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Radioactive Warning for Future Generations
tengu1sd writes "The Los Angeles Times discusses the problems with trying to leave a message for generations down the line. From the article: 'Symbols tend to lose their meaning over time. Exactly how and why Stonehenge was built, for instance, has long remained a mystery. Warnings, they argue, would be misunderstood or dismissed, the same way ancient grave robbers ignored curses inscribed on the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs to seize the riches inside. The curse of plutonium packs a painful penalty.'"
Just write it in every major language. Several languages have survived thousands of years through today, which is how the Rosetta Stone worked.
granite contains uranium so is long-lived radioactive.
important message would last as long as the medium holding it.
Write it in English.
If civilization ever devolves to the point where English is no longer recognized/understood, then guess what?
The cavemen who have replaced us won't be our problem to deal with. We'll all be happily dead.
Seriously, if such a warning is ever needed, to hell with Humanity 2.0. I can see it now:
Ogg (sipping a skull full of blood): Me say, is nice of other human to warn us of glowy shiny.
Eck (nodding his head before picking something out of his hair and eating it): Mmmm. Yes, is pity they stupid and bash selves.
Ogg and Eck: Ahahahahaha!
Well, screw you, future savages - may you all wilt and die from radiation poisoning.
Then future generations can look it up on the wayback machine.
Universal Translator error code #7
The language you requested is available only to registered members.
By the time English is no longer understood or the signs are no longer understood, if civilization exists, they will figure it out on their own pretty quickly, while if civilization doesn't, who cares?
Why not make a hard-to-break-into storage fascility (secure as in 60-foot concrete walls & 3-foot glass-encased steel plating for the containers)?
Then if 10,000 years from now the civilization is dead, and the surviving humans are at the level of chimps, they will not be able to get into a secure bunker.
If the future humans HAVE the technology to break in, we can surely assume they would have Geiger counters, etc., and know better than play in the radioactive waste
In response to the problem of symbols losing their meaning: haven't any of these people read "Contact"? Use prime numbers -it doesn't matter what language you speak, prime numbers are the same to everyone!
In response to the problem itself (how to warn future generations about a dangerous radioactive stockpile underground) why are we so concerned about future generations 100,000 years from now, and not even concerned with our own well-being? Get on the global warming problem and curbing nuke proliferation before worrying about what happens a thousand years from now when mole men try to dig into our plutonium piles.
Today's warning sign is tomorrow's tourist attraction. If anything, the warning signs will attract tourists, exposing them to more radiation. "Hey lookie here FuturoBillyBob, these ancient symbols must lead to treasure, because no ancient symbol would ever be a warning, right?" This will inevitably lead to naturally selecting out curious tourists who will die out from radiation poisoning and not pass on the curious gene. The "Where's Waldo" series will plummet in sales, causing its publisher to go out of business, reducing the sales of red and white horizontally striped sweaters, thick glasses, blue pants and brown shoes as well as stocking hats, unleashing an economic chain reaction leading to a global economic collapse that will start nuclear war, resulting in the annihilation of mankind. So don't mess this up, LA!
just make a huge pile of glowing, long-lived nuclear waste, and surround it with a high stone fence. Put signs on that barrier in every language known to Mankind that say "if you cross this fence you will die". Undoubtedly, some people will cross that fence. Niven called this effect "Evolution in action" and that's certainly the case. However, after a few years, the growing pile of radioactive skeletons would serve as a graphic example to future generations about the dangers of radioactive waste, while simultaneously cleaning the gene pool.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Leave it unmarked and buried deep in an area that has no mineral deposits or anything worth mining. No-one will know, so no-one will want to go snooping for treasure. To get to it, you'll have to know that something's there in the first place. To dig that far you'll need tech. If you've got the tech to drop a shaft down 1000ft, well, you'll have all the gear necessary (and normally, on-hand)to detect radioactivity.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
An article about the same topic here . Its foccused on the repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." -- Linus
The curse of plutonium packs a painful penalty.
And probably makes more sense millenia to come than the English phrase:
"Do not install this software, 'Duke Nuke 'em Forever', under any circumstances!"
...but I'm sure they'll consider your suggestion for a beowulf cluster of self replicating NetBSD nanobots.
There need to be additional deterrants, in case whoever finds the site later is too stupid, too greedy, or too malevolent to keep away from the site.
This may sound cruel, but I really think some attractively shiny sealed containers with neurotoxins or simple, stable, chemical poisons should be added in another layer under the surface. Perhaps they already plan to do this, and just don't want to make the information public. But would you rather a few people die on the surface, reinforcing the idea that the site is full of death, or let those people dig down and extract some of that waste, before expiring and leaving it out in the open on the surface, later? That would surely end up having a more catastrophic effect on local life.
But if we don't leave warnings and such, how will humanity be held in suspense when the Psychlos decide to let a few rag-tag slaves lead by Johnny Goodboy run free for a few days? And really, you folks in the DoD, make sure that you leave the flight simulators for the F-16s plugged in kplzthx.
Does anyone else think it's stupid to bury a huge super-structure around this site? I mean, if I were from the future, that would make me want to explore the place MORE. I think just keeping it as small and as simple as possible is the best solution.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
If civilization has deteriorated to the point that the future critters no longer have the technology to detect the danger, maybe a good old fashioned dose of mutation will kick-start them back on the path!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The third arm that they sprout will serve as a good warning. A bit after the fact though.
hi mom!
If you never read A canticle for Leibowitz, well you need to, it's part of any liberal education. In any case what is the most enduring instituion bar none. Religion. Start a religious order that protects the sites.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why can't we destroy it? We enriched the fuel from natural sources that weren't harming anyone, so how hard could it be to get it back to the way we found it?
The problem with our current reactors is that they only "burn" a small fraction of their nuclear fuel and leave the rest as waste. With reprocessing and more advanced reactor designs, it's possible to extract far more energy and leave behind waste that's not dangerous for anywhere near as long.
The highly radioactive stuff we're struggling to "entomb forever" at Yucca Mountain is probably the same stuff we'll be scrambling to dig up and use as fuel 50 years from now.
Pack the place full of bones- either human ones (ick), or concrete/other long lasting (but otherwise useless) material imitations. And not pretty, display quantity skeletons- make them broken, burnt, chewed on, etc. In huge piles/surrounding the casks. Sort of an unmistakable message saying "bad things here".
If anything finds em in the far future and DOESN'T recognise savaged human remains (and assuming they don't know how to make a geiger counter), well, they are on their own...
RdT.
One would think that with the prevalance of technology today, that the availablity of a Geiger counter or dosimeter would be a fairly common device in the future...
If not, then I think it likely that, oh, we have probably nuked ourselves back into the stone or iron age, and knowledge of radioactivity will be fairly moot, not to mention its omnipresence in such a scenario...
Either way, I think it is a far better idea to use Nuclear waste as FUEL in a nuclear reactor, as opposed to just waste... But then that idea just makes too much sense, so we have to consider marking toxic sites...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Skull and crossed bones.
I think the best solution would be to examine human psychology as we know it and see what symbols will create the most appropriate 'instinctive' reaction.
For example, does the letter 'X' or the 'Radioactive' symbol evoke a more instinctive sense of forbidding?
I am Nobutu Bangari and I am in posession of a large consignment of gold
that my people left me some time ago. you are free to dig here to find it but
as a token of good faith I ask that you remit to my swiss bank account a small
fee that we will reimburse to you once the bullion is secured by you.
etc
Just translate that and no-one would dare bother digging.
Hedley
Create a GIANT statue out of stainless steel(hard to move/destroy), one for each of the 4 compass points. Make it of a man with a shield in one hand and an open palm in the stop gesture, point the shield at the mountain, point the palm away. Place it around the mountain. inlay around the base with messages in hopes that one makes it and that they may get the gist of theyre shielding against the mountain.
It'll be reposted about every year, just like this 'news' item.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Skull and crossed bones.
Cool! Pirate treasure!
Why don't they just type it out in ALL CAPS? (After all, doesn't yelling your language to foreigners work?):
HEY, THIS IS RADIOACTIVE!
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken
... which has been around for ages: e.g. was on the table in 1991 Probably originates much earlier.
News?? ???
Just surround the place with skeletons. Start out with a bunch of animal skeletons, then as you get closer in, throw in some fake human ones. Nobody is going to mistake that one, no matter how stupid people become. Anybody who wanders in after that knew what they were getting into, even if they know no language.
Better than attracting all the intellectuals to try to decipher the mystery writing on the ancient temple. Duh. "Hmmm, it says we're going to die... great. Let's go tell the oth...erk."
Granted, it has the minor short-term side-effect of creeping the hell out of the poor folk that have to work there now.
Well, I'm sure a bunch of poison darts, spike gates coming out of the walls, and a large, rolling, crushing boulder would do the trick, too.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
pictures of death by radiation should work. especially if there are no traps to make people think that it is a curse... first looter will go down and word will spread. Hell, it will probably be a rosetta stone in it's action!
How about a dinosaur with it's legs straight up in the air? If they are still aware that the dinosaurs died out it should give them pause.
We could use a radioactive marker.
What's really the big deal here? I mean, assuming that for some reason the people living in those areas "forget" they are not supposed to dig stuff up by the radioactive waste dump over a few generatinos, and assuming that some people way in the future try to, I would think that that civilization would figure out rather quickly that they shouldn't have dug stuff up there when some of their people start to die gruesomely. If civilization has regressed so much that they wouldn't have any geiger counters or any knowledge of radiation, then I would assume that some massive, world wide catastrophe has occured - in which case, who cares if ten or twenty more people die. I think there are more significant, and more urgent problems for people to focus on. Like maybe, how to reduce the amount of radioactive waste in the first place. Or how to use fusion to generate large amounts of energy without tons of radioactive waste.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Just make a bunch of glass logs out of the stuff and build moon/mars habitats out of it.
Stamp on the logs the radioactive icon with a clock icon and a date.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrification
http://www.geomelt.com/
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Since there is no language or system of symbols which is instinctively understood by humans, coming up with a symbol or something to write on a sign that a generation of people with no knowledge of our civilization would understand is a lost cause.
The best solution is to just use a well defined symbol, such as the nuclear hazard symbol we use now, and plaster it all over the place. The first time it's encountered, it won't mean anything. But after the 5th guy dies soon after building his hut near one of those signs, the rest would catch on, and the symbol would develop meaning within their civilization. This is how humanity has always learned what is safe and not safe, and where good and bad places to live exist.
Just leave the radioactive waste in the open, add something that attracts animals, and let the future civilizations figure it out from the three-headed buffalo in the region.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Meh. I think we ought to just do a really thorough job of hiding it, with warnings inside the perimeter. Obvious warnings will just draw attention to the site.
I say we build a necropolis there.
What says "deadly danger" more than a bunch of stiffs?
You can't take the sky from me...
Actually, there's a lot more interesting information in the abstract of the report that actually generated that data sheet.
Take a look at excepts from the Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plan for more comprehensive details on how they came up with these concepts, and the team(s) of multi-disciplinary researchers/scientists who worked on them.
If nothing else, I was reminded of other (fictional) mutli-disciplinary teams brainstorming about far-off civilizations temporally or spatially. Eg, from Sphere or some other novel...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
you know, some symbols should be pretty obvious. invent some way of preserving images for a long time, then, make a giant billboard with a before and after picture, underneath the before picture make an image of a regular area. underneath the after picture, a picture of the area (buildings if you got any) of the waste.
then. before picture = health person.
after picture = horribly mutated dead person.
problem solved.
Yes, I was thinking the same thing. Not sure how long this has been used, but putting a skull and cross bones on something like a bottle or a barrel is still quite effective at warning people.
Nuclear reprocessing is a must. At the current rate of development and fuel use, uranium ore will run out 25+ years before we are due to have a commercially viable fusion reactor, never mind enough such reactors that fission reactors can all be replaced. Well, either reprocessing is a must, or we need to invest an order of magnitude more in fusion research, but Governments don't like funding speculative research much and the decades of fuel we currently have will outlast the career of any politician currently with sufficient influence to actually bring about radical funding programs.
However, if we do have reprocessing, it absolutely needs to be far better managed than BNFL can do. Oh, and don't get Group 4 to carry the nuclear fuel, either. They tend to lose things a lot.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If you're advanced enough mathematically to understand them, which 'Mad Max' types are often not. You don't need to know what prime numbers are to dig or drill.
We're talking about a warning system that hopefully would be understood by everyone from the Native Americans to the Mongol hordes, to Victorian adventurers over a span of 10,000 years.
Unfortuantely, history shows us that looters just think that warning = hidden treasure.
I think that a better solution would be putting the effort towards making sure we don't fall in the first place. Even if we do, the worst damage that's likely to happen is a town gets poisoned. Maybe some of the upper crust from handling or making jewelry out of the stuff. Then again, the upper crust tended to do things like dose themselves with mercury and have bloodletting done, so I don't think it'd make a huge difference anyways, if they fall that far back.
I don't read AC A human right
Unless human nature fundamentally changes I don't see how any warning given by the people of today will be heeded by the archaeologists of tomorrow. We certainly have no problem opening tombs and graves that are clearly marked as such (with grave, forebodding warnings) from cultures just hundreds of years old (and in fact we make heroes of the people who do it, like Lara Croft and Indiana Jones.) Why should we think a culture thousands of years from now won't see our radiation sign or skull and crossbones as anything but crude religious superstition?
Languages change and symbols are open to interpretation.
The answer? Show what happens to those who cross into the area. Showing signs of a dead body encircling an area, while morbid, does get a point across. Vlad the impaler impaled his enemies in front of his castle/region and i'm sure people of many languages got the hint without a single written word.
But what if a future intelligent species doesn't look like a current human? Show a skeleton. Any type of semi-intelligent species would know how a body looks after it's been dead for a while. A picture of a skeleton implies death.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
Future governments might consider it a deposit of weapon technology for them to use if it is too deadly. Don't make the warning sign attractive.
-- up-modding policy: make a good point, write self-contained.
According to the professor in my Radioactive Waste Management class, one of the methods for propagating the "Stay the hell away from Yucca Mountain" message for the 100,000 years of its projected duty cycle was to start a religion whose main tenet is to avoid the area. The rationale was that since religions are good at propagating information over spans of time when language, culture, and the like change drastically, it could effectively communicate this information to subsequent generations. It was, of course, dismissed as a possible plan of action. I wish I could find a link to substantiate this....
The message was also coded from first principles, starting with true = true and true != false. A messgae of that kind long enough to talk about radioactive waste would be too long to be useful or have much chance of surviving. A better method would be to have a diagram of the periodic table, highlighting the elements present. Even if the periodic table itself is unknown in the future, it contains enough basic information (mass, name, charge, valency, etc) that any advanced civilization descended from an existing human civilization should be able to interpret it sufficiently to at least be on guard.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
just put a windows logo on it....by the people will have figured out what that means
That's the UNIVERSAL symbol of death. And engraved depictions of people and bones, and stuff.
Check out: http://www.nsc.org/ehc/wipp/manage.htm
I visited the WIPP site a few years ago, part of a project I was running. Got a ride down in the tiny salt excavation shaft. Open sided cage, ya gotta wear lots of protective gear and be careful or you can lose skin as the strata zip past. Then I was given a fascinating tour of the underground tunnels and storage areas on a sort of golf buggy for WIPP DOE guys.
I still have a sealed packet of rock salt I chipped out of a tunnel wall (well away from the areas with waste. Interestingly the web site URL printed on the handouts I got is now unreachable. So, yep, I guess even government stuff just gets lost over time.
WIPP is a fascinating place, a government salt mine, where they dont want the salt. they can;t even sell it, The excavated permian age rock salt is piled up around the place.
The place operates pretty much as advertized, oh I am sure there's stuff they don't tell us about, but hey, its a government right!
The tunnels are quiet and cool, well ventilated, and extensive, the place is big. The rock salt creeps under the pressure, its 2,150 feet down. The salt moves even as they fill areas in, the movement over several years is detectable. It messes up the structures, and is, well, creepy. I have no doubt that waste buried there will be crushed and sealed in tight.
I beleive the DOE made an excellent choice for disposal of TRU waste, the people that work there were freindly and had that south western laid back thang. Very cool.
I left with the impression that once sealed in, nothing will ever get back into the environment, accidentally at least.
But what if someone drills? Ok, here's a crazy thought.
One thing that gets to you if you go there, is how isolated and non-descript the area is. We don't bury waste in beautiful places. Its a 40 minute ride out from Carlsbad, to no-where, (at least to a city guy like me).
If you have never been out that way, its hard to believe just how much empty wasteland there is. It does have a bizarre desert beauty, but lets face it, there's a lot of boring scrub nothing too. So... what, I wonder are the odds of anyone drilling there if we just hid it. Yep, I mean the whole WIPP site, removed down to say 6 feet. take it off the maps, make it a non - place.
Then... Sure, place a layer of hard concrete and warnings under the surface, Icons decals, cartoons, large rectangular monoliths, whatever, but hidden Then return the surface area to boring nondescript scrub desert.
Wouldnt it be forgotten eventually? If its forgotten, and thus left alone, isn't that what we want anyway? Sounds crazy, maybe, but there's a lot of boring looking places where no one ever digs, why not make this just one more patch of salty scrub?
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
Just paint it mauve, the universal symbol for danger.
Small to Large blood red very sharp spikes.
Surely, the warning should read:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent lacus felis, adipiscing vel, tincidunt vitae, tincidunt eget, velit. Curabitur ut urna nec neque sollicitudin tincidunt. Vestibulum urna. Aliquam dictum malesuada justo. Mauris pretium porta mauris. Phasellus porta, ante non convallis viverra, nulla erat blandit eros, non iaculis odio dolor sed nisl. Phasellus vitae lectus sed nunc gravida pretium. Proin blandit. Ut placerat nisl vitae nisl. Praesent erat. Fusce ultricies. Maecenas dapibus libero in dui. Nunc urna lacus, volutpat ut, porta aliquet, semper nec, purus. Nunc lectus.
Sed lorem. Mauris dui. Donec ut purus sit amet urna molestie placerat. Integer laoreet. Fusce velit. Vivamus at massa. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Vestibulum bibendum. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Integer felis nibh, semper non, ultrices et, facilisis nec, nulla. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Etiam fringilla ipsum nec dolor. Sed sit amet dui eu nisi viverra aliquam.
CURAE; ETIAM FRINGILLA IPSUM NEC DOLOR!!!
enough said?
Look their are two possible scenarios we need to worry about.
In the first scenario we continue our impressive technological progress and civilization does not collapse. In this case simple messages in major world languages and records in other places around the country plus the radioactivity itself will be more than enough to pass this information on to a civilization unimagineably more technically adept than we are. Likely this civilization will have found a much better solution for radioactive disposal (or will just want to reprocess the waste) but even if not we can count on them to be better able to solve the problem of warning people away thatn we are.
In short if we expect civilization to continue to progress we don't need to make warnings that will last for more than 500 years and english will accomplish that.
On the other hand if civilization does collapse and humanity returns to primitive existance it seems a bit silly to worry about this radioactive waste. If societal collapse is a serious worry then we should be putting this effort into caching technology and information to help rebuild civilization not making sure future cave-men avoid cancer. The harm from radioactivity is bad and sucks but it doesn't even register compared to the harms and loss of lifespan from global collapse of civilization. Heck, while some people might die discovering the mysterious deadly waves might even help civilization to rediscover scientific knowledge.
Overall I think a lot of this buisness is just silly. Before going and wasting all this time trying to communicate the danger first figure out in what scenarios it will be important to do that and then ask if in those scenarios these sort of warnings really are the most productive thing we can do to help.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
The people who came up with the biohazard symbol also tackled similar problems. How to convey danger properly without words. I think they did a pretty good job. Any human or near-human being will see the pointy biohazard symbol as indicating danger, unlike the classic radioactivity symbol.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
waste + sun = problem solved
... is not to stockpile the radioactive wastes, but to recycle them!
Bury them in a subduction zone, deep in the ocean. As geologic time marches on, they will be pulled down into the earth, where they will be safe and secure until they emerge from some volcano (hint, lava is mildly radioactive from just this sort of thing occuring naturally -- it's one reason the Earth has a molten core).
These materials will resurface hundreds of thousands of years from now, at which point most of their radioactive decay will be completed.
And it's hard to think of a storage place more secure than at the bottom of a deep ocean trench where tectonic plates are being recycled. Once buried (by robots or teleoperated mechanisms) beneath a few meters of muck, they aren't going anywhere, and I believe they would be secure from pilfering.
Yeah, in the locality of where they are buried, things might get pretty toxic, just as they will inside Yucca Mountain or other similar repositories. But after a few tens of thousands of years, the irradiated part of the environment would be pulled into the earth, with no human involvement needed or practical.
You said: "If you've got the tech to drop a shaft down 1000ft, well, you'll have all the gear necessary (and normally, on-hand)to detect radioactivity.
Since it's CLEAR that you have no idea about the so called "tech" to drop a 1,000 foot shaft, it consists of:
Sorry...
No Gieger counters needed, ever.
Yes, I happen to own a 1,200 foot piece of caving rope, and have PLENTY of experience dropping DEEP pits.
Barring a very serious apocalyptic event, information will survive. The makers of Stonehenge didn't have computers. Sure, data storage methods have limited lifetimes, but, the data will always have been transfered over to something else. Not to mention that there will always be some things that can be recovered even from those.
Warnings, they argue, would be misunderstood or dismissed, the same way ancient grave robbers ignored curses inscribed on the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs to seize the riches inside. The curse of plutonium packs a painful penalty.'"
What great examples. Record keeping is so much better kept and used more since the middle ages. I'm not sure if anyone, other than who did it, and again they failed to keep records, knew what Stone Hedge was. Curses...how many of the curses have come true? All theses tombs found and raided, and I haven't heard of any curses coming true. Despite what civilization is becoming, we are getting more intelligent and we are keeping records, sometimes too many. I'm sure what ever symbol we use will still mean the same, and if not, someone can find it in a record.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Maybe my understanding of history is flawed, but I was under the impression that Navejo is far from being a major language. I mean, wasn't it the primary basis for a US code in the Pacific during World War II or something?
Just put a skull on there. Thats a pretty universal symbol. Many civilizations independantly decided that a human skull or skeleton was a sign of death. My other recommendation would be a giant mural of people dying horribly, but that might lead future people to believe that there was a buried weapon there that they may want.
A Goatse statue/image! It crosses cultural and language boundaries like nothing a bunch of eggheads in a lab can ever cook up.
Table-ized A.I.
Piles of skeletons attract archaeologists.
:-[ :-( :'-( :( :( :-C FYI WB to ADIH. GUD! FE! FO! FUM! ADBB! TARFU!! TEOTWAWKI!!! :( :( :( :( :-C :( :'-( :( :( :-[
I had to add this section of text to get this comment past the lameness filter, which may or may not have been a good idea.
what sig?
when this story gets posted every year for the last 4 years?
The Nuclear Energy Institute and President Bush told us about "Clean, safe nuclear energy". Why not just mark the site with some of their PR materials with blue skies and smiley faces? I'm sure future generations will thank us for subsidizing reactor construction.
Nuclear energy and the politics of nuclear energy are the most mind-boggling thing. I know that one of the major issues in the recent election was whether they were going to let their perfectly good functioning reactors keep working until they reach the end of their operational lives, or they'll shut them down early. The Greens wanted them shut down early, probably because we so much extra cheap energy around these days?
The same thing is going on with this plutonium. Then-President Carter signed an order banning fuel reprocessing and so we end up having to burry perfectly good fuel materials, which could be safely burned in new reactors.
-----------
Carry a gun, in California
To summarize every major point made in this thread so far, as to why the article's concerns are stupid:
First off, for all we know we're going to be wanting that "waste" back a century from now, for use elsewhere. Assuming that doesn't happen, then burying it hundreds of feet underground is going to put it out of the reach of all but the most technologically advanced, to whom it won't present a threat anyhow.
And even if somehow a bunch of degenerate savages get into the waste, a thousand years from now, why the fuck should we care? Absolute worst-case scenario, a number of people in the region die. We're talking radiation here, not a bacteria or a virus. If some idiots lug it up to the surface and start snorting it for joint pain, the ones who live will rapidly figure out something is wrong, and even if they don't understand what the mechanism is, they'll certainly be able to put it back and stay away. There's just no real way I can see it ever presenting a real "threat" to more than a tiny group of people.
Seriously, it seems as though they're worried to death about litigious action by barbarians from the year 11999. Why the fuck should we care? If ten thousand years from now we've regressed so far that people don't understand the concept of radioactivity, then perhaps it's for the best.
Hippies will dance around it naked at the full moon....
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Next project?
It would be surrounded by 48 granite or concrete markers, 32 outside the berm and 16 inside, each 25 feet high and weighing 105 tons,
Or here's another thought: just bury it.
Bury it in a pluton of ancient rock, several hundred meters down, as most current proposals suggest. When the site is filled, backfill it with concrete from the top to the bottom of the shaft.
Any society with sufficient resources (technology, tools, time) to cut through that to see what we buried will also undoubtedly have an archaeological record of us, and will probably also have at least a very rudimentary understanding of nuclear physics. (Remember we might regress - think HG Wells.)
In short, they're going to see that we went to a hell of a lot of trouble to dispose of something. That should be enough warning.
Of course, you could also arrange dots into the periodic table. Again, any society capable of getting there will also have discovered the periodicity of chemistry, even if they don't understand our numbers or element names. A few arrows pointing at the swarm of dots representing the constituents of the waste ought to be enough. Pour slabs of something with a table of dots into the concrete at ten foot increments.
All the stuff about communicating with them further than that is B.S. - never ask a humanities major a question when the audience is the scientists of the future - all you need to use is simple science. That's like asking a roofer to perform a heart transplant.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
When they're finalyl done burning everything down, and the actinides and transuranics are removed from the spent fuel, the remaining waste elements have half lives of a few decades at most. The result is that within 300 years, such wastes are no more radioactive than the ores of natural radioactive elements.
After 2000 years, your granite countertop will be as radioactive as the waste from one of these.
We can use plutonium to make electricity for many years, and come out with comparatively innocuous waste materials.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I have to assume that the divine creator is going to take care of most of this stuff," said Steve Casey, the WIPP engineer charged with overseeing construction of the warning system.
That's really encouraging.
I had a lengthy diatribe about religion and engineering but, well...
Those who can think already know and consider it obvious.
Those who can't would just mod me "Troll".
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Just think, no one would ever discover this tomb, if we didn't PUBLICIZE IT. Maps are not rare, Yucca mountain is probably not very difficult to find ON a map, all you have to do is look for the right symbol sequence (spelling), and you've got it! I really, hate the rich, powerful, IDIOTS messing with our future. The press makes it look like they're trying to warn you. The very publication of articles ont the subject, leaves behind a lot of evidence. My concern is that, if you have those pillars with language on them, people will discover them and then it WILL be a tourist attraction. People are stupid. Peoplem are gullible. People assume things. Like the mojave phone booth (linky: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_phone_booth ). The presence of Magnets, and radar reflectors, in the tomb would be a significant thing to take note of. I think they should bury geiger counters in the sands out there, MILLIONS of them. Hopefully, someone will find them, if they are looking for treasure or whatever the hell they are doing digging out there. Modify these geiger counters to emit a very loud, very annoying sound, when near radioactive waste. Of course, someone is going to dig up a few of these, and then think they are gold detectors or something stupid like that, and then it is a tourist attraction. As they said, radar DEFLECTORS, deflect means to send the radar back, which means the radar operator will know something is there, but he won't know what's past that. It's like a science fiction movie, it's a major mystery, and people will try to dig it up, wanting to know what that radar signature is. But think, if they dig up, the internet, or a PC that still worked, with a copy of this article, they pretty much have a map to the tomb. The press has done similar evil things, like the publicisation of the mystery man who honors a very famous poets grave every now and again, no one knew who he was, or how he got into the graveyard. Upon the announcement of this, tons of people showed up to see him, only one man had seen him before, and this was a story done by Yahoo! news, so A LOT of people know about it, and there are probably throngs more people showing up evry year. If they can decode our language, english maybe, from an old computer, they have the map. Hell, if they can find a compiler, trial and errror, and common sense, will prevail. They might be able to read, even program these computers. They could learn everything all over again! With the underground crack network, they will have no problems getting everything runnning. I once had an idea, for a story centered around this, and the article has given me loads of ideas as well. Did the article say they were building a super structure over it? Bad idea. One also wonders and worries about ecological, or even climate changes affecting the site, deserts were once tropical forests you know. Could nature crawl back over the site? Could it thrive, maybe provide a habitable habitate for humans? The sun has already lived for a long time, there is not enough time left for a new species to develop, and be as intelligent as ours, based on current evolution history. It is vital now, more than ever to preserve our race. I still worry about the looming nuclear war, and no I don't mean I'm worried whether it might happen or not, I KNOW it will happen.
"The idea is to preserve humanity at all costs."
Why, yes it is, so the sensible thing to do is to not make the hideous stuff in the first place, no matter what it costs us now to do something different.
money-mouth
Nuclear power is concentrated heat,that is all it is, a very dangerous and expensive and elaborate way to make some "hot", at a tremendous cost, both in dollars and in time and effort,and for millenia to come. We have a plethora of other heat sources and techniques to make power, we should be concentrating on devloping them and using them. We have practical fusion power, it is called "the sun", abundant sunshine on the earth, perfectly useable. There's a start. Deep underground-more heat, useable. And so on. renewable biofuels, min hydro setups, ocean thermocline temp and mineral/ion differences (automatic current flow), atmosphere/land natural static currents exploitation (tesla action), and whatever, there is a huge list now that taken as a total is quite enough, either as a "works right now-use it" scene or "looks good, throw some R&d at it" level. IF we just did that, and not the other.
If we REALLY were concerned over future humans we wouldn't be poisoning THEIR planet now, would we?
Nuclear "power" was a sap, a stealthy way to develop atomic weapons by the thousands, they had to come up with some marketing gimmick to "sell" it to the plebians, and to hide the true military costs. It has never been profitable in civilian use for power, and here is another example why, no one readily admits to the cost of disposal, and even in todays dollars with todays prices it isn't near the so called "deal" they kept claiming it was going to be for decades. I was just reading some figures the other day (sorry, didn't bookmark the article), compaing costs with coal generated, natural gas, hydro, commercial wind power, etc, and..no big deal, it is not even close to being significantly cheaper, and is actually more expensive than some of the options. granted, they all have drawbacks, all of them, but still..we can do even better. I would class nukes as 'close, but no see-gar, the waste is a deal breaker". It really isn't all that great, except perhaps for submarines. And if you add in disposal and decommissioning power plants and guarding them for generations, it is more costly just in dollars than the other methods of generating electricity by far.
How's this different from, say, an abandoned mercury mine? "De Re Metallica" tells of mine floors oozing droplets of "quicksilver". Walk in, inhale, get chronically ill.
Copper runs together with arsenic. Arsenic doesn't decay like a radioactive material does, neither does mercury. Abandoned copper mines are going to be health hazards until they are either emptied or subducted.
Are we planning to put up 10,000 year warnings up around all our existing toxic waste dumps?
If we need to, English should be good for the next couple of thousand years if it has anything like the longevity of Latin. After that, someone uncompromising might put a heap of skeletons in contorted positions. Or we could just have future explorers click on a EULA to enter.
At the risk of being a jerk - While technolgy and information reigns - nobody would be stupid enough to walk into a death zone.
If civilization crashes - some twit will walk out in front of the death hole and say "if you go in there you'll die"
At that point - if some idiot goes into the hole, he'll die. As will the next idiot, and the idiot after that.
The "Shamen" that said "if you go in there you'll die" will spawn a new religion, and the very few twits that would walk into the death hole will be regarded as stupid non-believers.
Can we please metamod the article as +37 LAME?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I mean, if human civilization has collapsed so utterly that both historical knowledge and basic nuclear physics is unknown, any additional damage that this could possibly do has to be microscopic in comparision. And why would mining techology still be going strong??
There seems to be some weird assumption that the next 10.000 years will be similar to the last 10.000, on average. I can 100% guarantee it will not!! Most likely, this very discussion will be archived for people then to read!
If you really want the waste to be inaccessible, you should dump it in one of the very deep sea trenches, and have geology fold it into the earth mantle.
Cultural symbols will not evoke the same emotional reactions in different cultures. This even would include the universal NO sign... it may mean nothing in the future.
Several commenters have mentioned the pyramids of Egypt and the fact that they were looted in antiquity. The material deposited in Yucca mountain will not contain much gold, but it will be valuable to our descendants, who will see it as a cheap source of easily reprocessed nuclear fuel. They will remove it from Yucca mountain and use it within a few centuries.
In ten thousand years, people who find signs warning of radioactive material will be disappointed to discover that salvors had beaten them to the site millennia before.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
The point that always seems to be missed is that elements with longer half lives are actually *less* radioactive. Duh! That's *why* their half lives are longer!
Plutonium has a long half life, and it radioactivity level is very low. It's main toxicity is chemical, and that is vastly overblown. See
The Myth of Plutonium Toxicity
at http://russp.org/nucpower.htm
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
The solution is simply to make bullets and bombs out of it, give it a catchy name like 'Depleted Uranium' instead of 'Radioactive Waste', start an illegal war under false pretences, and dump thousands of tons of it indiscriminately wherever fighting occurs, ensuring large amounts are vaporised and scattered through the atmosphere.
And, since its much easier to supress research into the carcinogenic, mutagenic and heavy-metal toxicity of the radioactive waste when it is part of a military programme, both the enemy, innocent civilians and friendly troops struck by friendly fire or on reconstruction duties can be sacrificed to slow (or rapid, depending on exposure) deaths due to radioactive and toxic particles ingested through exposure to battlegrounds where radioactive munitions have been used, or even the air, water and food chain in contaminated areas, with a clear conscience and plausible deniability.
I think the most easily recognisable warning of radioactive danger for future generations will be the US Flag.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Burying it with no warnings is not a solution. Earthquakes would break this idea, although they can be minimized by placement. But even ignoring natural disasters, society could fail, then start over, and reach the ability to dig deep mines without records. We are talking about tens of thousands of years, and digging down a mile is not beyond 1800s-era mining technology.
bah weep graaagnah wheep ni ni bong
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
This was covered back in '02 on /. :
1 1/011235
p df
This Place is Not a Place of Honor
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/
Check out the official SANDIA report:
http://infoserve.sandia.gov/sand_doc/1992/921382.
the no
This is an old story and the LA Times left out the best part. Although the page has moved around a bit, I've had Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in my bookmarks for years.
I've always liked the first words of the study, a creepy, post-apocalypse-sounding salutation that summarizes what the message must convey:
This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
Armageddon outta here, dude.
Insert witty sig here.
The article linked to in the post is only available to members of the site where the article is hosted.
How the heck did that even make it onto slashdot?
If someone could post the article text here, it'd be quite helpful.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
How about radioactive markers?
is it just me, or does the fact that stonehenge has no obvious pictures or writing make it a bad example? in itself, it's a symbol i guess, but it's not obvious. if someone drew something on stonehenge, it probably wouldn't be a mystery.
surely warnings written in multiple languages will suffice, along with drawn or other kinds of symbols.
symbols that exist can survive forever, such as an arrow or knife through a human skull. that symbol would never fade, and if it did, then humanity itself would not exist.
Unfortunately, given humanity's track record so far, the more warnings and "bad stuff here" deterrents you use, the harder people will try to dig it up and weaponize it.
Just make a stick figure showing it like this rudimentary ASCII art... (here's hoping that lame filter don't kick in.)
If they can't "read" and art, like we can... well... they can roll over, Darwinishm-style.
It's likely that any future civilisation with the level of science and technology to understand radioactivity and basic nuclear physics would have idenfified the radioactivity / Trinitite / Bloody big craters of the nearby Nevada test site, and worked out exactly what they're dealing with. To all those discussing the IFR, and reprocessing of the waste, it's important to consider exactly what WIPP is dealing with. Not spent reactor fuels, but transuranic actinide wastes from weapons research - predominantly stuff produced between WW2 and the Cold War, from the early research in Actinide radiometallurgy through to large-scale weapons Pu production. Look at the clean up job that is being undertaken with the buried waste tanks at ORNL Y-12 these days - that's the sort of stuff we're dealing with. Reprocessing waste, to extract the Plutonium, is always going to generate additonal actinide-contaminated waste, and that's what we're dealing with here. Not spent reactor fuel with heaps of Plutonium - waste from fuel reproccessing, basically. It's not practical to further reprocess the waste for IFR use, both for economical reasons, and for the fact that it will simply generate even more spent filters and crap like that contaminated with Pu and other nucleides - exactly like this waste we've already got. If recovering these nucleides was practical, we would be doing just that.
How about getting Superman to toss all the nuclear waste into the sun like he did with all the nukes in Superman IV?
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
The novel "Riddley Walker" - Check it out.
Heck, write the damn thing in COBOL. After all, what better language to use than one that refuses to die despite every best effort to kill it?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I would guess that if we are talking about one place (Yucca mountain), a relatively small number of persons will be liberating the high-level waste. When their hair falls out and they suffer the other symptoms of radiation poisoning, they will figure it out within a few days, and after a relatively low number of fatalities, they will leave their own message in a readily understood language.
Chinese writing would be a pretty good bet for future readability. After all, modern Chinese characters are still rather similar to those of 4000 years ago. (The tradeoff is that we have no idea how Chinese was pronounced 4000 years ago, but for this application it's more important to convey the meaning.) As a bonus, it's known by a large portion of the human population that is spread through much of the world.
Why not try something simple, like showing a picture of someone's face melting off while touching a glowing rock? Scary skull/skeleton images are pretty universal as well, I'd think.
Reminds me of the awesome song from Full Throttle:
"The population is greatly decreased,
and now the odds are greatly increased
that I may someday get a chance
to kiss your lips.
I thank the lo-o-o-o-rd each day,
for the apocalypse.
Folks are mostly disfigured or dead,
but sugar I won't let it go to my head.
My momma's face has dripped down
into the dirt.
But I'm still chasin'
chitlins, whiskey, and skirt."
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
http://downlode.org/etext/wipp/ http://www.wipp.energy.gov/library/PermanentMarker sImplementationPlan.pdf
As presently planned, the Level II messages will state through text and
pictographs that there is danger present, and the danger is below the land
surface. Level III messages tell that radioactive and hazardous waste is buried,
instruct persons not to dig or drill, indicate the depth of burial, when WIPP was
closed, that the repository is intended to last at least 10,000 years, that there is a
decreasing danger over time, and requesting that the messages be updated to
the current language or languages in use (space will be left on the markers for
this purpose). Level IV messages expand on the above topics, and also address
the potential for releases through ground water, identify cancer as the primary
risk, provide detailed information on radioactive and chemical constituents of the
waste, provide a geologic cross-section with reasons for choosing the Salado
Formation for the WIPP, describe the locations world-wide where other nuclear
waste sites are located, and urge readers to seek out those other sites and
ensure consistency of messages.
To enhance the potential for comprehension of the messages, it is planned that
they will be inscribed in seven languages: English, French, Spanish, Arabic,
Russian, Chinese, and Navajo. This spread of languages representing different
cultures and geographical regions will, it is hoped, potentially allow the markers
to serve as "Rosetta Stones" for future populations, and thus increase the chance
that they will be understood. Other means of improving possibilities for
comprehension include the use of complementary diagrams and pictographs,
use of simple words and short sentences, and through the testing of message
comprehension with populations indigenous to areas speaking each language,
as described in this plan.
The proposed text of the Level II, III, and IV messages are included in Appendix
PIC of the CCA. Pictographs proposed in Appendix PIC include the following.
Level II Message:
Graphic symbols of the human face expressing horror and terror;
DOE/WIPP 04-3302
42
Graphic symbols of the human face expressing something nauseating or
poisonous; and
Trefoil and biohazard symbols.
Level III Message:
The pictographs described above, plus:
Diagram conveying the danger of digging or drilling;
Spatial perspective of the marking system to the underground repository;
and
Time elapse diagram from WIPP closure via north celestial pole migration,
including faces showing disgust at closure to neutral at 10,000 years, to
contentment well beyond 10,000 years, and decreasing size radioactive
symbol.
Level IV Message:
The pictographs described above, plus:
Detailed spatial perspective of the repository;
Geologic cross section of the WIPP site and relative position of the
repository within the formations;
Periodic chart of the elements, identifying the major radioactive and nonradioactive
elements present in waste buried at the WIPP site;
Azimuths of the bright stars Vega, Arcturus, Sirius, and Canopus as they
rise above the horizon at the time of WIPP closure, allowing calculation of
the time of closure; and
World map showing the locations where other radioactive wastes are
buried.
Drawings of these pictographs are shown in CCA Appendix PIC.
Skulls and bones were actually discussed in the original WIPP study. They were rejected as being culturally defined, ie today's usage on medicine bottles being unrelated to the original (pirate) meaning. Generally, they assumed that while human beings would not change much physically in 10'000 years, almost no abstraction would survive (stay understandable) that long.
The proposal was to replace artificial symbols with pictorials. Disgusted faces, stick people displaying sickness, with symbols which tie sickness to the actual monument.
Related link about how the monument was planned (long but interesting reading):
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html
The process involved all kind of scientists, including a physicist/science-fiction author.
The original WIPP report is also available somewhere as a PDF (sorry, no link). They accepted two or three alternative solutions for everything, from physical layout to warning labels.
Radioactive material will cause mysterious deaths and illness. Tribes will develop dogmatic arguments for avoiding the site, all on their own. They will mark it with their *own* symbols. Anyone who comes along with a scientific method, will stand a chance of figuring it out. Until then, tribe leaders and priests will make some argument, driven by the empirical understanding that avoiding the site helps increase the strength of the tribe, and vice versa.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Go read "DEEP TIME", this subject is nothing new...
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html
"Good news, everyone!"
Having said that, you assume that the guesses were wrong. Actually, there are some excellent reasons for believing the guesses were right.
Britain now consumes more food than it produces - it fell into a food deficit a few weeks back. Not sure about other countries, but I suspect that many do likewise. The 80s is about when starvation in Africa hit the point where people were dying in vast numbers. In America and other industrialized countries, it is no longer possible to feed everyone a healthy diet. People are fed extremely bloaty, chemical-laced, drug-laced* toxic sludge instead, unless they're rich enough to afford the real stuff.
We're not "out of food" in the sense that nobody has any, but we ARE "out of food" in the sense that it is no longer economically viable to keep people fed. I strongly expect the region incapable of maintaining human life (because there simply isn't any food) to continue expanding, and for those regions with high population densities to place more and more people in the position of eating dangerously unhealthy products in a desparate effort to avoid admitting to the fact that they simply don't have the food to feed their people. (The picture is complicated by Africa having extremely high death rates from disease and war, as well as from starvation, but the evidence seems to be that a significant portion of the world CANNOT feed itself.)
We should also bear in mind that the oceans have supplied a very large percent of the food for some time. However, cod stocks are extinct in some places and down 90% in others, with many edible fish stocks down 70-80%. The oceans can no longer support human life in the manner to which it is accustomed.
*Angel dust and other illegal substances are, according to some reports, routinely added to cattle feed along with extremely high levels of antibiotics and growth hormones. All this because the livestock have to be kept in unhealthy conditions in order to feed the population at all, and have to be bulked up to maximise meat per square foot of land used. The majority of farmers don't use organic farming - not because it's more expensive (they'd simply raise their prices, and would probably make greater profits) but because it's not physically possible to supply sufficient food using any kind of sane system of farming. If sane farming practices were mandated, a good half of the American population would look like the BBC images of Ethiopia that spawned Live Aid.
Oil has passed its peak and North Sea oil is virtually exhausted (having passed peak sometime in the 80s). Nor is oil the only fossil fuel in trouble. There are no working coal mines in Great Britain - the very few minable seams left are far too contaminated with sulpher to be of much value. It is unclear how much oil is left in Saudi Arabia, but it is notable that they have failed to increase capacity although they have quota to spare. There have been no major oil finds ANYWHERE in the world for some time and it is thought likely that this is because there are none to find. The arctic wildlife refuge has so little oil that although the area Bush wants drilled would take 10-15 years to get the pipeline and installations in place, there is at most 10 years worth of oil there, assuming the best possible estimates given.
All in all, the usual cry of "there will always be more" demonstrably has no validity. We are not in good shape, as things stand, and drastic changes will need to be made to human habits if humanity plans on staying around long enough to care about fusion.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Bury the waste deep deep in granite under concrete, and flood the area and ground with pottery and glass skulls.
The skulls will be a hint that there is something dangerous.
If civilisation collapses, primitives won't be able to dig through the granite and concrete.
Sophisticated civilisations will be able to detect the radioactivity.
The only people at real risk are Victorian-age engineers, for a brief period when they have the ability to dig through the concrete but haven't yet discovered radiation. If the skulls aren't a clue to stay away, a few people will get radiated and die. It's not a big issue.
Presumably it meant something very important to those who built it, but now we don't know what that was. Surely this is an excellent summary of the dilemma facing those who want to bury a deadly substance and keep it undisturbed for millenia?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I think there is no problem.
Nuclear radiation will be all around the world, rather sooner then later.
People will survive that, like the animals and plants near Tschernobyl.
And they will find ways to avoid the places which are too radioactive, even for them.
They're sure to get several dozen results by then.
1 1/011235
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Just leave a few skulls and pictures around. Pictures tell a pretty accurate story of humans hunting buffalo and elk from ancient times. No reason skulls and poison "death below" could not be pictured on stone.
Of course, no warning ever stopped idiots. Better to not mark it at all if you wish to protect them.
I was thinking along the lines of making the containment structure clearly show that it was intentionally made to keep something dangerous inside. Any intelligent beings could determine the intent without having to decode any language. One problem is that it might appear to be a structure made to securely contain something of value. So another option is to be sure that anyone mistakenly entering it would die quickly and graphically, serving as a warning to others. This kind of thing could also apply to stockpiles of biological weapons. The worst situation would be material which had an ill health effect in the long-term but was hard to determine the cause of.
Goatse Man.
A warning to work for 10,000 won't be needed because the material won't be there. Within a few hundred years, that radioactive "waste" will be dug up and reused. Like the air you exhale still contains most of the oxygen, the fuel we discard still contains a large fraction of the enriched material. Since Jimmy Carter banned reprocessing in the 1970's, we have no choice but to dispose of fuel that still contains large amounts of usable material in the form of (principly) U-235 and P-238. In a typical power reactor today, by the end of the fuel cycle 30%-40% of the energy is coming from fissioning plutonium. The fuel is discharged because there is too high a build-up of fission products that absorb neutrons. Just like suffocating in a closed room. It's not the lack of oxygen that gets you, it's the buildup of carbon dioxide. Back to my point, before too long people will figure out that throwing away fuel that took large amounts of electricty to enrich is a bad idea. Within 300 years all the short lived, high energy fission products will have decayed leaving only the long lived, low energy materials like Uranium and Plutonium. You can handle those with your hands with no shielding. (Little known fact: Plutonium is an alpha emitter. A sheet of paper will stop all radiation from plutionium. As long as you don't eat it or breath it in, it won't hurt you.) So our decendents will say "thank you," dig up the material, reprocess it, and keep their "X-box 36 Million" consoles and electric flying cars running. If there are signs, they should say "Dig here! Free energy!" (Know your sources - I've been a Nuclear Engineer for 25 years)
Seperate each floor with different levels of toxic juices, that way, if you survive level 10, you probably have some kind of radiation suit anyways and its not that dangerous for you
Besides the Zermatism, I mean ..
.. I, for one, believe that Protong is a useful construct. It sure makes it fun to read things backwards ..
Look, its whack. But that doesn't mean there isn't something useful to come out of it
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Dupe?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
That was the best comment in this entire thread.
If I actually had an account and had mod points, I'd mod you up. So consider this a +5 from an AC.
Instead of letting the skeletons and skulls of the first victims serve as warnings, plant artificial skeletons. Maybe splatter them with something that fluoresces in the radiation. Anyone ignoring this fairly obvious warning will just end up reinforcing the point.
We've had Ice Ages while humanity has populated this earth. There's even been discoveries that humans actually co-existed with dinosaurs. Landmasses that are now land has once been ocean and visa versa.. Some land millions of years ago, is now buried so deep none of us could have a hope of getting there..
Consider the scale you're talking about.. Earth is at least hundreds of million of years old, and over long periods the surface is really boiling when seen in "fast-film".
Something to destroy an advanced civilization, have to be HUGE. Eventually it will wipe out most traces of this civilization, except for the forklore, myths and occational artifacts.
That area, has been what is termed 'Positively Forbidden Territory' for the Western world since the year 1938, which now, in light of what Dr. Chow had to say, was probably not at all coincidental. At any rate, Professor Chi Pu Tei and his students discovered what was first described as a series of caves or caverns, but later admitted to be a complex system of artificial tunnels and underground storerooms. These tunnels are perfectly squared and the walls, ceilings, and floors are highly glazed, as if somehow the passages and rooms were carved by a device emitting heat of such intensity that it simply melted its way into the moun- tains.
Ancient texts, maybe more than 5000 years old in Sanskrit found all over Asia, and especially the areas around India speaks of:
"the holy Indian Sages, the Ramayana for one, tell of "Two storied celestial chariots with many windows" "They roar like off into the sky until they appear like comets." The Mahabharata and various Sanskrit books describe at length these chariots, "powered by winged lighting...it was a ship that soared into the air, flying to both the solar and stellar regions."
There are also references all over the Vedas to wars with missiles being fired on cities both from the land and air, destroying most of the cities, and anti-missile systems protecting said cities.
From A tribute to Hinduism (Mind you, the word Hinduism never existed before some scientists started tagging people that name. Before that, it was just the natural folklore and daily way of living in the areas in the Middle East, shared by people that now call themselves Muslims and others..)
There are many indications that humans knew how to fly, or have had experiences of flying in vehicles. One of the most famous examples being the Nasca Lines of Peru (Warning: This was the site with the best pictures I could find, but it's a bit New Ageish).
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
This project assumes that people and things will be pretty much the same 20,000 years from now as they are today. More likely, and barring planetary scale catastrophe, more change will happen in the next 200 years than in the past 2 million. Look at the emerging fields of nanotech, info science, biotech, etc. It's doubtful that homo sapiens will still be around in even in 200 years, much less 20,000. This project looks to warn future generations who will be less vulnerable to the danger, and far better able to deal with the problem.
The idea is to preserve humanity at all costs. As far as we know, Earth is the only home for intelligent life - and, perhaps, life at all - in the universe.
If the average human's body cannot withstand radiation in 1,000 years... That means one thing.
We haven't evolved to a state where we can travel long distances in space.
Which also means we are most likley stuck on this planet...
Given the stastistics, we will most likley be hit with a meteor between now and 10,000 years that will most likley make life a living hell for all still around... That is unless we happen to be elsewhere.
Or perhaps we aren't but we are technologically advanced enough to divert any incoming asteroids...
Or survive a gamma ray burst... Or magnetic pole reversal... Or anything else that may cause solar radation to kill off life on the surface.
For some reason I feel that life on Earth is indeed a fluke and we might be the only things in the universe with self awareness.
This might be our only chance to branch out and get off this planet before we are snuffed out by a cosmic hiccup. If our future selves are cave dwellers... Our chances of surviving an End of the World Event go to 0%.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I agree with you 100% and hate the comments you've had. I include a link about DU I read recently. I think it should be understood that the US (and to a lesser extent the UK) forces are actively engaged in a low level nuclear war right now.
e wArticle&code=20060503&articleId=2374
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=vi
DU is extremely harmful stuff people! After "Shock&Awe" air meters in the UK peaked at 400% normal value radioactive(March2003). Sickens me that people can be so glib regarding this.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Proin tincidunt sapien eget urna. Maecenas euismod. Praesent at ipsum. Donec eu purus. Vestibulum dignissim, augue at ultrices ullamcorper, libero magna vehicula tortor, at viverra tortor ipsum sit amet metus. Fusce malesuada."
Translation: "Traveller Beware! Microsoft Templates Lurk Within."
What cracks me up is that these people are optimistic enough to think there will be intelligent life 10,000 years from now. It's up to us, yes, but it's also up to the Universe and mostly up to chance. Once a huge asteroid crashes on "our" planet (yes, some people think we have some sort of ownership over this planet) the human race will be gone and earth will go on with a brand new ass and no intelligent life on it, or no life at all.
People, the first thing we should do is stop doing shit that is harmful to us and try to get out of here, life should be completely subordinated to insure we, as a species, survive beyond the planet earth (beyond in time and beyond in space).
Leave a large hunk of plutonium physically accessible at ground level. Anyone who cannot read the signs, understand the symbols and such, will wander in, irradiate themselves, and then die. It won't take long for the locals to figure things out and develop their own signage.
Gregory Benford talked about this back in 2000. Somebody must've read it recently.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
You're right. Let's ammend the bible!
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Excrement is a universal symbol of disparagement.
How about scattering a bunch of pit toilets around the site? The pits are only a couple of dozen feet deep, so won't interfere with the primary purpose. They can be lined with some low-value but durable concrete. Up top, instead of a western throne, an Asian squat toilet of the same material, perhaps (partially?) enclosed by a low wall. These toilets would, of course, be fully functional although not necessarily comfortable, but the most important purpose would be symbolic. The "two footprints and a hole" structure would be hard to misinterpret.
Sometime back I happened on this article by Gregory Benford about how we can communicate across tens of thousands of years to our descendants in the form of a warning ... as in don't open this up.
I particularly like the suggestion near the end about making the site scary so that it would become a place that was taboo just because it was so creepy. His suggestion was shaped stone monoliths that would wail in the wind. Anyway worth reading.
Bitter and proud of it.
The "Rosetta Stone 2.0" is a good idea. However the chance of them finding just one Rosetta Stone would be minimal. (to my knowledge there is only One rosetta stone, and that was found by chance in a desert.). Make multiple ones scattered about and with horrible images on each one. Though if archaeologists are like any of the ones from today. They wont heed warnings of a curse, and they could likely continue digging. Either way i dont think Humanities stupidity would go away ever. So whoever they are, they are boned.
Yeah yeah, i know, so quiet.
They have succeeded already! All generations of man is warned! It has been on /.!
First, there should only be a single route of access through the rock. Block it off with a series of airtight barriers, repeating the warnings. Between the barriers, you'll want a non-verbal warning of a highly specialized form. For each, you need:
* A few dead bodies, from people who have died (naturally) of cancer; the more pronounced the cancer, the better.
* A radiation source in about the 10000 Curie range, using an isotope with a half-life on the order of 1 year... sufficent to kill any bacteria in the area.
The radiation source will be harmless in 20 years. However, it will leave behind a dead body, perfectly preserved for centuries as a primitive warning. If they're advanced enough to do an autopsy, they get a more detailed warning, which hopefully might give a clue to decipher the warning.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
One of the main problems with protecting this site is that it isn't a case of "touch the glowing rocks and drop dead" - and if you have that kind of scary message and someone messes around with the site and doesn't turn into a glowing skeleton - then the warnings will be ignored.
That is why so much of the focus is on education, telling people what is here and the types of dangers that the waste represents. The problem with an educational messages, of course, if that it is very hard to get across, especially if there is a language/cultural barrier.
This is a tough problem and a lot of people have put a lot of work into trying to solve it (that and the whole natural physical containment issue).
An interesting look into the warning system design process is here:
http://downlode.org/Etext/wipp/
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
Yet another moron who thinks future people will be stupid.
This is because, morons cannot imagine anyone smarter than themselves. Just look at what gets "5 - Insightful" here on Slashdot!
You can't put the Geiger counter back in the bottle.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have noticed some significant assumptions made by most people considering this issue. The two most important assumptions are:
The second example is more speculative; we don't think there are any other species which are approaching the ability to develop large scale civilization and higher brain functions. However, since we don't really seem to understand the mechanism by which we developed our own advanced civilization and higher thought processes, nor why it occurred when it did and not at some earlier or later point, we may not be good judges of this natural phenomenon.
The first example is the one that concerns me more, and which most people ignore. There is no reason to believe that we will not experience a catastrophic natural or man-made event that results in the collapse of civilization. This is fairly unlikely in the next ten years, slightly more likely in the next hundred, more likely in the next thousand, etc. If we destroyed a significant portion of our infrastructure, it is likely we would descend as a civilization into a new dark age. Without the knowledge and infrastructure base, we would not be looking for radioactive material to power our nuclear reactors--we would be looking for land on which to hunt and grow crops. Travelling groups of humans might notice a site such as the nuclear waste storage facility. Curiosity might get the better of them...
So, we have two problems. How do we communicate with a future human race that might be far more advanced than we are; and how do we simultaneously plan to communicate with a future human race that has regressed into a new dark age? If you really want to speculate, then you might consider how we communicate reliably with a non-human intelligent race...
Jim
Every year, take the waste from nukes, low level, high level, whatever; and chop it into little peices. Then mail it to customers, managers, regulators, stock holders etc. Anyone who directly benefits from it.
Then let them deal with safe disposal.
This is actually the perfect libertarian ideal, where there are no hidden costs or subsidies.
It will never happen though as most humans are not far removed from irresponsible 3 year old like behavior ("It's not my problem!", "Just throw it away!", " Let some one else worry about it!" etc.)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The key to interpretation is having a point of reference. The FA brings up an interesting point, but consider the difference between human cultures today and early civilizations. Written and other persistent, nonverbal records are ubiquitous in today's society. The comparatively high literacy rate, combined with the ease of production of the written word provides a much more vast store from which to draw. Obviously everything we have today will not survive, but just think of what future archaeologists would still manage to find -- a wealth of books to decipher our language, as well as magazines, more realistic drawings and paintings, movie film, etc.
We have learned quite a bit about prehistoric civilizations from just their tools, homes, and a few other artifacts. Does it really seem reasonable to think the evidence we will leave behind won't paint a much more vivid picture to a presumably more advanced society?
that depleted uranium actaully gets more radioactive at first not less as the decay products have shorter half lives than the uranium itself.
anyone know if this is true?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Make a nice story that says something came from the sky and people died in diseases because of it. Make a nice cartoon of it and people burying the cause of the disease and those who died from diseases to the cave. Then mumify most malformed dead for display and after that have millions of peoples bones in the cave after that. I mean after they see the amount of bones in the caves they are probably not going to continue their path of searching what killed them.
The point that something came from the sky might need alteration but basic idea of needing to carry thousands of tons worth of human bones out of cave migh make someone understand what the cartoon was about.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
I read this story in Time or Newsweek back in the early 90s. I'm glad to see that progress has been made. Not.
I couldnt help notice that you mentioned 3 major english speaking regions but left out India. Granted India has other languages too but all educated people speak English that makes it around 300 million English speakers. I guess only the US comes close to that figure and Ireland?? Dont they speak Irish? Next you will be counting France as an English speaking country
**Life is too short to be serious**
These are th kind of kangaroo projects dreamed up by PhDs in lingusitics and history whose lifes work is not worth a rat's ass otherwise and who would be starving on asst. professor salaries otherwise.
I mean what the heck is wrong with just taking the waste on a ship and sending it on a round the world voyage and every 1 mile you dump a kilo of the waste into the ocean. Given the size of the ocean the waste would get diluted down to background levels in 10 mins
Problem solved. But no!! We have to build Yucca and WIPP. Otherwise how else we justify those huge salaries for the nuclear ministry people and those huge donations for the Greenpeace nuts.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Hey, it can happen!
IIRC, some researchers decoded Stonehenge (one of the largest henges in the world!) a couple years back...
The real message of Stonehenge is "Look out for that asteroid (the one I'm pointing to)!"
Department of Energy's plan, from August, 2004:
r sImplementationPlan.pdf
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/library/PermanentMarke
Includes:
1. Large Surface Markers;
2. Small Subsurface Markers;
3. Berm;
4. Buried Storage Rooms;
5. Hot Cell; and
6. Information Center.
There is an excellent book that covers this issue and related ones: Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia by the physicist and SF writer Gregory Benford. ISBN: 0380793466.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ocean trenches are where they are spreading apart. Mountain ranges are where they are pressing together.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I mean, if the effects are so well understood, and its so safe, why don't we just plow the nuclear waste into the fields? Theres trillions of tons of topsoil, a little extra radioactive waste can't hurt anybody, right?
Theres no evidence that plowing it into the fields is a bad idea, since nobody has done it and measured the effects, so it must be a good idea, right?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
'ignored curses inscribed on the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs to seize the riches inside. The curse of plutonium packs a painful penalty.'
... I think he was Pharoah in the late old Kingdom wasn't he? :-)
Plutonium
Let's dig him up and see if he was as rich as they say he was!!!!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
I recomend: A head, face in agony with a shovel penetrating the skull and chip flying from the shovel/skull contact location. Why, because: A primitave to less advanced socity should be able to recognize the meaning, while advance socities should take prepatory measurements erroring on the side of precausion. just a thought
In 50 or less years we will find a use for all of the waste we have today. Think about it landfills of just 50 years ago are being looked at and used as an energy source today. http://epa.gov/cleanenergy/renew.htm http://www.energy.sc.gov/Renewable%20energy/lmop.h tm
Maxwell L. Barrett Comp-WE-Mentor Software Trainer
All of that is extremely fragile technology. Electronic media is, if anything, known to be extremely unreliable due to format changes and deterioration of the underlying media. Even if you have good media, do you have the software to understand it?
E.g., what would you do with a backup of a msql database? Not 'mysql', the once-popular 'msql' that preceded it.
The internet is also fragile. Look at the big picture -- how many copies really exist? The host (hopefully with backups), some search engines, a few intelligence agencies. But anywhere else?...
Paper? Most mass-produced paper contains small amount of acid that slowly deteriorates the paper. Acid-free paper should be stable, but iirc deterioriating paper is already a problem.
The risk from year-to-year is minimal, but shouldn't be entirely ignored. (Can you say New Orleans Public Library?) But over a few generations you definitely need to consider the risk of "fire, flood and insurrection".
More than 500 years out? Greenhouse gases would have washed out of the atmosphere and we would almost certainly be seeing the start of the next ice age. How long until many of those caches would be destroyed?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
There is no way we should be burying this stuff, or at least the vast majority.
As has already been mentioned, IFR-style reactors can burn all of the actinide wastes - the stuff that has the nasty 100kyear half lives. With a decent breeder program, we should also be able to use up what we currently have as depleted uranium. We should not be burying used fuel rods, it's a pathetic cop-out.
Once the actinides are dealt with, the vast majority of the fisson products have half lives in the 30 year region. Concentrated, these make excellent material for nuclear batteries - the ultimate in UPS. Those people responsable for running hospitals, airports, server farms or other places where 24/7 power is absolutely vital may appreciate this; the fact that the power is also essentially free would be a side advantage. Importantly, if people are using the stuff for a commercial application, they will be highly motivated to maintain and secure it.
This leaves a very small amount indeed of genuine long lived fission products (Tc-99 et al). The technology does exist to transmute these into stable elements; however, if deep burial is seen as cheaper, then vitrification and burial on the small scale required, sufficiently deep so that no warning could be needed should not be a major problem.
You forget motivation. Why would they want to dig through a mile of rock or concrete even if they could?
Assume that they have taken special notice of a random concrete feature a couple of meters across on the surface. Recall, that it is in the middle of nowhere, a desert, currently. Also recall that there are hundreds or thousands of equivalent concrete structures scattered all over the countryside. There are missile silos, bridge and building foundations, sewage tanks, etc.
Assume that for some reason they are possesed by a nearly unbearable curiosity and a tremendous urge to find out just what is under this particular chunk of concrete.
Assume that it has been thousands of years, in which case it won't matter, the stuff will be safe.
Assume for the sake of argument that it is still active *and* dangerous.
If they have the skills, and most important the disposable energy, to dig up a few hundred meters of concrete, or drill through the equivalent distance of native rock, then if they have achieved that level of a standard of living, then they will understand what a periodic table is and what radioactivity is, without the need for words.
Even after all that, many people have died along the path of discovery that has brought us where are today. One woman named Curie comes to mind. Why should we expect to utterly safeguard those on the path to discovery in the future?
Again, assuming a circa 1800s like pre-radioactivity knowledge level of technology, people will die in the mine just doing the digging. There's no need for radioactive dangers, in a 1800s era mine half a mile deep, they'll be dozens killed just doing the grunt work!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
What if a future George W Bush type were to encounter such place when they were young. This of all teh leadership we may miss out on in the future!
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
> Firstly your facts are wrong
And you're being a dick.
Not only that, but you're being a dick who's missing the point and spewing effectively false information.
Certainly, many people in India speak English. If society collapsed, though, how many of them would continue to speak English and to teach it to their children, grandchildren, and so on?
Probably few. Most people would go with Hindi, or simply with their mother tongues. If everyone around you speaks either Tamil or Tulu as their best language, there's not so much motivation to learn English. Now add in the fact that there won't be the quality of education in this hypothetical "collapsed society" world, that there won't be as much free time to spend learning, and that English is from a different language group and hence harder to learn than a second (for example) Dravidian language, and the odds of English surviving as a major language in India are slim to none.
Yes, lots of Indians speak English and you really, really want us to know that. That's very nice - we know. It just doesn't matter to what we're talking about.
Image 1: A person's face smiling, bright eyes, long hair.
Image 2: A person -- not smiling; half-closed eyes, massive hair loss.
Image 3: A skull.
This would show the process of radiation poisoning. If anyone ignored the symbols and went beyond them, the people who didn't go could compare the progress of their comrade's painful demise with the pictures and draw the correct conclusion: IF YOU GO HERE, YOU WILL QUICKLY DIE IN A NASTY WAY. Message successfully transmitted down the generations, and probably reinforced locally with an oral tradition: "And in this cave, there lives an invisible monster...".
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
How about storing them in succeeding levels of more and more radiation. With the hope that they'll stop digging once they get sick.
:)
Hmm... they could even provide free samples.
Have you read my journal today?