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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Skull and crossed bones.
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
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!
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.
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,
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
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)
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.
That's the UNIVERSAL symbol of death. And engraved depictions of people and bones, and stuff.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Hippies will dance around it naked at the full moon....
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
bah weep graaagnah wheep ni ni bong
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
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."
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