancestor creatures looked like and it they'd marked anything with something that looked like a skull with bones we'd know to avoid it. That's my two cents.
Who knows, that the Stonehenge, or Easter Island statues, or the Pyramids, are actually warnings from ancient cultures about forgotten technology.
(Like, the "Bermuda Triangle? Or Sitchin's Earth Chronicles?)
They should also put up automated laser turrets (of course nuclear powered so they work for a few eons) to vaporise everyone who approaches so that nobody dies from that deadly radiation.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
* NOT Responsible for people becoming critically ill, insane, or insomniaks. See warning label on the next cansiter.
It's heartwarming to find out that we're being so carefully worried about for the future. Hey, the unlucky could even find their hearts literally warmed, whee!
Everything will be taken away from you.
But what does a "Do not enter" sign mean to the average geek? It raises his or her curiosity why exactly whatever is behind closed doors should be left alone. Hence the number of mummys lying in museums instead of pyramids.
If the knowledge is lost why our generation took so much precaution, not even the best signs or defense systems or whatever will keep the curious out. But maybe the humans of the future will just scan the sites from their orbiting starship while sipping a cup of hot earl grey tea .... ahh, drifting off again ...
Line 9: Argument of type SIGNATURE expected.
It's not like we can't change the sign if a new language comes along. And it's not like civilization will forget that there's a whole bunch of really nasty shit in the Nevada.
Just post a sign with the goatse guy on it. That should scare away most any intelligent being.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I made one seven years ago for neurological pathogens, but I think in this case, the best idea might be a variant of the skull and crossbones, replacing the crossbones with the traditional radiation symbol.
Kevin Fox
C'mon, this is a great chance to play a practical joke on future generations.
How about a sign with amorous stick figures, hearts, and in every modern language, "Procreate here and you will have interesting offspring"?
I swear, government takes the fun out of everything.
-b
In dark ages past, my aunt would renew my subscription to OMNI as my birthday present. Gawd... that was 15, maybe 20 years ago. As I aged, I kept that subscription -- all the way up to when they quit publishing. (They "embraced a fully electronic format" or something like that... sound familiar?)
Now, here's the kicker:
- I remember an article about this same subject!
And now here we are... the internet has come, grown, the bubble has burst, my favorite Sci-Fi magazine is no more, and we STILL haven't answered one (seemingly) simple question! Nuclear power plants are storing every fuel rod they've ever used on-site, Germans are willing to disable their rail system to prevent nuclear waste transport, and Nevada residents (read: voters) will only allow the Yucca Mountain Facility if the rest of the country rams it down their collective throat!(It was complete with artists' renditions of the ideas... fields of giant spikes, etc...)
The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Now imagine that the pyramids were nuclear waste disposal sites and that all those dread pictorial warnings of demons and death adorning them to warn off graverobbers that you know from Indiana Jones actually were warnings about nuclear radiation.
"You will die a slow and horrible death, if you enter here!"
Yeah right, said graverobbers throughout the millennia. Egyptian jewelry and pottery from those graves have adorned houses and women everywhere. They were fashionable in the 1920's, I believe.
Mummies were used for fuel in the USA a hundred years ago.
Hundreds of thousands of people would have been exposed to radiation before we finally gained an inkling into its dangers in the fifties.
It's rather improbable that our culture will last the 100,000 years that our nuclear waste will remain highly dangerous, so the above scenario is inevitable. People are curious and they do not believe in warnings of unseen, tasteless, odorless dangers. Better think of a way to hide the stuff well enough to stay inaccessible for that time.
Impossible? Well fancy you saying that! That's exactly why I have a problem with nuclear power generation!
>and IMHO is much less deserving of mockery than the
>Salon author makes it out to be.
I agree...this article contains most of the requisite elements of a Salon author's work: an obvious disdain for science and especially those who practice it, a lot of unfunny non-humor, contrived anti-government cynicism, and the obligatory stab at George W.
It's fine, though - as long as the scientists keep doing what they do, and the pseudo-intellectual hipsters at Salon confine themselves to their useless pursuits, real progress should remain unimpeded.
Two words: Neverland Ranch.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I like the "massive stone grid" approach.
For those of you who didn't read the shorter site: A grid of massive, roughly hewn 25' black cubes with about 5 feet of separtation between them.
You could get in, but it'd be a distinctly uncomfortable place to be. It'd be unbelievably hot a lot of the year, it'd be tought to do anything useful in the area, etc. It says "stay out" without trying too hard and inciting curiosity.
Of course, I also think "Most gross danger" in the top hundred most popular languages and Welch would be a good addition. Hell, it might even serve as a rosetta stone some day...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
10,000 years from now the place will be a magnet for the sort of people who visit stonehenge now.
The best possible marker would be none at all.
--
--
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me - Churchill
You could bury it in Nevada then nuke the area. Once people see the desolate waste land that destroys all life and sucks your will to live right out of you...
Oh wait, it's Nevada. Nevermind.
Just put a casino nearby, then nobody will care where the nuclear waste is.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
I mean....we won't be here, I'm against putting my hard earned money towards helping people 10000 years from now, let them figure it out on their own.
Kinda reminds me of Stonehenge -- ominious pillars and whatnot?...
I'd say it's fairly unimportant to worry about how beings 10,000 years in the future are going to interpret this. It may be an interesting study in thought, but nothing outside of that.
There is one thing that keeps echoing through my mind, and I hope to God that the people working on this project are thinking it too: What the hell are we doing?
-- I'll cut you up so bad, you'll wish I'd never cut you up so bad!
At some point in the next few thousand years someone will want to find a way to kill lots of people. Whatever marking they put over this dumpsite will say "Here's the dangerous stuff! Come and get it!"
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
Alright, so now that I've been up all night, here's my suggestion:
What we should do rather than a sign we should make the hole facility a death trap, so anyone curious enough to explore it will never get close to the deadly radiation. Kind-of like the Scarab of Ra (really old game I played on a Mac), we can keep mummies, lions, leapords, spike traps, or whatever the hell they had in that game all throughout our nuclear waste pyramid.
To make it more of a challege we can give them points for every level down they get, up until the last level when they find the nuclear waste and die.
btw, its spelled "honour".
Question (possibly stupid): Why can't we just heave it into space? Is it due to sheer volume? Do we have plans to produce a whole lot more of it?
If so, i'll want to find another planet, but i'll probably be barred from entry due to our reputation. We need a legal system which allows people to be sued by their hypothetical descendants.
i've always thought burying your troubles and pretend they have gone away is a shitty solution.
quality, above ground storage would allow maintainence, monitoring, etc.--heck, in fifty years we might have the technology to turn this crud into baby food.
be a shame to have to go dig it all up again.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
There's no if left, regarding the rest of the country. Votes in Washington were 3 to 1 that we should fill trains with nuclear waste, and send them to Nevada.
So that our sightless post-apocalyptic descendents can discern the danger as they undulate along the ground on their many legs. Also, it needs to be pulsed out in high-frequency morse code so that they can use their sonar to avoid it.
Also, if they really want to deter Mad Maxx, they should point out that it contains no gasoline.
*I* think it's every bit as silly as the Salon article makes it out to be. It's cool, but it's still stupid.
"No Treasure Here!"
Sigh.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
This is a monument after all. It's a testimony to our wasteful use of energy. It documents for the next 10000 years how we cared less about the generations that followed us and more about unnecessary and lazy luxuries. It establishes our disregard for the land and our lack of spirituality. It is a testament to irrational, self-destructive behavior. People coming across it millenia from now will think it is a monument to honor devils and daemons. And they will be right.
At the risk of them being dragged off to a museum in the distant future, this strikes me as the perfect purpose for the creation of modern equivalents of the Rosetta Stone. To that end, the warning should be given in every known written language.
If any presently known language survives to be known by those who discover the warning, they'll be able to read it. As a bonus, these warning markers could open vast wells of 21st century information to future societies. It is possible that we'd still be wondering what the pretty pictures in Egypt mean without the Rosetta Stone. Why not take this opportunity now?
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Warning: This site contains nuclear materials. In laboratory tests, the most common side effects were headache, anal discharge, fever, death and dry mouth. Please see our ad in the current issue of Newsweek for more warnings. As always, talk to your doctor before exposing yourself to nuclear waste.
100 shuttles from now one blows up. Oops. You just dumped a shitload of nuclear wasted into the atmosphere.
Then 10,000 years from now the stuff recrosses the earth's orbit and crashes into the planet. Imagine how embarassed we'll feel then...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If our descendants are anything like we are, they'll be digging that stuff up like nobody's business.
A few things spring to mind-
The tale of Father Boedullus in A Canticle for Leibowitz. In a post-nukewar world, a Church scholar and his team attempt to reactivate a mysterious ancient site they found. All that's left many years later is a giant crater lake and local legends about evil spirits.
Artifacts from the "Age of Legends" in Wheel of Time. Madness and destruction generally resulted from meddling, but meddling was done all the same.
And finally, every single ancient site we've ever defiled- who knows what kind of things those places were designed to keep *in* rather than *out*...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
We are already pretty close to having the ability to launch nuclear waste into the sun and get rid of it permanently. Within the next century, doing it cheaply and safely will be a no-brainer, and this stupid monument to short-sightedness will probably have bathrooms AND a gift shop.
I have to say, I think the better option is
to make the site non-obvious, not to mark it with
monumental markers which make a tourist attraction.
Put information markers under the ground so if anyone starts to dig, then they will discover them.
The less future generations are even aware of the
site the better. And if they do decide to dig there,
and they ignore the submerged marker, I don't think there's
much more you can do. I think this is one case where security through obscurity is preferable.
The question is whether to include the even more obscure languages (Gaelic, Australian aboriginal etc...) or bizarre ones like Klingon.
There are two facinating projects. The first is in response to your point: the need for a modern rosetta stone. The second is just darned cool.
Check them out:
Rosetta Project
Long Now Project
website?
"uh hi, can I pay for my ISP service in advance?"
"Of course"
"Great. I'd like to prepay for 10,000 years in advance"
(stunned silence)
"Uh...hello? I have a coupon..."
Put that on a huge sign and you will keep the linux geeks out of the way (except the terrorist ones ^_^ But that will take of itself ^_^).
Here is my report for the DOE.
If you don't want anyone to go near something, you need to find out why people don't go to certain places. So, where on the world don't we generally go today?
a) Deep under the ocean.
b) To the center of the earth.
c) Tops of sheer faced mountains.
d) North/South poles.
e) Space.
So, this means that those places are the best place to put dangerous stuff. The End.
mogorific carpentry experiments
As anyone who's taken a decent class on nuclear energy knows, radioactive waste isn't nearly as scary as everyone makes it out to be. After about 600 years tops, the level of radioactivity has dropped to or below the level of natural radioactivity and is essentially non-toxic. At the very least, it's no more toxic than any naturally occurring radioactive element (since uranium is found practically everywhere on the planet). Small fact most people don't know: uranium and plutonium are both alpha particle emitters, alpha particles cannot penetrate the skin and are only dangerous if inhaled...thus you can hold either in your hand and just about never have any chance of developing cancer.
This Place is Not a Place of Honor.
bye now!
Skull and crossbones gets it's fearsome reputation from the fact that it was used as a pirate's flag. No pirates, no fear. I saw a documentation on African farmers once, in which they were given pesticides to use on their fields; they thought they had to stand at the fields and bow with their arms crossed below their chins because of the illustration on the packages, which they couldn't read. They didn't think of the chemicals as dangerous.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
One word, Cuba.
Hey, isn't security through obscurity a bad thing?
Why are we trying to design something to prevent someone from discovering what we are hiding? That is not only counter-intuitive but doomed to failure.
I too remember reading about this long long ago. My first thought was to construct a giant thorn patch from metal and concrete. Giant spikes, each with protruding spikes, each with protruding spikes...layer them all over the area. First of all, I don't care what century you come from, thorns are thorns and things that poke give you pause. Even after hundreds of centuries they should last well enough to make it clear that this was not a place that people travelled through easily or often.
But now I'm thinking that even that might be construed as some kind of complex art project. Which brings me to my question...
Why don't we lace the site with the toxic chemicals themselves? Wouldn't that make it painfully obvious to future explorers?
Here we are at ground level. A big concrete/metal box with sharp pointed spikes sticking out of it. Inside the box...a tiny tiny microgram of the bad stuff.
Go down several feet. A bigger box with the same unfriendly exterior. Inside...a miligram of the bad stuff.
Go down several more feet...again bigger, again more bad stuff.
There should be a pattern here. If the future explorers know anything about chemistry or science in general...then they will want to know what this substance is that has been protected in this manner. Through trial and error and maybe some people getting burns on their hands, they'll llearn it's not good. When the dig down further, and find ever increasing quantities of the stuff...they'll figure out it's not going to get better and them might want to stop digging, unless they figure out a way to diffuse the material in which case...please please please do dig it up.
This doesn't take modern knowledge. Remember the Star Trek episode where Data lands on this planet searching for radioactive material but gets wonked and the material ends up being made into jewelry by the local Indians or whatever?
Well, sooner or later they figures out the stuff was bad. Of course, there was so much of it around that it caused a lot of harm. So that's why I saw give them a little bit so they can learn the lesson before digging up the main repository and rifling through it.
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
To accelerate the entire universe very nearly to lightspeed for about 10 seconds, with the exception of the site containing the waste. We'd age it oh, I dunno, 10 million years or so, and it would be harmless.
Yes, I've patented this process. Check IBM's archive, if you don't believe me.
I bet you are voter too. What amazes me is how ppl like you never turn up to complain when your hard earned money is used to subsidize the nuclear industry.
You are of spanish/latin descent, as most of central and southern America is. In these cultures the dead are respected, not feared. Death is seen as a natural process that should be celebrated rather than grieved like many others believe (e.g. Dia de Los Muertos in Mexico is a very festive occasion where people dress up as skeletons, parade around, eat dulce, etc.).
Imagine the horror if thousands of years from now that were the surviving culture, and they stumbled upon this: "OOH look! a celebration of the dead! let's go see!"
Not likely, but just goes to show that the skull is not necessarily a feared symbol everywhere.
Quote "5.3 Personal thoughts (WS) Working on this panel, always fascinating and usually enlightening too, has led to the following personal thoughts: (a) We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn't we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective "marker" for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste? In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters. An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system.
(b) The design and testing of markers and messages must involve a broad spectrum of societies and people within those societies. So-called "experts" can of course make important contributions, but they must listen carefully to all other people who represent those who might encounter the markers. In the course of working on this project, I received excellent ideas from a wide range of undergraduates, colleagues, friends, and relatives.
(c) The very exercise of designing, building, and viewing the markers creates a powerful testimony addressed to today's society about the full environmental, social, and economic costs of using nuclear materials. We can never know if we indeed have successfully communicated with our descendants 400 generations removed, but we can, in any case, perhaps convey an important message to ourselves."
I particulary like point a. It boils down to : "If it burns , then do not touch it". Althougth it may looks cynical, it is maybe the most cost effective solution.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
How about if we fill the place with albums from 'N Sync and The Backstreet Boys? Even far future cultures will know they should stay way from those.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Why are we so sure there is a high change civilisation will fall apart sometime within the next 10,000 years? For that is the only reason why the site would have to be marked. We sure are pessimistic about our future aren't we.
in a comment posted right here on Slashdot!
Read it here
this would be the perfect use for that mountain of unsold Jar-Jar merchandise?
-- 'intellectual property' is oxymoronic
No signs or monuments to make people curious, and samples of the bad stuff...
Best idea I've heard so far.
No sig to see here. Move along.
..But the truth is, a skull and crossbones would only attract Cap'n Morgan and his crew of saucy wenches.
:(
:(
Don't make the Cap'n glow.
Keep in mind that the site is designed to handle, say, our civilization collapsing.
If you want to make sure people don't forget that we put the shit there, Nevada isn't a good site. There aren't all that many people in Nevada, and the people that are there would probably mostly die and/or leave if civiliation (and therefor the ability to provide them with water) collapsed. Walla, no one is still in the area, and everyone else has more important shit to do than tell their kids about some nuclear waste site they heard about once, which is a couple thousand miles away.
If you want actual people to remember what the deal is with the site, you need to put it somewhere where people won't forget about it. This means putting it somewhere that is almost guaranteed to continue to have some sort of a population for a long time, and making sure that they know what's up. I'd recommend putting it in some big population centre that will probably remain populated even if they loose the ability to pump in water from elsewhere, or if the sea levels rise a couple hundred feet. I don't know where this place is. Maybe Denver, I have no idea.
Then, you'd want to make sure that everyone knew what was up with the place as long as civilization continues. Make it a museum. Get kids to go on field trips there. Once civilization does collapse, the native population will be thoroughly familiar with the site, and will be likely to pass this knowledge on through the generations.
Another recommendation I would make is to design the site to kill (via radiation poisoning) anyone who manages to break in past some certain point. Idealy, you could design it so that there is ~0 radiation that makes it to the surface, but so that once you entered the bad areas, the radiation would suddenly kick in at a level that causes dramatic and visible radiation sickness within a matter of an hour or so. Design the site so that it will take much more than an hour for any reasonable group of people to chisel the stuff out of the walls.
This means that, while a few curious explorers will die every once in a while, the stuff will not be brought to the surface by some idiot, and then irradiate everyone in the area. Ultimately, this is really what we are trying to prevent after all. And it's probably for the best if every couple of years a couple explorers stumble out, sick as a dog, and then die. That should keep all right-thinking people from entertaining notions of organizing a serious expedition to go inside and bring anything out.
Arrr, it be the infamous pirate, No Beard Pete!
Maybe i'm missing something but WHO CARES?!?! who gives a shit what will happen to some explorer in 10,000 years. We have enough issues on our planet now, not to be spending $150M on some fucking rocks. People in 10,000 years will probably have far greater technology than us, they will know that its nasty stuff, they will probably have so much technology that they won't need to worry about radiation sickness and poisoning. And, even if we've all de-evolved in 10,000 years and go play with the waste is anyone here going to loose sleep over it? no, we are all sick bustards anyway. I'm not saying we should pollute the world for future generations, but hell, we pollute it already, kill and torture and let people suffer and starve while the US (incidentally the worlds greatest polluter) wastes even more money buying rocks that serve absolutely no use (and lets face it, they are going to spend $10,000 on the rocks and pipe the rest into their weapons program). A sign carved in something, saying "Warning Radioactive Waste" in most of the worlds languages, a scull and cross bones and a diagram of various elements will suffice.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
What we should be crying over an mocking is our current "no nuclear power plants" policy. Almost on the very day that Carter blocked the licencing of any new power stations a woman at Fermi-Lab (spelling?) was finishing up work on what I have heard referred to as "the french process".
/sigh)
Basically a breeder reactor process that would make it cost and energy effective to reprocess our existing nuclear waste as fuel.
The process/design/whatever (I'm not an expert, but I have spoken to them) produces at least an order of magnitude less waste per unit of fuel. So where 100lbs were produced in the old format less than 10lbs would be produced. Reprocessing the existing waste as fuel would, once it was spent reduce the amount of existing waste by that same 10-to-1 ratio.
Since we never used flammables (graphite) to cool our reactors we were never at risk for a Chernoybl (sp?)...
Since nothing really happened at Three Mile Island (the first safety system in a chain of dozens did exactly what it was supposed to do and released some heat with ZERO RADIATION but it was good "media copy"...
Since fossil feul is messy and obnoxious...
We canceled the best power technology we possess(ed) before it had a chance to mature. And now the people who would know how to revive it are ageing out of the workforce and/or dying off. Prety soon there won't be anybody with experience to get this vital technology back into production.
THAT is what we should mock and resent.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Sustainable technology sounds like pie in the sky, but he has really focused on using things that work, and he understands the economic realities.
He does think that we have the wrong metric of prosperity.
His speech starts at 3:56, and listen especially to 4:45 into the speech. 5:45 talks right to your point about the lunacy of using technologies that will require 100,000 of cleanup.
And I challenge anyone to listen to the first 2 1/2 minutes and be able to turn the rest of his speech off.
Also contains interesting quotes from /.'s favorite president, Thomas Jefferson.
I realize that there's a chance that the technology might not happen, but it's relatively logical to think that people will still be dealing with radiation in the future (it'll probably be even more significant).
Who knows, maybe civilization will take a dive backwards, and we'll forget our tech,etc. Even then, though, there's a chance that a nuke was involved somewhere (and that would keep the idea of radiation in the civilization?).
I guess the last thing is, if people at a particular point in time don't have the tech to read the signs we put up, then they probably won't know about radiation, either... Then, if the place were not really interestingly marked, people who randomly decided to settle there would just die relatively quickly, and "the valley of death" would soon be discovered for what it was. If, however, it was something interesting, then people might not notice the connection between the people dying around them while they're exploring/bringing back objects from the place.
Apologies for the randomness of these thoughts --
classmate from cs160.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
w0w, i thought slashdot had gone radical political, and was reporting the real news, 'call em as you see em', and a Significant World Change was on the cards.... scary signs? mushroom clouds ;>
You've never watched Teletubbies have you?
we're probably going to create something like the rosetta stone hoping to help people understand the message. Unfortunately if they're anything like current archeologists it'll just give them more incentive to dig and die.
You're all assuming that a sign will last 10,000 years in the open and still be readable? And it'll probably take only a few weeks before someone spray-paints their tag on it anyway...
Does this make my brain look big?
I especially like the last sentences...
pride and admiration, indeed...
down, not across
Serge
I would place 2000 or 3000 people around that location and let them create a religion that forbids coming near or digging that place. Religions can last long, and I bet, there are enough people that have nothing better to do.
mm, okay, i guess you are on our side...
Impossible? Well fancy you saying that! That's exactly why I have a problem with nuclear power generation!
aha! I thought so! Terrorist talk. Crazy you say? perhaps, but that is the message my country is getting from USA, for the same train of thought!
NZL, nuke free and proud of it!It would say "Vote Democrat.", or "the Ludicri line is the only choice for government", or "Where do you want to be today", depending on which organisation decides to use it for propoganda first
Aren't we always told that some plastics take bazillions of years to naturally break down, why not build this site out of plastic? It can't even be re-used to build anything else.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
We are burying a huge energy resource -- Plenty of good fissile Pu and U-235. If we used breeder reactors and reprocessing, we wouldn't have to bury this stuff, and we wouldn't have to dig new Uranium up.
Well, the way I figure it, hopefully we'll inspire our progeny to wave geiger counters and other quantum particle detectors around the site before they start digging. It's not like the stuff will be so close to the surface that you cant dig for a few few feet first. In fact they are putting underground rooms to stop further digging if it should start.
I am surprised by the omission of latin as a language on the markers. It's a nice, static language, and I bet religious scholars will retain knowledge of it for a long time.
Also, lets consider the kind of ground penetrating, satellite based, detection information they are prolly gonna have. Just a quick glance at a false color topographic map and they will see what it is. "Gee, that's a lot of neutron emissions for a mountain, and all in one spot."
All we need to do is to get future generations to LOOK at the damn thing. The one good thing about a big pile of nuclear waste is that it tends to be a pretty damn good beacon. Sure, maybe a few individuals will die while re-discoveing what it is, but more or less we will avoid the creation of a reservoir there, or a city, or a housing development.
The pyramids were huge objects adorned with a clear message: this guy is god, mess with his place and you'll die a horrible death.
Did the Egyptians believe that if you raided the tomb, you'd die? Most likely. Is belief enough to kill you or keep you safe? Sometimes (voodoo curses, faith healing). Does exploring the pyramids today actually pose any risk? No.
Ok, I better clarify where I'm going with this one. In ancient times, people _knew_ you could die from messing with evil spirits. Hang out in a cemetary, the evil spirits make you die like them (disease). This goes on in many forms.
While today we think we know that toxic waste is toxic, to future generations of humans, it might be considered safe. Hell, it might even be desirable! Who needs to worry about radiation or poisonous chemicals when your cells use it for food?
We have absolutely _no_ idea what will happen in 10,000 years. If human civilization is still around (which it will almost undoubtably be), life will be so different on this planet as to be unrecognizable. Today, we possess through technology the comparable power of the gods for ancient Egyptians. A couple of smart bombs could level the pyramids in a few minutes. Trying to perceive the future in terms of today's rules is a fairly unsuccessful method of prediction.
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
A second idea.... Maybe this is acctually a good reason to accelerate a few chrononauts to relativistic speeds and drop them out every thousand years? It would take ten volunteers, and they would have a very simple job, that of popping out of the capsule, saying "Oh, excuse me, we took a big shit in Nevada," and then going on to live as time travel celebrities.
Somebody needs to remind DOE that the signs only need to be effective for 600 years or so. By that time the levels of radiation will have diminished to natural background levels. (So even if we truly have to wait 10,000 years for almost all the radiation to go away, the dump site will be basically harmless after less than a millenium.)
Would you be happy if the first colonists in North-America would have dumped radioactive toxic waste in New York?
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
In that case it wouldn't be horror... just cause for more celebration!
Remember the Curse of King Tut? It went something like, "If you enter here, you will be cursed. You will be doomed to ill fortune. You will wither away and die before your time. Do not enter!". The message is remarkably close to a nuclear waste warning, especially if translated by a culture that does not know about radioactivity.
And, of course, the practical effect was to attract archaeologists :) However, that tomb did stand undisturbed for thousands of years, so maybe the basic approach is sound.
Would make me run like the wind ;)
-=sig=-
Really... this was the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary years ago.... the conclusion then was any marker, no matter how it was designed, would simply attract attention and invite digging.
the best marker is no marker, except for some basic markings underground at the site... nothing above ground that would attract so much attention.
The whole point is that the site is not dangerous, unless you dig into it. Then it becomes very dangerous, since large amounts of poisonous radioactive material become exposed to erosion and get into the ecosystem.
So by the time people start dying, it's already too late to avoid the site. Instead, there will have to be a project to seal it up again.
"How many times have I told you!
Don't make messes that outlast our civilization..."
---- I've fallen, and I can't get up.
The idea probably is to have a wide range of language styles, in the hopes that the language of whoever we wind up warning in the future will have a similar language, and wind up being able to translate it.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
There is a real lack of critical thinking involved in the nuclear waste issue.
1. We are not importing the Uranium from Mars; it all comes from the Earth.
2. Every single atom of Uranium in the Earth is going to decay - producing all the same radioactive wastes whether mankind is involved or not. The natural decay products spread the same amount of radioactive energy over time - but the total radioactive energy from the fission and decay processes is about the same. The only issues involving mankind are the rate of production, the location and the local concentration of the radioactive wastes - not its creation. If we had never discovered fission the radioactivity from Uranium decay would still exist.
3. There was a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Africa where a deposit of Uranium moderated by spring water fissioned all of the U235 out of the ore. As far as anyone can tell the long term results of this reactor on the local biology were zilch.
4. The total quantity of pollutants produced by fission for a given power production is much less than that produced by combustion - no green house gasses at all. Until fusion is practical on a large scale fission is the best short term alternative available.
"Greens" are massive hypocrites: I have yet to see a Green walk to a protest rally on bare feet while wearing nothing else but crude fabrics woven by hand from natural sources. Greens don't really want to give up the advantages of modern society; they just want to be the ones in charge of their use. Sorry, no sale; it is all just another boring power game played at my expense - how utterly banal.
We may polute the planet so bad by then that this stuff will be the next Jolt Cola in 10,000 years. We're just setting up the next soda barron for that time period.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
It'll be cheaper for MTV than paying ozzy for another season.
In fact, RTGs HAVE survived launch accidents, been recovered from the ocean, and been RE-USED.
Just out of curiosity, had the solid rocket booster involved in the Challenger debacle been used before? I seem to remember reading - maybe it was Feynman's book - that there was a procedure to make sure that the SRB was round. It involved measuring the diameter of the SRB at several locations and then some kind of crude mashing/stretching to get it back to round. Doesn't sound like the kind of thing that makes for an ideal gasket sealing, but I'm probably sphincter-speaking now anyway.
FWIW, the Salon article is smarmy and not helpful. If you're going to point out foolish government spending and want to be taken seriously, this ain't the way.
I think a variation of the universal electric shock symbol would work well - a body recoiling in pain from waves of radiation. Some cultures may worship the dead, but not too many worship pain.
DoC
Hey, if we're so gone in 10,000 years that we can't understand "don't go in there, radiation!" in 10 or more languages and pictures, then I have to wonder, who are we warning?
My guess: the earth is populated by ugly, chest-bursting aliens who invaded and conquered us. I say, let the evil aliens in there. It's like a giant booby-trap.
cygnuhchur
Like Klingon.
Couldn't resist.
I think the scientist are wrong from the start.
What they are doing, is digging deeper and deeper into how OUR minds work.
If they don't stop digging, they may find something more terrifying and powerfull than some nuclear waste.
But hopefully they know how to understand the messages, and don't look for the system of messages.
They should speak to the Long Now Foundation. They've been doing some good long term thinking...
...also head researchers work on this same subject.
IIRC, they came up with a solution that envolved
creating a "cult" around these sites.
Sounds strange, but once you figure out that religions live longer than any other socio-economic community, it makes sense.
Well, kind of.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
For all we know, we:
(a) May figure out a way to properly recycle/reuse nuclear waste way sooner than 100,000 years (hopefully within even a few hundred)...
(b) Might not even live on Earth in a couple hundred years, either by wiping ourselves out in a stupid war or calamity, or by rendering the Earth uninhabitable by that time...
(c) That we'd be the dominant species on this planet within 100,000 years...
(d) That some wiz kid in marketing would produce "New Cobalt-14 Coke!", then we'd have morning news hosts and the public lining up around the block to get one...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Leave nothing above ground that indicates anything ever happend but put it in a location that is not convienient to water/ food etc. Since its in the middle of a desert the only people that might encounter it would be nomads seeking to go somewhere else and thus probably wouldn't get too exposed.
Only very intelligent cultures would ever be able to find it. i.e. ones who can do ariel radar/radiation scans.
For these cultures bury underground, maybe 10 feet down some, kind of message they will understand. sort of like the message in the "book" Contact(yes the movie was based on it, the book was better)
This could serve a dual purpose. speak in a language of science to our decendants to teach them enough to understand the science/technology and at once teach them the dangers of using it.
I have to admit they seem to have done a good job picking languages that at least someone will remember in 10,000 years. It looks like a fairly broad spread over the differnt roots that exist although there seems to be some bias towards romance languages. I think they should include maybe a few more like an island launguage and an african language.
Don't look at it in a sense of, oh my gosh they're still going to come and look. Think of it as what do we want to tell them once they are smart enough to know its there.
The sheer scale and oppressiveness of the marker will make it a tourist attraction unless one of the less accessible designs is used. The field of spikes sounds like it'd be awesome to see firsthand. Also, the drawings depicting death by radiation would give the place an almost spiritual feel; as if an ignorant, ancient, and less enlightened people felt it were cursed, evil, or inhabited by evil spirits. The atmosphere would lend the feeling of being in a mysterious and forbiden place.
It seems the authorities are giving a lot of thought to dealing with radioactive waste in a very inefficient manner - burying it in the ground and letting it sit. Instead, why not use that waste?
New nuclear reactor designs, like the helium-gas core reactor, are capable of using as fuel the high-level waste produced by "standard" reactors, and especially by naval reactors (which use ~90% enriched fuel). A system of these reactors could be set up to accept waste, separate the dangerous isotopes from the dross, then "burn down" the waste by reacting it to a short-lived isotope. Or, better yet, we could simply refit existing plants with advanced reactors, thus avoiding the problem of moving highly dangerous waste.
The real problem is the people who try to pretend this is a clear-cut issue and call you stupid if you don't take their side.
If it's impossible to stop curious humans from investigating this place in 10,000 years, why not leave instructions on how they might do that more safely?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Bottom. Ocean.
Marianna Trench anyone?
It's a real sham(e) that the waste isn't being recycled and used for energy production, in the name of protecting energy companies profits. Why can't we have real politicians who are wise enough to bring the energy fucks into the recycling of spent nuclear fuel business.
Why transport murderous things, when we can burn it at it's current location?
Americans deserves more than the crumbs our politicians are throwing at us
Best RadioActive Waste Warning Sign for 10,000 years from now:
That dude from Robocop who fell into the waste.
Funny Girl!
The Hawk-man
Barney Frank
CowboyNeal
All around the periphery of the site, shallowly bury a couple thousand tablets with Microsoft's EULAs on them, and random pages from the antitrust trial proceedings.
:-)
Future archaelogists will quickly find them and be so busy trying to decipher them, they'll never get back to the site to dig any deeper.
~Philly
Actually, if you would read the report, or at least parts of it, you would see that security through obscurity is not the goal of the design.
One idea is to have underground vaults that contain detailed information about the site, with enough of redundant information that it should be possible to decode its meaning. For example, a map of the world with similar sites marked out. A periodic table (with samples of the elements, where possible). A map of the facility. Texts in several languages detailing the site, what it contains.
The report in question _does not_ contain any details on how the repository is supposed to be protected from natural decay, erosion, earth quakes, etc. It does not contain thoughts on how to protect it from intrusion by humans.
The task of the team writing this report was only to investigate on how to _inform_ future societies about the dangers of the site.
There's just a few small thingies wrong with nuclear power. One of them is that the winning,transportation and preparation of the necessary uranium costs so much energy (it's present in only very small percentages in it's ores)that the CO2-production in that stage already equals that of the amount produced by winning the same amount of energy the uranium produces + what's needed to produce the uranium, with fossil energy. So the net-amount of CO2 saved with nuke-power is zero.
Furthermore, you are left with huge amounts of useless radio-active waste, evenly dangerous as the uranium won out of it. You can't put it back in the ground, as it's volume has grown (you never get it out of the ground as compact as it was). This is a problem the nuke-power industry does not like you to know about. Just as the fact you can poison the world-population with less than one gram of pure plutonium, the most poisonous material on this world.
As long as a few people can make big money out of nuke power, they will tell you it's safe and clean (oh, maybe for the 0,00000001% of it's lifetime the stuff spends in powerplants it is more or less safe, assuming no terrorists, idiots who don't know how to handle the stuff or bad design gets a chance), but what happens before (uranium mining is one of the most polluting industries) or after (oh, we're just left with piles of dangerous stuff for the next 100000 years or so, let's just dump it somewhere and hope there will be no earthquakes or anything, and while we make money, we don't care) the nuke-industry won't tell you.
As long as people believe the nuke-energy guys, renewable energy will not make it. Just imagine: they would not be able to squeeze money out of renewable energy, that would be an economic disaster! (for them, not for us common people).
Oh, another thing a almost forgot: A nuclear powerplant has an economical lifespan of 30 years. When used full time, it takes 29 years to produce the amount of energy used by building the plant, and winning and processing the fuel to run it. So the net time you actually produce energy is one year. Of course the Big Men are making money all this time, so for them it's well worth the trouble. But is it for you???
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Basically, it may be cost prohibitive to send stuff into space, but if everyone does it, that will make it competitive.
The articles about this subject, like the one at Salon, really tick me off.
I suppose that the current location of all this nuclear waste in 400 nationwide above ground, open air, storage areas, (with most of it in leaky metal barrels), is somehow preferable to the proposed interment in an underground mine, in the middle of a remote desert?
Even the proposed transportation of this material in reticulated stainless steel containers would be far safer than its current storage conditions.
The idea is to create an international standard for marking this kind of site. They would use the six official UN languages. There would be room for a local language as well. Since English is the standard language in the US, they are thinking about selecting Najavo as the local languages. (Although they did claim that they were going to investigate if the native americans felt comfortable about using their language on a stockpile of nuclear waste.)
Hmmm.... if only we could think of some invisible sign.
Maybe something future scientists could detect with some sort of meter, so as to keep out idle gawkers. Hmmm... The Salon article mentioned magnetism.
But wait! What if the DOE made it radioactive? Then any future explorers could easily find it!
Hmm... so how do we make Yucca Mountain radioavtive?
It IS a fact a teaspoon of plutonium can kill us all. Furthermore, plutonium is NOT a natural element. It is MADE, by exposing uranium to radiation (a lot more than occurs in nature), so the uranium turns into plutonium. There is NO plutonium in nature! (at least, there wasn't until we made it). And it's not just the radiation that makes plutonium poisonous, it's just poisonous by itself, just as cyanide is.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
This is a tired old "fact", suggesting that the release of one gram of pure plutonium into the environment would be a catastrophe. While I don't dispute your other words (despite their lack of supporting documentation), this statement is pure fear-mongering.
You may also want to take into consideration that newer, far more efficient designs for reactors have been around for 20 years, but because of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl (the former being a contained accident and the latter a combination of an extraordinary series of blatant violations of safety codes of the people who should have know better), nobody wants to build them, at least in the United States. Even in other countries, they are shunned and life is made very difficult by people who subsist mostly on the fruits of spreading FUD rather than cooperating to find an even balance.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21582&cid=2288 256
Wouldn't advanced civilizations be looking for a site like this?
Nuclear power would surely be known to any culture advanced enough to get to the vault.
If our civilization collapses, every nuclear power plant in the world will be a disaster site and many areas uninhabitable.
The terrestrial or extraterrestrial culture would have learned their lesson by the time they explore the storage area.
I mean c'mon, which is a more inviting archaeological site, the baren nevada desert, or the cities around the country, many of which have nuclear power plants nearby.
An evolving terrestrial culture would learn the signs of radiation sickness due to decaying missiles, subs, power plants, etc. And thus stay away.
An extraterrestrial culture would take one look at the planet and go "Hmm, old school nuclear fission. Where did they store the waste?" (scan) "Silly humans!"
Bullshit.
If more than 40% of what you say is true, it wouldn't be economically feasable to run a *single* nuclear power plant *anywhere*. I've got two within 60 miles of me...
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
the earthlings of the future will have
sensory organs to warn them of radioactive
areas!
I do not see why the retina could
not become more sensitive to energetic
rays, Marie Curie had reported that when
holding a radium sample close to the eyes
one saw kaleidoscopic figures.
We will as well develop spam-avoiding
features, UVB opaque skin, and so on.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
... why we should care? What have future civilizations ever done for us, after all?
A simple trefoil will explain to anybody what's there, as long as there are any vestiges of our current civilization left anywhere. It'll take a *long* time for the trefoil to be forgotten.
We don't worry about anything else that might affect our long-distant ancestors. Why this?
This hoohah about radioactive waste is nothing more than another bogus "reason" to scream "No Nukes!" without having to think. (Keeping nuclear waste where it is now is *ever* so much safer than putting it in the middle of the Nevada desert, after all!) Public attitudes toward nuclear power have been formed more by monster movies than any rational thought process.
IMHO, nuclear power is a Bad Idea, but for boring old economic reasons. No need to get hysterical.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Probably has something to do with the fact that the Navajo are from the northern Arizona/Nevada area. If the rest of civilization crumbles, they'll still probably be running around their ancestral stomping grounds.
Well, when an ancient civilizations communicated that they didn't want people going into a place by drawing pictures nearby. I propose we do the same thing. The DOE should hire a group of artists to paint/carve a massive mural onto the rocks around the site, depicting various means of hideous death, all having to with radiation or nuclear explosions in some way. If the visitor is absolutely terrified out of his/her/its wits, it has two options: get the hell out and stay the hell out, or get the hell out and come back when you have taken the necessary precautions to deal with whatever might be doing all this. Granted, in today's Hollywood-ridden America, those necessary precautions either mean the overbearing and evil US Army, or, for the more industrious type, a bigger gun; perhaps in the future the "necessary equipment" will have been redefined.
Sorry about the length, but to summarize: massive, terrifying, grotesque mural.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
and for a very few people / industries who are making money out of it now. If it suits them, they'll just leave it for what it is and start something else. The costs for cleaning up the mess will be payed by the people, so why should they care? YOU are the ones paying for it, not them. These folks in the industry are only interested in the short-term money, and when problems occur when they are out of this business (and/or out of this life), who cares? There's enough money to buy another congressman to tell you it's all nice and clean and to tax you for paying their bill.
Have fun, and think of the money you save bij radiating yourself!
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
The maddening thing about that article is that it contained no useful links. Typical Salon sloppy journalism.
A (dull) report on warning signs at a New mexico facility is here.
The Archaeology Magazine article (more of a blurb) is here.
Excerpts from "Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant"
A design exhibition of warning markers.
-adso
One very important thing that people forget, is that all power production produces waste! And no, I haven't forgotten about solar and wind and hydro power, there are byproducts produced, several of which are harmful, during the initial manufacture of these devices. And now for the methods of power production that are actually practical alternatives to nuclear (while our planet still has fossil fuels to burn). Combustion based power plants do enormous amounts of damage to the environment on a daily basis! Tons of radioactive materials are released into the air every day by coal power plants! Not to mention nitrous and sulfurous oxides, and scores of carcinogenic compounds. Even if the Nevada test site is compromised hours after it is sealed, it would still have a minimal effect on humanity, compared to what those who are against nuclear power are forcing the world to resort to.
People love to bash nuclear power, but nobody seems to care about the dangers of the alternatives.
So unless you want to shut down slashdot, we need to acknowledge that we need electricity, and nuclear is the safest practical way to get it.
OK now I will get off my soap box...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Now why does that remind me of a certain energy softdrink commercial?
Let's hope future cultures don't worship frenetic music and caffeine...
The first child born with 32 toes will be ample warning.
Plutonium's actually pretty harmless, in bulk, unless you have enough of it to near criticality and you irradiate yourself.
The dangerous part with plutonium is accidently inhaling dust particles of it, having them settle into your lungs and cause lung cancer.
The bad stuff is that with an intermediate half-life of up to a few centuries. Short enough to be really nasty and radioactive, but also long enough to stay aroung for too long. Also, that and isotopes that get impregnated into your tissues. (like strontium into bones)
Stuff like strontium which gets into your bones
Nuclear power plants are storing every fuel rod they've ever used on-site,
This is the important thing in my mind.
It's not like someone planned the Yucca storage site with the idea of making a lot of *new* nuclear waste to put there. The waste already exists and is stored in containment facilities much less secure than Yucca.
I'm not worried about signage that will last 100,000 years. I suspect that either we'll stick around long enough as a civilization to figure out what we can do to do either recycle the waste or to permanently eliminate it (throw at the sun, etc). Or we'll annihilate each other in some global calamity that will take 100K years to recover from.
There can only be one truly universal symbol.
Construct the number 42. Make it big. Make it awesome.
And then put a giant X through it.
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Cybermage is probably referring to the small minority who oppose the dump because "The government is invading my land and stealing my rights, gol durn it." There is a LOT of that sentiment running around here in northern Nevada. They don't really care about the safety and vew everything as a government conspiracy. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the extreme right groups did try some form of sabotage. It's a pretty weak argument because the land isn't exactly useful for grazing or agriculture due to previous nuke testing, though I oppose the dump for other reasons.
All that's needed is some form of containment that can't be penetrated by a civilization unable to make a radiation detector.
Would it not be possible to encase the waste physically, such that technology roughly equivalent to today's level is required to access it? (e.g. deep-level drilling, remote excavation) At this level of technology, it's reasonable to assume that some knowledge of radioactivity will exist, and so a pictoral/linguistic description of the danger will probably be understood.
On the other hand, if technology has regressed, such that the warnings are not understood, then the people won't be able to get at the danger anyway.
Or am I missing something?
I just want to help clear up a popular myth. In reality mummies were never used as fuel. Unca Cecil can explain it better than I can.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/020222.html
By the time a future civilization, provided we blow ourselves up to kingdom come in the next ten thousand years, discovers the waste disposal site in the mountains of Nevada, if we're really interested in preventing them from entering the place on the count that there are hazardous radioactive materials that won't be safe for about 90,000 years after we've all gone the way of the dodo, wouldn't it be more feasable to warn them about the actual dangers of the place instead of a glimpse into our screwed-up civilization?
My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
(Funny you should mention that character. Did YOU have the same take I did ("fission chain reaction!") to the scene in Temple of Doom where the artifacts are brought close together and they start glowing?)
Egyptian jewelry and pottery from those graves have adorned houses and women everywhere...
Some radioactive gold (used as needles for cancer therapy but later replaced with some other isotope) once got stolen and dumped into the jewelry market. For a while there were necklaces that caused sores and scars and wedding rings that made fingers fall off. A medical cobalt-60 source got into the scrap metal market too, down in Mexico...
But on to the main point of this post...
Imagine for a moment that the ancient Egyptians used nuclear energy four thousand years ago, and that all knowledge of it was lost in the following upheavals.
Now imagine that the pyramids were nuclear waste disposal sites
Back in the late '60s or so - about the time of the "pyramid power" craze and the beginning of public concern over disposal of waste from nuclear power plants - I did a rap on the subject. Alternatively titled "Nuclear Reactors of the Gods" or "Pyramid Nuclear Power", it was a mostly-tongue-in-cheek thing that pulled together a number of threads:
Plutonium's 24,000+ year half-life ("If you had buried a thousand pounds of plutonium [in small pieces!] under the pyramid of Cheops during its construction there'd still be [most of it] pounds left.")
Anomolous results from attempts to locate rooms in a large pyramid by cosmic-ray ocultation.
The discovery of a large deposit of depleted uranium in western Africa. (This had been explained by geologists as the ash of a natural water-moderated reactor that formed in river-delta sediment and ran at a few hundred watts for centuries, but for the rap I proposed tailings from ore enrichment.)
The discovery of dry-cell batteries (carbon rod / caustic paste / metal can / asphaltam seal in pottery urn, explained as probably being used for electroplating) in an early Egyptian dig, combined with the observation that modern civilization went from the carbon/zinc dry cell to nuclear bombs and power reactors in under two hundred years, while Egyptian civilization stood for several THOUSAND. ("So why didn't THEY get to nuclear reactors. Well, what if they did?")
A speculation about Egyptian scientific naming conventions being analogies with a conceptually-related myth. (After all, WE did this before we got into acronyms, especially when naming the radioactives. Consider: Uranium, Plutonium, Thorium, ...)
There was a lot more. But this gets us to the hunt for waste disposal sites.
How do you get rid of the waste? How about hauling it out into the desert and piling rocks on top of it? But it will be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. How do you mark it to keep your distant descendants out of trouble?
"Here lies the-one-like-unto-the-sun-god (Tut-Ankh-Amon). Do not enter here and do not take the relics. If you do you will get SO sick. You will puke for days, your hair will fall out, your skin will fall off. If you survive that you will likely die of painful lumps, become impotent or nearly so, and if you manage to have descendants that aren't stillborn their line will be cursed by deformities for generations."
(At one point I thought of doing a psudonymous nut-cult-style book on the subject, with the bulk of the evidence of the former civilizations destroyed in a thermonuclear exchange between Atlantis and Mu, and the Egyptian fraction of civilization's technical base being lost under the Sahara - which is a very recent desert. I probably could have brought in the stories of the flood and maybe the plagues of Egypt. But that's beyond the scope of this post.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
One of them is that the winning,transportation and preparation of the necessary uranium costs so much energy (it's present in only very small percentages in it's ores)that the CO2-production in that stage already equals that of the amount produced by winning the same amount of energy the uranium produces + what's needed to produce the uranium
Total bullshit. It sounds like another Green "statistic" pulled out of thin air.
I think that explains it all. A science project or development gets treated as pop culture, a way to make a comment on the state of our society. Typical for Salon.
Cruickshank and most of the responders misunderstand the purpose of the project. The only danger is in deep drilling on top of the repository. You could farm on top of the site to no ill effect. However, if you settled there, 20 generations later, your kids might forget the message. The scary messages are simply to keep initial primitive settlers out to avoid this "terror creep" or acclimatization to the warning. The monument will act as a physical barrier to initial settlers. Would you try to establish a town in between huge, jagged pillars or inside a hulking labyrinth of cubes? You might get curious and check it out, but you not going to raise a family there. Anyone with the ability to perform deep drilling or move 46 ton granite blocks as part of a archaelogical dig would presumably be deterred by the warning.
Furthermore, Cruickshank doesn't really comprehend the magnitude of 100,000 or even 10,000 years. If you think you understand how things are going to be then, you surely don't.
Designer William McDonough is a very thoughtful and moving speaker; he damn near brought me to tears (and fuming with anger) when I heared a speech of his at the Press Club in Washington, D.C. It was simply a wonderful speech. I double the recommendation...
I think all the low battery warnings should be like that sad Russian bear crying in "Red Planet."
6000 years from now, our fear and loathing of radiation will seem as silly to the advanced civilization of the time as voodoo and boogey-men are today. Who knows, maybe in the future ppl will want to find the radioactive stuff so they can do something good with it?
As others have said the Skull and Cross Bones can be mistaken by other cultures in the present and will likely lose it's meaning in the future. I think that a better sign would be a skull with a bullet hole in it. Even if this sign is read by a pretechnological culture they would recognise the the shape of the skull and that it was damaged. And since a damaged skull usually results in death the warning would be as clear as is possible
"The moment "pride" is lost, "freedom" is also lost." - Ramza.
All of this crap about putting up stonehenges...
Who says humans won't be extremely technologically learned in 10,000 years when we will have warp drive and invisible force fields like they do on star trek.
Don't you think by the time 10,000 years is near over we will have the technology to move this waste someplace else where it isn't in the way? Or do you all want to be pesimists and say humans will be extinct by then or not know what radiation is?
For that matter I doubt we will be living here in 10,000 years..we'll live somewhere else on another planet.
Sheesh.
if these people designing this care about the future so much, why don't they say
'HEY! digging up all the dispersed nuclear shit we can find, and concentrating it into one area is going to fuck up our future generations no matter what!'
and put a stop to this mess. does it really make sense to destroy our world like this? we need more investigation and initiative into renewable energy.
picture it. instead of every house having black roofs, they have solar panels which provide power to the house and more. we use the in-place power lines for when its cloudy (and the next city over is sunny). doesn't make sense to let that sun go directly into heat when we can do something with the entropy instead.
Simply use Egyptian style illustrations.
Show a man approaching a drawing of the site. Show the site "glowing". Then the man puts his hands up to his face cowering in horror. And then show him colapsing.
Can you imagine what could have been if NASA had been quick enough to begin the construction of a full-fledged outpost on the Moon in the 1970's? I we could have stored the spent nuclear material on the Moon, where no one can (at least currently) mount a safe expedition. We could have had this up and running by the end of the 1990's, and if worst comes to worst, and the stuff exploded or something, all that would happen is that the Moon would be sent out of orbit or something, off to have it's own adventures...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
What they could consider is lots of warnings away from the center site, but if you start digging towards it, disregarding the warnings, you could drop dead before digging in far enough.
This would need to be some sort of long-life, non-contagious biological agent - like Anthrax, but longer lasting.
Any digging effort would be quickly abandoned if all the people who got within 500m of the site were dead within days. If the nature of the site was ever forgotten, and people tried to dig down to it again, they die, the site is closed off, and people remember not to come back for a few decades. Sure, some people would die, but it beats having our radioactive fuel rods on dsplay in schools and museums.
Of course, it would be difficult to come up with a bioagent that would last more than about 50 years. And I wouldn't be that comfortable with the US government commisioning research into long-life, highly lethal poisions...
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
One: Build a space elevator, put the stuff into orbit, and send it into the sun, or to points beyond our galaxy. Though if there IS intelligent life out there, sending nuclear waste out randomly will more likely piss them off than anything.
Two: Bury the stuff so soundly that no one without fairly advanced knowledge can actually GET to it, and label it with logical symbols/diagrams which describe nuclear waste. Anyone smart or able enough to get to it will be able to understand it.
There are really no other options, unless someone comes up with a reasonable way to strip it of its radioactive burden. Just because we have no way to do that now doesn't mean we won't within 100,000 years.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This project is brings up some interesting questions about what Art is, and how it works. To be effective, a warning must be a truely universal work of art, understandable by all. IT should make the danger clear, but at the same time not try to scare people with superstition which may just attract more people then it deters.
http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/oklo.htm
Interesting article regarding the Oklo natural nuclear reactors.
http://unxmaal.com
Hmm, it sounds like the DOE hired the Klingons to come up with the signs for this project.
$200,000,000.00 to protect hypothetical future archaeologists from radiation poisoning? When millions of people in this country can't get health insurance? Or millions worldwide dying from preventable diseases?
Back in the early 1980s, when I was an undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin, I took a class in *something* which had a lot of stuff about "sign", "symbol", "signified" and "signifier" in it. (God help me, but I don't remember what it was about.) Anyway, the only thing I did get out of this class was a visiting lecture by a linguist who had been contracted by the Department of Energy to come up with signs to put on a proposed storage place (which became Yucca Mountain).
Anyway, the upshot of this guy's work was that there was no sign that could be devised that would carry the symbol of "danger" for 10,000 years. Instead, he proposed to the DOE that they come up with a "nuclear priesthood", a caste of people who would pass down from generation to generation why it was so important not to go near the storage place.
I've forgotten everything else I learned in that class, but I did remember that lecture. Wish I could remember the name of the guy who proposed this solution. Unfortunately, I don't have the bandwidth here for a 19MB download.
I've read articles that say we have sufficient science to reprocess current "waste" materials, at best producing some small amount of electricity, at worst degrading the material to a more harmless state. It's just not cost-effective at this point, and the majority of the "bulk" of waste materials is low-level (soiled protective gear, cleaning materials, medical devices, etc).
What if a few thousand years in the future, a pit of mixed plutonium/uranium/cowboynealium can be easily used as fuel (or at least, cleaned up or processed away). But we've made it so difficult to get to or extract safely that reprocessing is impossible.
As discussed earlier, in the future either they'll have knowledge of radioactive materials, or they won't. If they DO then we need to communicate effectively what the materials are so they'll know what to do (or not do) with them.
Something to the effect of "We considered these extremely hazardous materials dangerous enough to hide them here; but if you know what to do with them, here's what you'll find below." Then put unattractive (barrels of warm goo as opposed to pocketable artifacts?) materials nearer the entrance that will kill the curious/clueless quickly before they get too far (letting their survivors know how nasty it is) - but will give the knowledgeable some idea of our processing technology.
That and copious quantites of C4H12N2 (1,4-Diaminobutane, aka Putrescine - the smell of rotting flesh).
Scatter ceramic markers composed of the very material being stored. Not enough to kill, but enough that anyone with a geiger counter will notice something's wrong even in 10,000 years time. They dig up a marker and analyse it and figure out that this must be some nuclear site, including what is actually stored there so they can decide best how to deal with it.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Nuclear never paid off on the claims of "too cheap to meter". It's very expensive. There are all of the technical reasons, such as tedious maintenance, and the fact that the technicians can only work for a few hours at a time.
For Nuclear to be efficient it has to be run as a base load generator, however coal is so much cheaper it isn't even funny. The nuclear industry is subsidized by the Government, yet it still produces power that's twice as expensive per kilowatt hour than the alternatives.
Nuclear is a shinning example of how the scientists said you could do it, but in the long run it didn't work as planned.
I the speech were important, then someone would have converted it to a standardized audio format (aiff, wav, vorbis, mp2, maybe even mp3?) so that anyone could hear it. The file you pointed at it obviously only intended for some closed, elite population. Why don't you just put up a web page that says, "No Niggers Allowed" or "Aryans Only"? That's effectively the same kind of thing you're doing when you publish audio on the internet, using an obscure formats like "ram" or "wma".
In all of the discussion I haven't seen anyone
touch upon the fact that civilization (by any
definition of the word) is not older than
10,000 years yet.
The reason for this is scarely simple: 11,000
years ago the current warm climate started (this
is confirmed by - proxy - temperature measurements
based on ice-cores taken from Greenland).
Are we even sure that in 10,000 years a
civilization *will* exist - i.e., people who can
actually _read_ ?
Toon Moene.
The future is almost impossible to predict, but we can say the following: either our descendents will be as technologically advanced (or more) as we are, or they wont. If they are advanced they will know the danger and take precautions. If they are primitive then they won't be able to drive a mine shaft deep enough to get to the waste.
A good example - look at the tunnel under the English channel. Napoleon tried to drive a tunnel there using early-industrial technology but had to give up. The technology required for that tunnel include electricity, advanced metallurgy, a good understanding of geology, and likely computers, seismic sensors and lasers (the latter three are required to avoid drilling into unstable rock). It's a solid bet that any society that posesses those technologies will also understand the atom and radioactivity (It's really pretty straightforward stuff). This is especially true given how many other technological artefacts will be lying around anyway.
The thing that really pisses me off about these arguments is how they ignore the more obvious problems we are leaving to our descendants 10,000 years from now - like how to run an industrial society without either nuclear power or fossil fuels (we seem too afraid of the former and the latter will be depleted by then). Or how about the recent discovery of an asteroid that might possibly hit the Earth 900 years from now - shouldn't we be concerned about tracking that, and moving it if indeed it is on a collision course?
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Immense lightning-shaped earthworks radiating out of an open-centered Keep. It is very powerful when seen both from the air and from the vantage points on the tops of the four highest earthworks, the ones just off the corners of the square Keep. Walking through it, at ground level, the massive earthworks crowd in on you, dwarfing you, cutting off your sight to the horizon, a loss of connection to any sense of place.
I could be speaking out of left field here, but doesn't this a rather temptingly defensible location? No use if people ten thousand years from now still have aircraft, but if we drop down to the technological level of say, the Aztec Empire - which is entirely concievable in 10,000 years - then I'd think this could be used for a very nice complex of fortifications. The scaryiness of the complex would only make it more attractive as a defensive position - "Our enemies will be afraid even to attempt an attack on us here."
I'm the stranger...posting to
Can we make any black dye that won't fade in 10,000 years?
I'm the stranger...posting to
"We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn't we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective "marker" for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste?" - from the WIPP marker paper.
No, not really. Radiation sickness, unless you take a huge dose, does not kill all that quickly. It can take days to develop symptoms, and weeks to die. That's too big a stretch of time for people - especially in a non-technological, non-scientific society - to form a causal link. It sounds silly, but as late as the 1800s people were drinking from contaminated wells in England and other "civilized" countries, getting sick, and not realizing there was a causal link.
And bear in mind, human beings in 10,000 years may be no more than savages. It seems unreasonable to expect such people to reason that only those who wander through the Forbidden Scary Place get sick. Especially when one considers, also, that radiation poisoning would probably not seem all that distinctive in a non-technological society. The victim has a rash, and lessions. These can be caused by anything from poor sanitation, to scurvy, to many other illnesses. The victims suffer naseau, diahrea, and death. But in a world without technology, without modern medicine, pretty much everything does that.
In short, people stumbling on the site and getting sick is only self-correcting if the people are sufficiently advanced to make the neccessary reasoning, and have sufficient medicine that the symptoms of radiation poisoning are unique, or at least peculiar.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Stop propogating this RealNetworks nonsense. Your points about this person's intelligence are negated (and then some) by the choice of the Real format. Shame!! Shame!!
picture it. instead of every house having black roofs, they have solar panels which provide power to the house and more.
I'm trying to picture who's going to PAY for this pipe dream and coming up blank.
"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense" -- John McCarthy
Have you seen Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design it's also similar and a very good read.
a bit of a stretch to imagine a system for communication in (presently unknown) future languages somehow via an enduring embedded "intelligent" computing system which learns new languages as they evolve around the world ...
...
or perhaps just intercepts the occasional explorer and eats their brain to gain relevant information.
just trying to help
Future history will attach a curse myth to certain areas, bodies of water, etc.
Superstition and control of society by religious zealots will ensure tomorrow what science cannot today.
Reminds me of the huge monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey...
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
If it is virtually impossible for radioactive material to cause cancer, as you say, then what exactly did marie Curie die of?
Or Highlander II,Highlander II.5, or Highlander III
www.eFax.com are spammers
10,000 years from now, some sort of asimovian space society will inhabit the earth. A bunch of history students will read through this debate while doing research in the united earth standard library and laugh their asses off.
;)
Here are a couple of things mentioned in these comments as likely occurrence during the next 10,000 years.
* slaves
* wooden tools
* cannibalism
* greens
HEY SPACE PEOPLE! I KNEW BETTER! NOW GO AND UNFREEZE ME FROM THE CRYOGENICS LAB ALREADY!!
Ummm, overrated?
Put it in the middle of a big boring desert, inside a mountain, underground, surrounded by concrete and lead.
And the put the markers underground so that, if someone tried to dig it up, or if erosion takes hold, the markers will be found before the bunker, but the markers won't be visible ordinarily, to prevent curious post-industrialites from camping out near the 'ruins'.
Kevin Fox
The only perfect solution is to get rid of the waste all together. Since we cannot currently do that, we must pick a next best solution. That next solution WILL be flawed. There is no place on earth that would be safe for 10,000 years from someone accidentally finding it and getting their curiosity piqued to enter the room. Just as every code can be cracked, every secret can be found. It simply takes time and motivations.
So we must accept that our first model will not be perfect. Bottom line. Make something that will do for the time being and one that will be re-evaluated in the future.
I'd think that in 6,000 years' time that people would have fancy devices to detect radiation. Maybe they could call these futeristic devices "GEIGER COUNTERS" :)
Stile Project
C'mon, you like it.
What about Mr. Yuck, the green face with his tounge sticking out. What ever happened to Mr. Yuck? I remember him from commercials or elementary school propoganda growing up in the late 70's early 80's. It taught children to stay out of mommy and daddy's medicine cabinet. Maybe it would work for keeping people out of mommy and daddy's nuclear waste as well. Just put up a bunch of bilboard signs with that face on them.
Yah... there's lots of thing wrong with this, but it bears consideration.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Maybe I'm missing something, as this seems too obvious.
:-)
The problem is not future technologically-advanced cultures, who understand radiation, have the means to notice it, etc etc, but cultures that have no such knowledge or understanding. So make something for that eventuality in mind.
Now, the salt-flat geology (unchanged for 230,000,000 years so far) seems pretty stable, so the stuff can be buried deep enough that it is not damgerous to those on the surface. Leave it unmarked, and chances are no-one (or very few) will go there anyway - no fantastic monument to inevitably create the Tourist Industry of Doom.
Solution: the monument is also deep underground. Like the monolith on the moon in 2001 Space Oddyssey, the very act of finding the monument is highly compelling evidence of advanced intelligence and technology. (ground-scans, geological magnetic mapping, other technologies).
Any culture capable of detecting the monument must already know enough about radiation that warnings will be fairly quickly understood.
Any culture that couldn't detect the monument is (a) the high-risk group, and (b) likely to turn any visible monument into a tourist attraction (or place of spiritual significance) anyway.
Thus, for those for whom any monument would be worse than no monument, there is no monument and we hope that if the obfuscation fails, the storage depth will still suffice.
If the ground shifts and the storage site comes up to the surface, it is marked by a warning monument.
If the site is found by an advanced culture, the monument can actually work because the threat is describes will be understood as a reference to known phenomina, not some intriguing mystical curse.
If an asteroid strikes the salt flat, well, you have bigger problems to worry about.
That said, I feel that the practise of superficially lowering our living expenses (cheaper energy) by passing the cost onto future generations is unethical and immoral - we should bite the bullet and pay the full price of what we consume, as we consume it.
Currently, paying a small premium for "green" power is not difficult. If the price is a problem, I feel it's better to tighten one's own belt than to continue living beyond my means and forcing other people to pick up your tab. I also think more people should think the same way.
But everyone thinks that.
There is no shortage of energy. There is a shortage of energy that is as cheap as energy sources that we don't pay the full price for, but instead inflict on others in the name of greater goods (good for us, anyway).
Embarassed? Hell no... I'll be long gone by then!
I can't tell you how much it angers me to see "articles" posted on here that are blatant ripoffs of replys that other people made to other people's articles... This is the second day in a row that I've seen "news" on here that was actually just someone taking credit for someone elses posts... :sigh:
I think the report is fascinating - I just watched a NOVA episode the other day about the Mayans and how difficult it was to understand their culture and language from just 1,000 years ago.
I dunno about you guys, but "This is not a place of honor" would just make me want to keep digging if *I* was an archaeologist.
I'm a 2000 man.
Most people didn't get the msg that playing around with nuclear power might be dangerous in the last century even thought they saw the effects of it. They won't probably get it ever reading some signs. Guess life will learn it the hard way... the one who survive the next 10000 years will be the creatures who can cope with it. They'll enjoy radioactivity like we do enjoy sunbathing... not really healthy but you get this nice color from it.
But maybe i'm just to pessimistic about human intelligence...
I know most of you won't see it, but Carl Sagan wrote a letter which is included at the end of the PDF in which he endorses the skull and crossbones symbol.
It sickens me to see so many "+5 Funny" comments in this thread. Tiny brains.
I'm a 2000 man.
The best way to guard something like this is to leave a little bit of the radioactive waste up on top, so those who sneak in there in spite of warning signs and what their parents told them will die horribly. And so, 50,000 years from now when even pyramid-sized warnings have worn away, the locals will still know, "Go up that mountain and you die. Happened to two brainless teenagers last year."
So every five or ten years, some nitwit kids will decide to show how fearless they are and die -- so what? They'd probably have killed themselves and others driving recklessly anyhow. And it will help keep the nitwits from outbreeding the humans with sense...
There are a lot of comments here that seem to seriously suggest some sort of warning system that involves killing the future explorers.
I think you're missing the point... We're trying to keep people from being killed here. Its our fucked up, dangerous material that we're trying to take responsibilty for, and killing people to warn them off is not a way of acheiving that.
-Miles
Fuzzy
With the advent of photoresist, holograms can be made using nothing but steel, they are pressed.
I don't know how long these things would last, but a danger sign in glorious 3D is much more likely to be understood than a stick figure.
One can also make a hologram as a moving 2d picture, instead of a static 3d one. Perhaps a picture of the dump pulsating waves and a guy's guts spilling out might get someone's attention.
-twb
William Shakespeare's headstone reads "cursed be he who moves my bones" (or something like that).
His bones were moved. People laugh at his warnings, and in about 400 years, we won't be able to say ANYTHING to scare off anyone.
Our words will just seem silly.
-twb
In ten thousand years or so there will be radiological mutants that can implant thoughts into simian minds. :)
But really, why not use some kind of holographic imaging to create a warning sign.
The salon article makes fun of the probability that future civilizations will want to dig up the burial site more if we put a monument there. The major difference, however, between our burial and historical ones is that ours really is cursed. If we put huge diagrams of the symptoms of radiation sickness (figures vomitting, losing hair, becoming frail, etc., eventually leading to death) all over the place then when somebody actually has this happen to them after spending some time on the site, they'll get out of there pretty fast and probably tell their friends to stay away.
Also, we need only worry about civilizations more primitive than our own, as any other civ will know about radiation and why we marked the site. This means that the rosetta stone idea, while making for a neat time capsule, will be wasted since we never bothered to research archeological sites in that much depth until recently (a couple centuries or so ago). The entire idea of trying to convey in plain text that it is not the site but something under the site which eminates dangerous energy rays seems far too abstract, we should instead concentrate of conveying the idea to people that the land itself is sick.
The problem with my approach is that the land isn't that sick, the government article mentions that any radiation detected could be confused with background radiation. We should make it more radioactive on purpose to prevent permanent settlement, which is a major possibility if people of the future start thinking the site is sacred. Not marking the place at all is also not a very good option, as there is a good probability imho that somebody over the next 10,000 years will stay there for a while.
There is one flaw with the massive stone grid design. Something like that would quickly fill up with windblown sand, sedimentation, tumbleweed, etc.. In just a few hundred years, the spaces between those cubes could easily turn it into a rough hewn stone field. Stones that large would make beautiful solid foundations for buildings. Then someone would dig a well.... POOF!
Personally I think they should bury it REAL deep, in a crustal subduction zone. That way, the waste would be dragged down into the earth's core, and rendered harmless. The only problem being that areas like that are earthquake zones, so they would have to be very sure about the geology of the area.
It seems to me that what is needed is not something that is designed to provoke an emotion i.e. fear,or convey danger. what is needed is an unambiguous way to say, "Hey, there's nuclear material here." Let future generations come up with their own responses. Maybe they can use the material. Maybe they will want to avoid it. Who knows?
How about scientific drawimgs that depict atomic structures, mathematical formulas that describe the fission process - something like that? I am not a nuclear scientist or a chemist, but surely there are images that can clearly convey that something is radioactive to anybody with enough science under there belt to consider drilling in the area? We wouldn't speak to aliens in Greek or Navaho - we would try mathematics as a presumably universal point of reference. Why not do the same here?
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
For those who didn't see it, that title's from last night's The Daily Show .
"I have fallen off the wagon, for I am a slave to tea."
Back in 1980, the DOE commissioned a study for just this question. The document isn't available online, but a query sometime ago elicited this reply:
You connect the dots, you pick up the pieces.
If you're into his ideas, check out his book (just published) Cradle to Cradle
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Within less that ONE thousand years even the highest level reactor waste is no more radioactive than the rocks it was originally mined from. Certainly less radioactive than the Denver City Hall.
You can find houses in England older than that still in use.
++PLS
Consider the location. There are more speakers of Navajo in the realtive vicinity than speakers of Russian.
++PLS
Anyone else feel that this could become the next 'All Your Base'?:
This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
Total bullshit. It sounds like another Green "statistic" pulled out of thin air.
Agreed. It also sounds like the equally false 'statistics' used against renewable energy sources.
How about a purlple faced dinosaur?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Back in WWII, when the US military decided it
needed a secure communication mechanism, didn't
they choose to base their code language in
Navajo? Wasn't one of the reasons they chose
the language that it had NO WRITTEN RECORD, and
was therefore more difficult for the Bad Guys to
decode? If the language is oral only, then
how are they going to write a warning in it?
You don't need to put up warnings that last for tens of thousands of years. That's nonsense. Use the French process, which removes almost all the plutonium from the waste. Plutonium is not waste, it is valuable fuel - burn it up in reactors making more electricity. Without the plutonium, the waste pretty much falls into two categories: short-lived highly radioactive fission products, and weakly radioactive long-lived transuranics. In about 500 years, the fission products are pretty much gone, and the remaining radioactivity in the waste is about as much as that of the ore the uranium was mined from. If you separate out all the transuranics and burn them in reactors, the situation gets even better.
Even if the plutonium were left there, what are the hypothetical miners 10,000 years from now going to find? Concrete vaults. OOo, interesting, break one open. What's inside. Steel casks. OOOoooo, fascinating, crack that open. Repeat a few times until they get to the center -- and what have they found? Beer-can sized cylinders of somewhat radioactive solid glass. Huh? That's not very interesting, and not worth anything. Even if they don't know about radioactivity (and how could they not, if they have the technological sophistication to dig this deeply?) they'd have to extract the plutonium out of its suspension in the solid chunks of glass to be seriously endangered by it.
A warning sign that's printed in every current language and several dead languages, so that, even in the event of a global catastrophy wiping out most human knowledge, there's a good chance that someone would recognize the warning.
Perfect! Now, how do you say "spent nuclear fuel waste" in Phrygian?
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Build a large marker out of a common and valueless material, say granite, in sections too large to be practical to move. Build it in the shape of a periodic table of the elements. Ever seen the curved one, in which the rows go around and meet at what are usually the edges? It looks like an expanding spiral, and is quite distinctive.
Prominently indicate the elements which are contained in the dump. Go ahead and put the atomic numbers in the element squares and prominently indicate the atomic weights of the radioactive isotopes. It would be useful to include drawings of the atoms illustrating the proton & neutron counts, but these would of course be useless by the time we get up to the elements which are radioactive. The first few drawings would be understandable, and would serve as a useful clue as to what the thing was about. Radioactive isotope nuclei might be drawn with neutrons or alpha particles flying away from them. Any civilization capable of understanding nuclear power or even molecular chemistry would understand such a symbol, though it might take them a couple of hours to get the numbers. Space aliens from another planet oughta be able to understand the distinct arrangement of the elements of the periodic table. It's not a cultural symbol, like a skull & crossbones, and it's NOT subject to misinterpretation. You either get it, or you don't.
Yeah, it'd be a puzzle, but it wouldn't be that obscure, and it would take a hell of a lot less brains and effort to figure out its meaning than it would to dig down a couple of miles to find out firsthand what's down there.
For the sake of the clueless you could keep the information kiosk and the multilingual messages. Sanskrit and Egyptian heiroglyphics are still understood. Engrish & Times Roman probably will be also, even in 10,000 years. The nuclear hazard trefoil symbol is likely to be around for quite a while, too.
Then you just have to bury the waste deep enough down a hole blocked up well enough so that any ignorant primitives who may descend from us won't be able to get at it. 4 Km sounds like plenty, backfilled with concrete oughta thwart anybody without the sophistication necessary to understand a periodic table, or construct carbide-steel drills. How many wells or mines were dug that deep before the industrial
revolution?
If a nuclear war happens, it's a pretty safe bet that the survivors (if any) will understand radioactive isotopes, and for a very long time.
I think it's as likely we'll find some _use_ for that crap, and will want to dig it up ourselves!
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
There is a fairly obvious solution.
First, hide the site well enough that no civilization that hasn't discovered radiation should be able to find it. e.g. buried and behind obstacles that shouldn't be breakable without modern equipment.
Second, sprinkle trace amounts of radioactive material aroun the surface. Not enough to be dangerous, but enough to attract the attention of anyone with a geiger counter (or futuristic equivilent.) Thus if the site is discovered by a civilization of comparable technological level to us, it will most likely be discovered by its unique radioactive signature. You can only hope then that if site was discovered because it was radioactive that the archeologists would keep some sort of geiger counter on hand and realize it when it became too dangerouse to continue.