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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.'"
FTFA
You can't take the sky from me...
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
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.
Do we really care about the grave-robbers and such? If we're trying to protect against the future equivalent, I'll note that most grave robbers were illiterate and did unmeasurable harm to archeology with their destruction. They'd note our warnings, however many languages we put them in, about as much as the historical ones paid to the egyptian writtings.
For that matter, I can see scientists not leaving well enough alone and digging in there to find out what the horrible hazard is.
Personally, I think that it's sad that we're this worried about the stuff and harming 'future generations'. Besides, most high-level waste is very recyclable, and what remains would be 'safe' radioactive wise within a thousand years. Warnings written in English, Spanish, Chinese(same written language, remember?), Japanese, Arabic, and Latin should be fairly easy to translate for longer than that. I'd throw Hebrew in there as it's seemed to survive well over time. Heck, we might just be making the Rosetta Stone of the future! On the other hand, Navajo? Isn't that pretty close to a dead language already?
For that matter, if we bury it right, by the time anybody has the skills/technology to dig a half mile down into the earth they should be technologically advanced enough to know most of the hazards.
Finally:
A third plaque was pried off, perhaps as a souvenir. According to earlier visitors, it read, in plain English, "This site will remain dangerous for 24,000 years."
This makes me think, but at what level of dangerous? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt and are inhabited today. Would a society at a victorian technological level even have the average lifespan to notice minor radiation poisoning?
I don't read AC A human right
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,
how hard could it be to get it back to the way we found it?
Not especially hard.
But it would require further research and the building of new reactors. Unfortunately the public seem to be scared of all things "nuclear" so politically, it wouldn't go over well. It is my suspicion (I'd like to see a survey to support or refute this) that the general public, in the US anyway, would rather just bury the existing waste and forget about nuclear power altogether because they see it as something dangerous and scary.
chown -R us ~you/base
Well, Sir James Lovelock (of "Gaia Theory" fame) has suggested the best way to preserve regions of high biodiversity (such as rainforests) is to do just that. The developers wouldn't touch the land (just imagine trying to sell it!) and the critters will only have slightly reduced lifespans - something that they are unlikely to appreciate or care about. Chernobyl is his example of just how well this works.
Of course, this is hardly a long term solution to waste management, as the only reason why it works as a deterant is that people know what it is, and that in a post-apocalyptic world these regions may very well be the best sources of food in the region.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There are interesting considerations that have gone into the design of the warnings. For the Yucca Repository, the warning contains a disclaimer akin to, "No achievement of ours is worshipped here." The fear is that future generations will think we buried our treasure there, or set up some elaborate tomb like King Tut's. Future generations may understand the warning about sickness and death, but consider it a "curse" meant to dissuade grave robbers or the like. Perhaps they'll all be cavemen in the future if they cannot detect the radioactivity, but what if they've all moved to solar panels or fusion or some crazy, non-polluting technology we can never imagine? Furthermore, what if they don't have the equipment on an archeological dig, or some random guy who was digging a mine finds it and decides to go treasure hunting by himself? And the casks are meant to hide the radioactivity so you cannot detect it until you opened the cask? There are many bizarre things scientists have thought about when designing the cask. It's interesting to read about.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
No we don't. There are plenty of organisms that live in areas which are effectively impossible to disrupt or contaminate with nuclear weapons, and which are resilient to nuclear winter. There are even some extremophiles which would enjoy a nuclear winter, and lots of the poor anaerobes all but wiped out by oxygen-producing plants and algae would be glad to see the end of viable chloroplasts.
(Unfortunately there are sporulating species which might carry chloroplast germ lines through a nuclear winter... so the revenge of the plants -- much more successful at wiping out almost all other life forms on the planet in the Archaean eon than we could ever dream of being today -- could occur at some point in the distant future).
Moreover, if the nanobes/nanobacteria actually turn out to be self-replicating living organisms, even boiling off the oceans and atmosphere likely wouldn't eliminate them all.
Come back when you invent a weapon that can completely vaporize the planet. Anything short of that is a doomsday weapon only in the eyes (or analogs) of fragile surface dwelling creatures like us, and it's hubris to suggest otherwise.
Natural uranium is 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. U235 has a half life of 700 million years. U238 has a half life of 4 billion years. Isotopes with longer half lives are less radioactive. Therefore U238 is far less radioactive than U235.
Depleted uranium is uranium that has had most of the U235 separated out. Making it less radioactive than natural uranium
The average natural uranium content in topsoil is about 2 parts per million(that's without any contamination of any kind). Iraq has more than a trillion tons of topsoil. In the first meter of soil there is already more than two million tons of natural uranium. Adding a few thousand tons of depleted uranium will have no effect on the people of Iraq.
The effects of uranium are well known and have been studied by many countries other than the United States. You are just making up a conspiracy theory because you have no facts on your side.
We're at the point, Right now where drying up of even %50-60 of oil reserves worldwide would still be endurable.
We in America would enter one hell of a recession, people would die from starvation or a lack of medical supplies, but civilization as a whole would endure.
Would it be possible to refine the waste in a couple of thousand years? :). I figure I could start a company now, buy it all and store it, then sell a shitload of uranium to the iranians or jihadis or whoever else needs it in only a few lifetimes (assuming good cloning tech to harvest some new organs as I need them...)
Try 90%+ recyclable, depending upon the reactor you took it out of and what you're looking to put it into. Also, no need to wait a thosand years, 40-60 seems to be enough. The problem you run into is that it's so radioactive when it first comes out of the reactor that handling it safely is difficult. So you move it just enough to place it into a containment pool. After spending a decade or two in that, it's something like 1% as radioactive as when it came out. Some point after that, you stick it in a cask to free up your pool, as it's now not generating enough heat to need active cooling/monitoring. After 20-40 years in that, you crack the cask and recycle the now relativly cool materials without the need for extreme radiation measures.
At least, that's what Bush is looking at doing.
I don't read AC A human right