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.

Comments

Skull and Cross Bones

[akmed]

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.

A little thought experiment

[Frantactical Fruke]

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. We did after all only relearn to read Egyptian hieroglyphs during the last century.

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!

What should REALLY be mocked...

[IBitOBear]

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".

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"... /sigh)

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.

Re:Best Marker = No Marker

[DarkZero]

You want a solution? Here it is. Make it as difficult as possible to get to the waste (stone, concrete, iron, let engineers call the shots). Then make sure than the place is flooded with signs in various medium (stone, metal, ceramic, you name it), each one depicting the best graphical representation of what danger lies in there....bodies slowly curling up as waves pass through them, animals dead, it's not hard to visualise it. After that if any future civilization is foolish enough to ignore every single sign, and break through all those barriers then those who tresspass deserve what they get for being just as stupid as you are!

The problem there, as with almost all solutions, is that there are still common ways that a fairly intelligent person could misinterpret such signs. Cave paintings are filled with depictions of death and horror, but they're always seen as primitive art, rather than warning signs. Similarly, most ancient graves are filled with depictions of death. To archeologists, these signs aren't a warning of danger. They're a marker declaring, "Hey, you, archeologist guy! This is where our dead are buried. It's exactly what you're looking for!".

The best plan that I can think of, which I believe they're already using in some nuclear waste sites, is a Rosetta Stone. 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.