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

Deep Time

[scrod]

These effors were written about in more depth and detail by Gegory Benford here:
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benfor d.html

My proposal

[Skyshadow]

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.

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.

Re:Skull and Cross Bones

[beertopia]

marked anything with something that looked like a skull with bones we'd know to avoid it

Exactly, plus it'll attract Goths, so it'll be a two-birds-with-one-stone type of thing.

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.

Will curiosity kill mankind after all? ;)

[CyberQ]

Ancient cultures were able to communicate to us that dark and demonic pictorials mean "Do Not Enter!".

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 ...

You know this will get the message across!

[toupsie]

Just post a sign with the goatse guy on it. That should scare away most any intelligent being.

Why bother?

[brooks_talley]

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

Anyone remember OMNI Magazine?

[Raetsel]

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!

  (It was complete with artists' renditions of the ideas... fields of giant spikes, etc...)

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!

The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.

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.

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!

Salon - feh

[Coldwar]

>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.

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...

boom!

[vinnythenose]

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.

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:how stupid can you get?

[KFury]

And it's not like civilization will forget that there's a whole bunch of really nasty shit in the Nevada.


Fuck. I forgot where I put Atlantis. Anyone?

Ok, 4 in the morning, weeeeeee.

[Xenopax]

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.

The Little Engine That Could... Kill Us All

[mosch]

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.

Re:how stupid can you get?

[sunking]

If a warning sign were tranlated as well as the Bible it would probably come out reading "Radiostation Active, Come On In."

-sam

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.

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:What should REALLY be mocked...

[c_ollier]

You will find some details here (link to frameset, check the link "How is waste managed" at the bottom of the main frame) about the "french process". This is the web site of the Cogema, a French company (partially state controlled, I believe). They seem to work also in the USA (http://www.cogema-inc.com/).

From the French web site :

reprocessing of spent fuel as practiced at La Hague:

• 
  
• reclaims reusable uranium and plutonium,
  
• provides safe, internationally accepted conditioning suitable to the technical and radiological properties of each type of final waste,
  
• reduces the amount of final waste requiring disposal by at least a factor of 5, as compared with approaches in which the spent fuel itself is waste,
  
• removes almost all (99.8%) of the plutonium, a leading contributor to nuclear waste toxicity, from the final waste.
  

Not everybody's happy with having a nuclear waste processing plant near cities, though... Check here for instance.

Architect, idealist, pragmatist William McDonough

[jerryasher]

Here's a recent speech (real player) by Designer William McDonough. Very interesting how he moved to sustainable architectures and sustainable ecosystems. It wasn't his first inclination, but fear of a negligence lawsuit moved him in that direction.

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.

Sure it will

[vspazv]

You've never watched Teletubbies have you?

Re:wonder

[CTachyon]

Just out of curiosity, have you ever taken a class on nuclear energy? The "fact" that a tablespoon full of plutonium could kill every human on earth is the most blown out of proportion ridiculous fact ever. Consider this, uranium is a natural element. It exists everywhere, everywhere! ...

Actually, it's not the radioactivity of plutonium alone that makes it so lethal. It is a very powerful carcinogen because the body accumulates what it absorbs over long periods of time, although its near-insolubility in water reduces its effective toxicity to far below what many people believe. However, if it reaches the bloodstream, it accumulates in the bone marrow and in the liver, where it has a half-life of elimination of 70 and 35 years, respectively, and inhalation of fine Pu dust can cause significant alpha exposure in the ~500 days that it takes the lungs to eliminate it.

To put it simply, it's neither a massive threat nor a relatively benign substance, and it gets a lot more bad PR in the press than other, much more worthy, scapegoats.

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.

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.