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: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.