Slashdot Mirror
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.
These effors were written about in more depth and detail by Gegory Benford here:r d.html
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benfo
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.
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.
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.
No one will *ever* top this as a symbol of universal terror: http://www.goatse.cx/
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
how about lauching a satellite that 'paints' the spot with a laser... then if anyone comes near it projects a sound wave that becomes audible over the site only and puts the fear of god in them...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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
That's actually a fair question. There are several answers, but there are two that seem the most potent to me:
1)
There is a moral obligation to not harm other people, whether your neighbor, or your descendant.
2)
We are driven to propagate our species. The very near example is procreation. A logcal extrapolation of that drive is to preserve our culture. This can be witnessed to varying degrees in monuments and artifacts designed to last a long time. To that end, we should also not leave a legacy that could kill our culture.
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.
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
This wont be the kind of stuff that could be used for nuclear bombs.
But it could be used for dirty bombs.
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.
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?
You've never watched Teletubbies have you?
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?
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!"
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.
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.
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.
...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!
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....
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.
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
Make a small area at the centre, perhaps a cave or shrine, deadly with radioactivity. For the small price of the deaths of a few wanderers, people will know very well through the millennia that this place is deadly.
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.
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
You are quite clearly contradicted by the information at http://www.pu.org/main/facts/pu.html, which states, "There are traces of plutonium compounds in our natural environment, but most existing plutonium was created by changing the atomic structure of naturally- occurring uranium, predominantly U238, in a nuclear reactor."
It does exist naturally.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
... 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.
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.
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.
now you have:
http://www.nuvs.com/ashram/gallery/
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.
And the radiation would turn them all into those money-mutants from The Mummy Returns!
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.
We could put Dick Clark inside the last vault with a nice sword to stab anyone who tries to get in. He doesn't age, anyway.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
All that's needed is some form of containment that can't be penetrated by a civilization unable to make a radiation detector.
(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
Damn, Gandhi schooled yo' punk ass...
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...
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.
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.
Yeah, just like the great pyramids! Good thing we're all smart enough to stay away from those fucking things 'cause nobody wants the wrath of those dead pharoes coming down on them!
Do you seriously think that this would deter anyone from investigating further?
Obfuscation is the only answer that makes any sense. Building monuments on top of the site or doing anything else to attract attention to it will only turn it into a future tourist attraction/religious site/etc.
I'm all for warnings, but they need to be placed AFTER all the obfuscation and most of them need to be consistant with the warnings we already have at facilities with similarly long-life waste (otherwise the place could be mistaken as being much older than it actually is -- an archealogical find that even we didn't notice). There should be detailed information on nuclear energy. We can assume that any civilization able to find the warnings shouldn't be too far from having nuclear capabilities of their own.
The only thing you got right is that it is fucking stupid to include a nuclear bomb in the mix.
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...
Every single atom of Uranium in the Earth is going to decay - producing all the same radioactive wastes whether mankind is involved or not.
Most nuclear fuel is artificially produced Plutonium, not naturally occurring Uranium.
Uranium 238 has a half life of over 4 billion years. When converted in a breeder reactor to plutonium and subsequently used as fuel it produces a variety of isotopes with half lives that are too long to decay rapidly and yet too short to spread their emission over billions of years at safe, low levels. It these pesky midrange half-life isotopes that the site is designed to handle
Technically, the total amount of radioactive waste is the same whether you include human nuclear activity or not - but only if you calculate the total over billions of years. In the range of a few thousand years the results are more disturbing.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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.'"
Hmm, it sounds like the DOE hired the Klingons to come up with the signs for this project.
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
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
Have you seen Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design it's also similar and a very good read.
Well, it's good that you can admit that you were wrong. That puts you above a good portion of the Slashdot community. :)
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
We are not importing the Uranium from Mars; it all comes from the Earth.
But the nuclear waste is our product and as another poster has said will release its energy in a short period of time.
There was a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Africa
Yep. But there was no local biology. It started, finished, was 'decommissioned' before life walked on the land. And nature had plenty of time to seal the nuclear waste in the rocks. We can't wait for millions of years.
The total quantity of pollutants produced by fission for a given power production is much less than that produced by combustion
This is a crazy proposition. I am sure that you would rather a smogy day in LA than to have been downwind of Chernobyl. A whiff of nitrous oxides and hydrocarbons is far better than a dose of radionuceides that might kill by themselves or damage my dna, causing cancers etc.
Bitter and proud of it.
Reminds me of the huge monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey...
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Yes, all true. You correctly understood what I was saying, and I understood it too. Thank you for clarifying what I was saying.
There are a couple of important points you missed: The total damage done by radioactivity to biological organisms is the same because the total dosage to living organisms will be the same. A million years down the road everyone is better off because we 'burned' up all of the Uranium now. If we burn up all of the Uranium nobody will be able to build nuclear weapons involving fission in the future! Compared to the damage from the detonation of a single nuclear weapon Chernobyl is nothing.
Do we do more damage to our selves now by burning the Uranium is reactors? Maybe, maybe not - encapsulate the waste in ceramics and it is pretty stable over its really dangerous life time.
When we burn fossil fuel like coal we release radioactive Carbon 13 into the atmosphere - the amounts are really large since you have to burn so much more chemical fuel than nuclear to get the same amount of energy.
If we turn off the electricity then millions of people will die in the cities - 18th century technology can't support 21st century cities. For example: there is no way using horse and buggies to bring enough food into a city to support it.
If you attempted to use horse and buggies to try you would find out what pollution really is: the horse droppings would breed so many flies that disease would rise rapidly. The automobile, by getting rid of the horse dropping - fly problem, greatly cleaned up the cities. Cities are much cleaner now than they were at the start of any other century in history. This is part of the reason that life expectancy is up over previous centuries.
Like all technological problems the solutions to the power generation problem have trade offs. If you look at all of the factors nuclear fission comes out near the top of the pile. (Pun intentional). Any thing you do - or fail to do has negative consequences. Sorry, that is how the universe works. Stay out in the sun unprotected and it will kill you; Greens want us to do better than God. Sorry I don't know how to do that - and neither does anyone else.
A minor point: no true green has any business ever being on the internet or allowing technology like cameras to be used on his behalf.
A real Green is so busy trying to claw a living out of the dirt that he hasn't got any time free to go to protest meetings - so fake and poseur.
I have great respect for true Greens - but fakes are just playing power games.
Booooring.
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
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).
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.
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...
i am not sure that all the damage will be the same.
smaller doses of radioactivity will probably cause disproportionally less damage.
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
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.
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
You proved to be quite ill informed with your post. The moderation up to 3 just shows that many moderators seem to be pretty clueless as well.
Um, in no way does what you have written in any way conclude that the parent poster is ill informed. Not one of your points links to anything that the parent poster has listed out. Nothing. I'm at quite a loss. Or is it just that you don't agree with the poster and have no real rational reason as to why 'many moderators seem to be pretty clueless'. So instead of thinking it out you just threw up some relative but non-linking information as said everyone else is just 'clueless'.
That seems to be pretty clueless to me.
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 picture of a mushroom cloud with waves shooting out of it? It's pretty darned simple. Any advanced civilization ought to get the idea at once.
Of course, it will also be necessary to have a version for un-advanced civilizations, in case there's been some sort of massive event that throws things back into technological oblivion.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
How about a purlple faced dinosaur?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.