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

Simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Simple solution

[networkBoy]

Na, just type:
Warning, Lawyers buried here.

No-one will ever dig it up.
-nB

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.

Re:Simple solution

[spiritraveller]

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.

Re:Simple solution

[Preeminence]

I would suggest writing in not in major languages of today, but ancient languages that are still understood/studied. Latin, (Homeric) Greek, and Hebrew come to mind. Who knows if anyone will want to study Tom Clancy novels 10,000 years in the future, but if civilization still exists, they will still be studying the Bible, the Iliad, the Aeneid, etc.

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?

Re:Simple solution

[Scrameustache]

As the FTA points out, people who robbed the pyramids in Egypt didn't pay any attention to the warnings about curses

Yeah, um, curses? Should I worry about black cats too?

Re:Simple solution

[larry bagina]

addendum: Perhaps future archaelogists will be fascinated to learn that the ancient romans colonized north america and utilized nuclear power.

Re:Simple solution

[Andrzej Sawicki]

So right. This reminded me of a Terry Pratchett quote:

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying "End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

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.

Very Easy Solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Very Easy Solution.

[oudzeeman]

Thats right - in 10,000 years English will be unchanged!

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, eodcyninga, rym gefrunon hu ða æelingas ellen fremedon.

Re:Very Easy Solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for you, you can recite Beowulf.

Oh - wait, you've proved my point. English may change, but the knowledge to decipher it isn't likely to disappear.

Try to keep in mind that there's almost certainly never going to be another 'Dark Ages'. The world's population is a damned sight higher, and the idea that every last person who understands English is just going to disappear off the face of the planet is ludicrous, at best.

We have no Library of Alexandria to burn to the ground - in the US alone, we have libraries in every moderately sized town. Not to mention countless brick and mortar stores. And college campuses. And elementary schools.

And let's not forget the Internet(tm). While reading it on the Internet doesn't make it true, there's a hell of a lot of knowledge that's scattered across the world.

So, where is Rome, that it might fall and plunge the world into the damnable darkness? Rome no longer exists, and that weakpoint of our civilization has been condemned with her.

Re:Very Easy Solution.

[BobNET]

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, eodcyninga, rym gefrunon hu ða æelingas ellen fremedon.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

Re:Very Easy Solution.

[Jesapoo]

Are you kidding me? A CITY? You do realise that we have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out every living thing on this planet, right? Destroying a civilisation nowadays doesn't require the destruction of a city by a marauding army. That's far too much effort...

A Biological Weapon is accidentally released. In an attempt to protect the population, nuclear weapons are fired at supposed infection hot-spots. Anarchy errpupts as the deaths from this plague start killing all over the world, spread by the rapidity of travel as allowed by jumbo-jets. The Bio-agent and bombs kill all but 0.01% of the population of the planet and make 75% of the survivors sterile. Remaining Food crops are destroyed as nuclear winter sets in. Simply finding sufficient food is an almost impossible task.

Do you really think keeping the internet running or teaching your kids to read is as important as finding food for them?

It does not take a huge ammount of time for an abandoned house to start to crumble. It does not take long for the freshly unprotected contents of a crumbling house to be destroyed by the environment. It works the same with Library buildings and books.

Language standardisation is largely due to modern communications. Assume the UK and Ireland, the USA and Canada, and Australia and New Zealand, are each cut off from one another - the three major English Speaking parts of the world. Without communications to keep the language similar, local dialogues will develop resulting in harsh accenting. With illiteracy ubiquitous, English turns into Engrish, Australish and Redneck. The written word is no longer recognised. Technology falls back to the dark ages.

Not quite so ludicrous

Just post it on the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Then future generations can look it up on the wayback machine.

Tourist signs

[dotslashdot]

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!

Well, to crib an idea from Larry Niven ...

[ScrewMaster]

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 monumental task of warning future generations

[mxpengin]

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

there should be additional deterrants

[artifex2004]

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.

Re:there should be additional deterrants

[natrius]

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.

"The people who built this put so much effort into deterring people from entering it. There must be something valuable inside."

What warning is needed?

[NotQuiteReal]

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!

Plutonium is fuel, not waste

[Zobeid]

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.

Solved.

[llZENll]

Skull and crossed bones.

Re:Solved.

[Bemopolis]

Just label it something no self-respecting American would go near, like "Health Food", or "Books".

As for any other nationalities, screw them. That's what they get for winning the war against us and occupying Yucca Mountain.

Bemopolis

To whom may dig here

[hedley]

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

Just post it on slashdot

[bunions]

It'll be reposted about every year, just like this 'news' item.

In the not so distant future...

[TCQuad]

Skull and crossed bones.

Cool! Pirate treasure!

Good idea. One problem.

[jd]

BNFL really F'ed up the whole reprocessing idea at Windscale, err, Selafield, by occasionally "accidently" dumping radioactive waste into the Irish Sea (which is now the most radioactive in the world). The sea spray contains measurable levels of plutonium. Cancer levels are something like 100 times background levels. A burst pipe contaminated so much of the infrastructure of THORP that it is unclear if it can ever be made safe. And this is the center that was taking radioactive waste from nuclear power stations across the globe, on account of nobody else wanting something like that in their backyard.

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.

weapon technology artifact

[tilminator]

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.

The answer is obvious

[Tablizer]

A Goatse statue/image! It crosses cultural and language boundaries like nothing a bunch of eggheads in a lab can ever cook up.

Re:A cantilcle for leibowitz

[iamlucky13]

That's not quite the story. It wasn't an order that survived but the church. In Canticle for Leibowitz the Catholic church survived a nuclear holocaust and an ensuing uprising against all technology. While some clung to hope, most started destroying any technology they found in a desperate effort to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. Humanity would've been completely back in the stone age but for a Catholic engineer dedicating his life to preserving it. It's pretty much all lost anyway, and the book follows the course of humanity trying to re-achieve the modern world based on what he was able to rescue, long after he and everyone else who understood it was dead. It often presents situations that suppose how a person not familiar with a technology might react. For example, when some monks who had studied Leibowitz's documents figured out how to make a light bulb, one of their brothers was scandalized that they were messing with devilish powers, while others recognized that there was some impressive knowledge that had long been lost.

It's not a decidedly Catholic book, although the author was a member of the church and some issues like euthanasia and seperation of church and state enter into the story line. The Catholic chuch has maintained Apostolic succession for 2,000 years and is basically independent of political boundaries, so if any entity seems capable of enduring a nuclear war, the Catholic church is it, and it is a fitting structure for the plot to make use of.

The church did not exist in the book for the purpose of preserving the works. The church was there, as it was before the war, to try to understand and bring humanity closer to God. One order of the church was founded on the idea that preserving the technology of the past could aid in that, just like Mother Theresa's Sister's of Charity was founded for providing care to the poor.

A big tunnel filled with stuff that makes people sick hardly seems like something that could effectively inspire a religious devotion. At the very least, it would make a poor premise for a religion and an rather uninspiring reason to maintain an order. I think merely attempting to maintain the message that the stuff in the tunnel should be left alone (with further details for any potentially advanced civillization) is going to be the safest way to handle this.

Away from the fictional side of things, while I think some measures should be taken to make it clear that the waste is a hazard, I doubt it will be a problem. 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). Secondly, this isn't going to be easily accessible. The Yucca Mountain proposal places the waste something like 1000 feet down. It's also all in a very hard and chemically stable ceramic form, encased in concrete and steel. It will be hard for anybody dumb to get to and get out of the tunnel. Finally, it would not be the first time mankind has discovered harmful things. Bubonic plague comes to mind as one thing we handled in our history.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

COBOL

[Embedded Geek]

languages die and words once poetic or portentous become the indecipherable marks of a long-forgotten scribbler

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?

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:Burial in Ancient Rock!

[Itchy Rich]

Again, any society capable of getting there will also have discovered the periodicity of chemistry...

So, you're saying that before 1896 the human race would have been incapable of mining out a couple of hundred metres of concrete? Any pharoah worth his salt could have that concrete shaft carved into a tasteful spiral staircase within his lifetime.

Re:A cantilcle for leibowitz

[rohan972]

The problem is that in 3,000 years the people will start trying to re-intepret the original religious texts and give them meanings that didn't exist before...

You accidentaly added three zeros to that number. And you spelt days wrong.