Even if future trespassers could understand what keep and out mean when placed side by side, there's no reason to assume they'd follow directions. In "Expert Judgment," the panelists observe that "[m]useums and private collections abound with [keep out signs] removed from burial sites." The tomb of the ancient Egyptian vizier Khentika (also known as Ikhekhi), for example, contains the inscription: "As for all men who shall enter this my tomb ... impure ... there will be judgment ... an end shall be made for him. ... I shall seize his neck like a bird. ... I shall cast the fear of myself into him." It's possible that the vizier's contemporaries took Khentika at his word. But 20th-century archaeologists with wildly different religious beliefs had no reason to take the neck-cracking threat seriously. Likewise, a scavenger on the Carlsbad site in the year 12,000 C.E. may dismiss the menace of radiation poisoning as mere superstition. ("So I'm supposed to think that if I dig here, invisible energy beams will kill me?") Hence the crux of the problem: Not only must intruders understand the message that nuclear waste is near and dangerous; they must also believe it.
The report's proposed solution is a layered message--one that conveys not only that the site is dangerous but that there's a legitimate (nonsuperstitious) reason to think so. It should also emphasize that there's no buried treasure, just toxic trash. Here's how the authors phrase the essential talking points: "[T]his place is not a place of honor ... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here." Finally, the marker system should communicate that the danger--an emanation of energy--is unleashed only if you disturb the place physically, so it's best left uninhabited.
As for the problem of actually getting these essentials across, the report proposes a system of redundancy--a fancy way of saying throw everything at the wall and hope that something sticks. Giant, jagged earthwork berms should surround the area. Dozens of granite message walls or kiosks, each 25 feet high, might present graphic images of human faces contorted with horror, terror, or pain (the inspiration here is Edvard Munch's Scream) as well as text in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Navajo explaining what's buried. This variety of languages, as Charles Piller remarked in a 2006 Los Angeles Times story, turns the monoliths into quasi-Rosetta stones. Three rooms--one off-site but nearby, one centrally located, and one underground--would serve as information centers with more detailed explanations of nuclear waste and its hazards, maps showing the location of similar sites around the world, and star charts to help intruders calculate the year the site was sealed. According to 1994 estimates, the whole shebang would cost about $68 million, but that's just a ballpark figure based on very incomplete data.
Proposals for the "earthworks" component demonstrate that the whole project of communicating with the future is really a creative assignment, more dependent on the imagination than on expertise. What'll really scare off 210th-century tomb raiders? The report proposes a "Landscape of Thorns" with giant obelisklike stones sticking out of the earth at odd angles. "Menacing Earthworks" has lightning-shaped mounds radiating out of a square. In "Forbidding Blocks," a Lego city gone terribly wrong, black, irregular stones "are set in a grid, defining a square, with 5-foot wide 'streets' running both ways. You can even get 'in' it, but the streets lead nowhere, and they are too narrow to live in, farm in, or even meet in."
I know I'd want to get to the heart of the mystery if I came across any of those setups.
Well, I see that all of the "Paragon" level adventures for my D&D campaign have now been designed for me.
"It should also emphasize that there's no buried treasure, just toxic trash."
.
But isn't there a problem with that? Who knows what "treasure" is going to be? No reason it has to be gold always and forever more. Maybe radioactive stuff will be treasure to the future. If nothing else, stuff that you can sprinkle on your enemies to make them get sick and die sounds pretty darn valuable, and scavengers of a future dystopia after the fall of civilisation may well think radioactive waste is among the most precious of all treasures.
Or you could use it as fuel for a nuclear reactor. Most of that waste can be used for fast breeder reactors to generate more energy, it's just not efficient or quite as safe to do so.
But if that's your goal, well, you probably haven't destroyed the stores of human knowledge that we have which can, you know, translate English.
Yeah. If future-us have breeder reactors, they probably have geiger counters too. We wouldn't need terrifying landscapes of thorns filled with images of agony and pain and helpful maps to tell explorers where the other treasure troves can be found. They probably be able to figure out what was inside anyhow, and either make proper use of it or seal it back up.
I wonder if the "I told you so" message will be any easier to craft.
And Josh, with all of this prep work being done, maybe a Gamma World re-issue is in order?
Ehn, maybe. It's either not weird enough or too well done for Gamma World. In GW, the nuclear waste should seem deceptively similar to tomb treasure, and the "magic item"-grade treasures should ideally be the products of a civilization whose works are incomprehensible to the players in addition to the characters.
Deliberately horrific, noticeably inhuman architecture littered with obvious signs saying "here angels fear to tread" is right up D&D's alley, though. Exalted could kinda do either.
Human beings are curious. Ain't nothing going to fix that. They're gonna crawl into the place and examine everything, even if it kills them.
Completely unrelated: Some of these rock-garden proposals sound familiar. Has anyone checked Stonehenge or Easter Island for evidence of radioactive waste?
Another aspect of a proposed solution I remember reading about was having a smaller, initial sacrificial chamber containing a moderate amount of toxic waste. If all of the surface-level warning signs were ignored, this would be the first stuff to be discovered, and it would only be bad enough to sicken or kill several people. Further signage would indicate that what lies beneath is just much more of the same.
May I suggest that we carve the likeness of Mr Rove, and Mr Chaney - one on each side of the entry to the magic caves of radiation DOOM.
If that does not scare them off, add another of Ms. Clinton just a little farther back into the gloom. That will do the trick!
Sounds a lot like the ruined prehuman cities of H. P. Lovecraft's stories (for example, "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow out of Time"). Maybe those distorted alien architectures weren't a product of nonhuman mentalities but an attempt to say "Don't disturb the shoggoths, you fools!"
This is a totally ridiculous exercise, for two reasons.
1. It is mostly useless to contemplate nuclear waste storage more than 200 years into the future. 200 years ago, we had yet to invent steam-power locomotives, or plastics. Things that were once considered dangerous or impossible to manufacture or transport are now considered routine - things like liquid hydrogen or high explosives. Give the enormous advances of the past 200 years, it seems hubristic to presume that future generations will not come up with a massively cheaper and more satisfying solution than burying it and hoping no one digs it up for 10000 years. Of the top of my head, I assume that after space travel is routine, we can just launch nuclear waste into the sun. Or drop it down deep boreholes to mix with the Earth's mantle.
2. Assuming we do bury the nuclear waste and build colossal structures, I think we underestimate the humanity of our descendants. If our dependents are more technologically advanced, they will detect the radiation without difficulty, and understand the danger. If our dependents have regressed to a more primitive state, they will no doubt explore the site, regardless of the warnings, as a ruin of their great ancients, seeking to uncover secrets to wealth and power. It's mystical ability to kill those who dig for treasure will no doubt add to its legend. Then an enterprising leader will build his palace there, and use it to intimidate and terrify his subjects. It doesn't matter what you write on there. Landscape of Thorns? That will the the design motif for his palace.
Not to mention, we're severely overstating how dangerous this stuff would be, from the perspective of a society in a truly primitive state. They'll be dying right and left from disease and internal violence. Even if you could explain the risks they wouldn't care.
Of the top of my head, I assume that after space travel is routine, we can just launch nuclear waste into the sun.
Why would we do that? That waste could be useful in the future. Better save it for a later date.
#1 was my first thought, too. Any society sufficently advanced to dig the stuff up is going to understand radiation. Besides, we've got people alive today who teach, read, and speak Middle-Ages English (think Chaucer and Beouwulf), among other long-dead languages. The only way something like this makes sense is if you buy into the 'Secular Rennassiance rediscovered everything the Christianist Dark Ages buried' myth. That ain't the way things happened back then, and it's not likely that all technical skill is going to vanish from human knowledge in the future, either.
I think the hard part will be convincing future generations that we gave a damn what happened to them, since we're assuming that we've already in some way failed them and civilization has collapsed.
Would peoples at a stone age or middle age level be able to break into the facility? Can you burrow though 4" of stainless steel and 6' of steel reinforced concrete with stone tools?
Well, they're not necessarily from the stone age or even just from the middle-ages. They're talking about people from 12,000 AD. That's time enough for civilisation to fall and rise again. I think they're envisioning late-19th century-type adventurers in the 121st century. Though to be fair, it's more entertaining to imagine Severian wandering the landscape of dying Urth.
No you're not.
High radioactivity = short half life.
Long half-life = low radioactivity.
A few hundred years and your hazard level is on the order of natural uranium ore.
Can't our descendants just rely on on their nano-implanted radiation detectors to warn them ?
Signs aren't necessary, traps are. Make it deadly to come in. I'm talking Indiana Jones style traps (or Tomb of Horrors, for Josh).
Rob's idea is good as well. If the the people who have the magic rocks start dying horrible deaths, few people will be interested in getting more of them (there are still some who think that King Tut's curse is real, so how hard could this be?)
Another option would be to build on Rob's idea, where you have a small deposit of waste, and hide all appearance of there being more. Go through deadly traps for glowing rocks, rocks kill people, so don't go back for more. . .
Basically, fear motivates like little else. Sure, it may attract a fringe, but ensure that these ones die while investigating.
The waste won't actually be dangerous after that span of time. The regulations for storing the waste that long are part of a broader regulatory scheme designed by environmentalists to prevent the construction of nuclear power plants.
The "scientific" backing is the zero threshold linear scale. Now you don't have to have that Caltech Ph.D. to know that almost nothing in the real physical world is zero threshold or linear...
@ tehdude, et. al.
Correct; The Loony Liberal Left is interested
in frightening people _now_ as part of their
anti-nuclear propaganda.
A previous suggestion was a priestly order
living on-site, generations without end,
dedicated to delivering the warning.
Fuse the waste into billets of glass, drop it
into the Marianas Trench, and fuggedaboudit.
There is a place in India where the natural
background radiation ought to have killed off
the natives.
There is an apartment complex in Hong Kong
built with steel salvaged from a junkyard
where somebody dumped a medical Cobalt-60
source; The inhabitants are statistically
healthier than average.
Makes no never mind; Does not fit the narrative
What's being called "nuclear waste" is high-value nuclear fuel; the only reason we aren't using it is a bunch of idiot politicians are in charge of American nuclear policy. Let's be sure to keep it where we can get it back if and when morons like Senator Kerry are dead.
On some level, such waste is self-signaling. If a tribe that moves there (or a robber who takes artifacts) dies with horrible sores, other tribes (or robbers) are unlikely to follow.
Beyond that, burying it deeply enough that it's unlikely to be found by people too unsophisticated to know what radiation and heavy metal poisons are should help a bit.
Beyond that, burying it deeply enough that it's unlikely to be found by people too unsophisticated to know what radiation and heavy metal poisons are should help a bit.
How deep is that? In the 19th century, we could tunnel pretty deep, but we had no clue what radiation was.
Of the top of my head, I assume that after space travel is routine, we can just launch nuclear waste into the sun. Or drop it down deep boreholes to mix with the Earth's mantle.
Both are feasible in the near future. The space disposal method could use laser launchers for direct injection into solar impact orbits. For mantle disposal, boreholes aren't needed, just drop it into subduction zones in the deep ocean.
Of course these waste products may be valuable as feed stock for breeder reactors. Jimmy Cater killed the breeder reactor and reprocessing programs in the US, but the EU and Japan are involved in reprocessing and further research.
Laser launchers? How exactly does a laser provide thrust?
Ground-based lasers heat reaction mass from the spaceship (or IIRC some proposals, air during the early part of the launch phase) to provide thrust. The idea is that you save weight, because your fuel and motor (though not your reaction mass) is on the ground. By the same token the energy generation device isn't limited by the size and weight requirements of the spaceship, so you can have a honking big power plant driving the laser and delivering as much energy as needed. There have been some experimental successes on a small scale, though AFAIK nothing that's actually been put into practical use as yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
You can also use lasers to propel a light sail (using light pressure directly), though thrust in that case is lower. (AFAIK, the only experiments with light sails in space have been solar rather than laser-driven, though.)
Solar impact orbits ain't cheap. From an earth-escape trajectory, you need an additional delta-V of 30 km/sec to get down to the Sun, where a Solar escape trajectory from the same starting point only costs 12.4 km/sec. That's a cheaper method, if "gone forever" is your basic goal...
After 10,000 years, any highly radioactive material will not be very dangerous. The shorter the half-life, the more dangerous the radioactive material, but also the quicker it becomes less dangerous.
For example, Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87.7 years emitting radiation in the form of an alpha particle. In 2,000 years, 1000 lbs of Pu-238 will have enough alpha decay to have only 0.0002 lbs of Pu-238. In 10,000 years, there is essentially nothing left of the original Pu-238.
A radioactive isotope with a long half life is not emitting much radiation to begin with, and therefore, is not as much of a danger.
A larger danger is with Pu-239 (the fissile Pu used in nuclear weapons) due to its toxicity. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,110 years. Inhaled Pu-239 can cause lung cancer at very low concentrations. Maybe vitrification could reduce that the hazard of someone breathing particles of Pu-239. But the radiation itself is minimal.
This nails it on the head. The problem isn't that the stuff is (was) radioactive; it's that it's toxic. But it's a lot easier to get people worked up over stuff that they believe will produce an eerie green glow for thousands of years, as opposed to the nasty chemicals we dispose of every day.
Or perhaps more accurately, there's a lot of industrial talent invested in keeping people blissfully ignorant of the many and varied toxic substances and processes all around them. Better to keep them fixated on the scary nuclear stuff they remember from their "stop drop and roll" drills in school.
It is the radiation in Pu-239 that causes cancer, not the chemical toxicity. The reason why it is more dangerous when it is inhaled is because of the type of radiation, which has very low penetration (you can hold small amounts in your hands). However, if it gets into the bloodstream it can cause tremendous damage to the DNA and other components of a cell, thus resulting in cancer.
And as far as the half-life of Pu-238, after 2000 years you may have only 0.0002 lbs of Pu-238, but it isn't as if you would have nothing, you would have roughly a 1000 lbs of U-234. It has a far greater half-life (measures in hundreds of thousands of years) and in addition to the albeit lower levels of radio activity, uranium is chemically toxic.
I think that the best way to deal with all of this is to not try to bury the waste material, and just develop a method to sink it into a subduction zone at the bottom of the ocean.
What's interesting (to me anyway) is that this is essentially an exercise in trying to refute Lyotard, Derrida, etc. The Slate article points out, for instance, that even a skull and crossbones might not effectively communicate danger, but instead could communicate treasure. What these people are looking for (in the ideal, anyway) is a universal symbol of danger; postmodernism says one can't be found.
"210th-century": eh? After about a thousand years the stuff is no more dangerous than the uranium ore that the whole process started from - and that's scattered about according to the whims of God, with no warning signs whatever.
If our civilization falls back to primitive state, I don't see a problem. Because we've exhausted all the easy carbon fuels(coals, oil, natural gas) by the time that occurs there will be no means to rebuild civilization back to 19th-20th century levels that could facilitate un-earthing these sites. I know this because it takes 100s of millions of years to regenerate fossil fuels. By the time that happens, the radioactive waste will have long become inert.
...we've exhausted all the easy carbon fuels...
But there will be an available energy source. All these magic rocks that give off heat for no reason at all. You can find them easily, they are buried underneath the monoliths and spikey statues.
The king has one of these rocks, it is made into his throne, and it stays warm ALL BY ITSELF. Every day, the king sits on his magic throne and wonders why he has no children yet...
I'm talking about now... not some dystopian future which I will not be alive to see.
Couldn't we just use a couple of well placed skeletons that look like they died a grisly death, along with stone floors that, when stepped on, release giant blades or poison darts out of nowhere, then reset automatically? I know that stuff never stops Indiana Jones, but that's a movie. In real life it would probably work.
In real life you send a flock of sheep in first. Then all the traps are safe AND you have a meal ready to celebrate your discovery of the magic warm stones
The whole mess is an artifact of idiotic policy anyway.
The only reason we have long-lived nuclear waste is that we're storing it instead of reprocessing it as fuel for fast fission reactors.
After reprocessing it and using it as fuel in a fast reactor, the waste from the fast reactor waste decays to less-than-original-ore radioactivity in about 200 years.
Why do we have to assume that future generations are less intelligent that we are? Or that today's amazing information storage technology will not continue grow, thus ensuring this information is carried forward in perpetuity?
1. Surround radioactive waste with a moat.
2. Put sharks with lasers in moat.
3. ????
4. Profit!
Yes, lets think of ways to scare people away from using nuclear power... er, I mean scare people away from getting hurt by nuclear waste.
Here's an idea. We'll take 5 million dollars. We'll use it to provide medical services to the third world, thus purchasing a certain number of 'life credits.' to balance out possible deaths due to the waste.
Or even better; we'll have a really thick door. Any civilization that can get through it is advanced enough to figure things out.
I think we should just assume that future anthropologists haven't lost all the necessary data to understand the warnings. A simple etched sign reading "Radioactive" should suffice.
I also like RyanW's idea, because it keeps out ordinary meddlers. Anything behind a thick enough steel door would require a massive, coordinated effort by a civilization that persumably has Geiger counters.
Exactly. If they've regressed so far that they no longer have geiger counters, then they have bigger problems that whatever nuclear waste we left them.
I think a key element to preventing an invasion by unwitting scavengers might be to NOT do what the Egyptians did, i.e., decorate the walls with fancy writing while hoarding a sizable stash of gold and trinkets along the rest of the things that shouldn't be disturbed. Nothing guarantees excessive human curiosity like leaving behind ten thousand mysterious signs and symbols with fancy looking objects buried beneath them, which is roughly what these proposals entail.
In short, go out into the remote desert, drill far into bedrock, drop the container 8000+ feet into the earth, cover it back up with very ordinary dirt, and then sweep your tracks. If it eases the conscience, mark the container with a skull and crossbones before dropping it down the shaft.
Anyone dumb and curious enough to both locate and recover it deserves whatever they get.
That makes it unnecessarily difficult for us to recover it and use it for energy. The problem isn't that the waste exists, it's that Greenpeace exists.
I suppose this just reveals what an unfeeling ogre I am, but when I read about this discussion my only thought is, "Why on earth would I care what happens to people 12,000 years from now?"
Most Americans can barely bring themselves to care about what happens to people in Mexico tomorrow, but somehow we're supposed to be concerned about the health of people who are as far removed from us in time as the first discoverers of agriculture?? My mind boggles.
If we've learned anything from cheesy sci-fi movies (and God help us if we haven't), it's that the post-apocalyptic ghouls of the future will either worship the radiation as a god, or use it to breed giant cockroaches as beasts of burden.
Who do we think we are, trying to deny our future ghoul descendants of the entire basis for their religion and/or economy?
Plus, glowing death-rocks are just plain cool.
@ sean E:
Plus, glowing death-rocks are just plain cool.
Right, grind it up make get glow-in-the-dark
body paint; Has happened; Not cool.
Interestingly enough, the plan for "disposal" of the waste at Yucca Mountain does not envision that the repository will actually be "sealed" until 200 years after it is full. Until then, the doors will essentially be closed and locked, but they will still be able to unlock and open them, and remove the waste. It will actually be emplaced on railroad cars so that it will be easy to do.
Someone has already figured out that the "waste" has a lot of energy left in it, and we may decide at some point in the future that we want to use it.
There has been one proposal, by environmental groups, to dispose of the Pu by encapsulating it in a form of glass that makes it really difficult to separate, so that the material is proliferation-resistant, but everyone seems to agree that this is really a bad idea - why would you spend a zillion bucks to make a really nice source of energy, just to be able to make it harder to use?