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

My (serious) pick:

[Skyshadow]

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...

Re:how stupid can you get?

[KFury]

why not have a sign that just says 'radiation: keep out!' in a few common current languages?

This is stupid. Thousands of years is a long, long time, and catastrophic things can happen. 'We' might not be around to update the signs into new languages, and people most certainly do forget where important things are buried.

We're still discovering about one new pyramid every two years in Egypt, but I bet you were the guy back then who said we didn't need maps and signs because who would forget where we put a fucking huge pyramid?

Re:Anyone remember OMNI Magazine?

[cybermage]

Nevada residents (read: voters) will only allow the Yucca Mountain Facility if the rest of the country rams it down their collective throat!

Actually, I can tell you, as a Nevada resident, that public opinion here is across the entire spectrum. Opinions are mostly broken down like so:

• Tiny minority that supports the project for some random reason (jobs, war time nationalism, etc.)
  
• Small minority that accepts the project because it's a little late now to back out. (We accepted the money to build it, after all.)
  
• Large majority that can't hear the news over the din of slot machines.
  
• Small minority that opposes the project because it doesn't pass many environmental tests.
  
• Tiny militant factions that oppose the project for more radical reasons. Most of these either are actively interfering/sabotaging or plan to.
  

To date, the largest act of "interference", that I've heard of, has been the cutting off of water to the site. Without water, drilling has been basically stopped dead.

It's a cultural thing...

[PontifexPrimus]

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.

Re:Skull and Cross Bones

[XNormal]

A study was conducted on children for labelling of drugs and other poisonous household stuff. It turns out that children associate the skull and bones with pirates, not with poison. For them it's cool, not a warning. A green face looking sick was suggested as an alternative.

Re:Best Marker = No Marker

[SEWilco]

That does sound reasonable: seal it and hide it. There's enough land that nobody might dig there for 10,000 years. (back of the envelope: how many acres in the USA, and what is the chance of a 10-acre quarry being in a certain 10 acres?)

Then the problem becomes those "basic underground markings". The reports point out that solid barriers can mean "this barrier is protecting treasure". If there are no barriers, future archeologists or curious miners might remove the fill, thinking that the shaft was abandoned for other reasons. (Yes, I know the facility will be much larger than a single 7-foot shaft, and that makes it even more interesting to study)

Remember, Oak Island, with a barricaded and boobytrapped shaft still attracts attention from treasure hunters after repeated failures over two hundred years.

Construction workers routinely cut through reinforced concrete. Tunnels are cut through granite. Barriers will only stop someone with wooden tools, and will only slow down hundreds of slaves eroding it with stone tools. Solid metal can be worn away by building an iron-age smelter against it and melting the surface. Modern welding or water/plasma/laser cutters are even faster.

Deception: We could try placing treasure in a barricated chamber with little disguise, and hide the further shaft. But the ancient Egyptians tried that, and both old tomb thieves and modern archeologists went on to find the real tombs. And any treasure is an invitation to find more.

I think there should be a solid barrier behind camouflage, then a backfilled vertical shaft. The real horizontal shaft can be carefully hidden behind the top of the vertical shaft (by "carefully" I mean modern tech used to drop a solid block across shaft and the seams melted and aged to make the wall seem to be virgin mountain rock -- again, old tricks: behind this barrier we can put as many modern physical barriers as we want, as anyone going past the deceptions will always think there is more). The vertical shaft is a time waster which will make many explorers give up before reaching the bottom. At the bottom of the shaft leave broken mining tools, indications of some routine exploration, and a crushed body or two. Success will only prove to be a waste of time, delaying further exploration for perhaps a generation or two while the story of failure lasts.

Large scale: We could use an underground nuclear explosion to make a large cavern (or maybe grotto is the right word, as it is man-made) across the shaft. Then there's both a large pit as a trap, and there is no shaft to follow until climbers explore the far side. But in additional to possible damage to the storage area, a cavern with characteristics different than other caves would attract attention.

We could try talking to miners by leaving broken mining tools in front of the barrier, but youngsters think they can do better than their ancestors.

There is one more thing: A few hundred feet in from the entrances, behind all the deceptions and barriers, put two chambers. Cover the walls with graphic warnings, modern scientific warnings, gold-leaf ionization detector. This is the last chance room -- we already know we can't stop them physically so we hope they're archeologists and figure out the warnings. The word of this is supposed to get out, so if they encounter its twin in the other shaft on the other side of the mountain they'll keep people away for a few generations. The chamber beyond the last warning chamber has a nuclear bomb with a simple mechanical trigger -- it explodes when grabbed. This will either show advanced people exactly what type of problem exists (they defuse it and find it has radioactive material or read the warnings), or detonates and reseals the shafts, or if it is no longer functional but not enough time has passed then its radioactivity poisons the team and warns others of the effects of going further.