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

Re:wonder

[KFury]

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?

The sheer bolume is just one problem. The second problem is what happens if there's a launch accident. I recall that NASA was pretty keen on getting some plutonium pellets back from a botched NSA launch a few years ago.

the third problem is that something in orbit, or in free-floating space, is still likely to come back to us or another planet and contaminate it. Properly distributed, a tablespoonfull of plutonium could kill every human on Earth. Entering the atmopshere at high speed isn't the optimal way to distribute, but it would still do a heck of a lot of bad.

Flinging it into the sun would probably work, but getting it there is the hard part.

And heck, nobody really goes to Nevada anyhow.

Modern Rosetta Stones Needed

[cybermage]

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?