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.'"

Comments

Re:Simple solution

[Scrameustache]

Just write it in every major language. Several languages have survived thousands of years through today, which is how the Rosetta Stone worked.

FTFA

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, engraved with warnings in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic and Navajo, with room for future discoverers to add warnings in contemporary languages. Pictures would denote buried hazards and human faces of horror and revulsion.

The monumental task of warning future generations

[mxpengin]

An article about the same topic here . Its foccused on the repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Re:Simple solution

[Firethorn]

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?

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Re:Nuclear Waste isn't a problem anyway

[fredmosby]

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.

Re:Simple solution

[Firethorn]

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.