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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.'"
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.
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.
I agree. If you put warnings all over the place, there will eventually be some crazy people who think it's just a big stash of treasure and go dig it up.
As the FTA points out, people who robbed the pyramids in Egypt didn't pay any attention to the warnings about curses and such... we can't be sure that a potentially uneducated group of future beings will believe all that mumbo jumbo about radioactivity.
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.
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)
isn't sanskrit older and still understood/studied?
Sent from my desktop computer
What am I learning in law school then? And it's on our currency!
I can tell any Roman "E pluribus unim" and "res ipsa loquitur." "Caveat emptor" "contra referendum"
Yeah, I'm fluent. I just can't say anything useful.
What a stupid idea! Wake up and smell the coffee - its not waste and if you think it is then send it to Alberta.
Up here we need about 75 nuclear plants and of course most Canadians have not come to grips with this idea either. But we need those plants and if we have them we'll make gasoline for our good friends just south of us.
So send all your nuclear waste up here. We do know what to do with it. Send up your nuclear engineers too. We need them also.
Very good post, I just have a couple of things to add.
First of all, I don't believe a massive collapse of civillization and loss of scientific knowledge will happen. We're unaware of anything like that happening in our past (discounting myths like Atlantis).
When the western part of the Roman Empire collapsed, it definitely could be considered a massive collapse of civilization and loss of knowledge. It took Europeans over a thousand years to recover even a portion of what was lost. Obviously this wasn't something that was on the scale of what you're talking about, but with our advanced technology it is possible.
This is kind of a tangent, but this is one thing people sometimes have a hard time thinking about. Sure, we can ensure that Yucca Mountain is stable for the present, but we really have a hard time thinking on a geological time scale. Yucca Mountain is a freaking volcano! It is in a (relatively) geologically unstable area. Ten thousand years ago, it was under a huge lake. How can we ensure that people thousands of years in the future know where our radioactive dumps are? What happens if hundreds or thousands of years down the line, the volcano becomes active again and spews radioactive material into the atmosphere? Or what if the region becomes less arid, and the radioactive material is leaked into the water table. That is why I have a problem with designating some place as a radioactive dump and pretty much throwing all the shit we can in there (especially since I used to live near there).
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.
its not that English will no longer exist, its that it will change so significantly, that what we've written will no longer be recognised.
compare old English (around year 1000) to modern English. a good deal of change. then multiply that change by a factor of about 15.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
24,000 years is overkill. In about 1,000 years HLRW is about as dangerous as the original uranium ore from which it came.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.