20
votes
100,000 years and counting – how do we tell future generations about highly radioactive nuclear waste repositories?
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- Authors
- Thomas Keating, Anna Storm
- Published
- Mar 18 2024
- Word count
- 1381 words
Been thinking about this since I've first started self educating on the subject and I always circle back to the eerie message that any warning system should convey for future generations:
This place is a message…and part of a system of messages…pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here…nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location…it increases towards a center…the center of danger is here…of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
The source for this quote: Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
The report is quite long, but it was fun for me to skim through some parts, especially the tables describing the ideas they came up with on how to convey some of these messages.
Some highlights I personally found interesting:
Inscribed granite monoliths
Message chambers for complex information
Use of pictographs (such as facial expressions and analogies to other dangerous activities, such as falling)
Use several languages
World map of other nuclear disposal sites
Use low value materials
4-5 levels of messages of increasing complexity
Star map and celestial marker to indicate time since closure
Periodic table of the elements and diagrams of nuclear reactions
Placement near the surface of materials with magnetic and electrical conductivity properties anomalous to those of the naturally occurring materials in the area (I thought this was interesting because I felt like it would actually draw more attention. People are curious.)
My favorite is the Ray Cat idea. Making cats change color in the presence of nuclear waste, and using basically cat based fables and fairy tales to keep the information from generation to generation. It assumes there will never be a time where humanity doesn't live alongside cats :3
To transport the message, the importance of the cats would need to be set in the collective awareness through fairy tales and myths
Every few weeks like clockwork, "Don't change color, kitty" pops into my head.
When was the last time you thought about
the roman empireglow in the dark kittens?But "good" colors and "bad" colors are very culture dependent. Not that we shouldn't make a mood ring cat... but if the sign is interpreted as its opposite then we have more people digging up radioactive waste than not bringing any attention to the place.
I love how much the text reads from something out of a Star Trek episode. I'm actually almost positive there was a Star Trek episode exactly about this.
“Message from a perished/alien civilization” is one of my favorite fantasy/science fiction story templates. Star Trek has several that fit that trope.
It's interesting how this messaging really feels so similar to a spiritual or religious message.
In my imagination I can see it going both ways, too: A culture that's lost our current knowledge basis integrating this message in some religious way. Or, a culture that's expanded their knowledge so vastly beyond ours seeing this and ascribing it to us having some primitive spiritual inclination toward radiation/radioactive material.
I really don't understand the point of worrying. There are plenty of natural places on earth that are deadly to humans but don't appear so at first. Hot springs, volcanoes, lakes have released methane clouds that have killed villages.
Bury it deep, encase it in concrete and call it done. Stone crumbles, pictures get graffitied or erased, nothing is permanent on a geologic time scale.
Exactly, we may lose our modern sense of linguistics, but that doesn't suddenly make us stupid. If you saw a bunker covered in Greek warnings, and little novel pictograms of people getting sick or injured, you'd probably proceed cautiously, despite not knowing Greek.
And if civilization advances beyond communication via language and images, we're probably sufficiently prepared to handle the danger within, though context clues.
And if civilization regresses to the point of not being able to understand the danger due to comprehension issues, we likely wouldn't have the engineering means to break into a heavily sealed ancient vault
People before and after us weren't and won't be stupid. And despite feeling like we're a planet full of idiots from time to time, humans are ferociously intelligent problem solvers.
It makes me think about the Goiânia incident...
I think any indication that there is something buried is worse than leaving the land as boring as possible. I think the location is important: bury it tens of meters deep and far from bodies of water so that future human settlements are not likely to go there. There are places in the world where fewer animals live simply because they are so far from water--those are the ideal places to put this stuff
Very simple statements that fill me with dread...
It's an unfortunate story but I think radiation in general is not very scary... It's just an invisible and very portable fire that you can't see or feel directly but can kill you. It exists everywhere at low levels but some rare places burn hot. Perhaps we live in hell surrounded by small invisible flames--but probably not. But if you live somewhere a long time it might be good to check for radon and radiation in building materials.
Thankfully the list of global incidents is pretty short--though that could simply be because it's not the first thing people think to check
This question has fascinated me for years, both because it's an interesting question and also because it makes you really think about how much of our lived experience is contextualized through society. How do you convey "bad" to someone who doesn't understand your language, facial expressions, iconography, color perception, etc?
My thoughts have been around using IQ test-like pictographs to teach some universal "danger" symbol leading to nothing via visual addition. Like put pictures where a small dot + circle = a circle around a dot. One line + another line = two lines. with many examples to show that we are displaying 2 symbols and then combining them in the 3rd frame. Then show a bunch where first symbol + nuclear waste symbol = nothing, over and over and over again, adding the nuclear waste symbol means you get nothing. And alongside this, represent some mathematical concepts (prime numbers?) so the pictographs can be seen to be trustworthy.
Assuming civilization doesn't collapse, I'm sure they'll be plenty aware of where it is. Hell, they may even crack it open to mine it for resources, who knows what we could use nuclear waste for in the future.
I think the scale of 100,000 years is hard to grasp. The ancestor of almost all European languages (and several non-European ones), was spoken less than 10,000 years ago. Passing information that far into the future is far from guaranteed, and basically any linguistics means of communicating danger is off the table (though for the sake of linguists in the year 102,024, we should leave linguistic warnings anyway).
This is more for the "yes civilization has collapsed or at least back tracked, fall of rome style". These areas are extremely dangerous, so figuring out ways to convey information about that, assuming that any modern language will be long gone, is difficult.
That said, I also think they somewhat over complicate it. We've seen pictographs on cave walls that are pretty clear in their meaning from thousands of years ago, so something similar with skulls and bones would probably be sufficient. This is technically where they landed, but it gets a bit weird.
Honestly, I think the problem is sorta self correcting.
Just make the place scary.
Humans are instinctively afraid of a lot of things. Snakes, spiders, disease, large predators, darkness, loud noises.
Just fill it with those things to make the place really scary.
The only humans that would be able to overcome those innate human fears would be members of civilizations advanced enough to recognize that they are inborn biases that are irrational at times, at which point, they'd be able to decipher any written message we give to them, provided we hedge our bets and write them in a bunch of different languages, like the Rosetta Stone.
How do you make it scary in a way that will last 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 years though?
A large majority of what you've listed has a very low chance of making it 1000 years, let alone 100,000. That's the whole issue. Passing information down the timeline isn't very easy if you assume things have fallen apart at any point.
Not only that but also braving scary things has long been part of rites of passage. It needs to be communicated not just that this is a bad place, but that there is no value in trying to overcome it, and this message is trustworthy
But how do we make something scary for 10,000 years? Look at how hard it is to find evidence for the massive lost pyramids and ziggurats that are generally less than 5,000 years old.
Lost is good in this case. You just need to surround the containment chamber with scary stuff such that any method of entry into the chamber requires you to pass through the scary stuff chambers first.
Except that humans are fascinated by hidden treasure. The more you try to discourage looters, the more that looters assume there's something worth dying for inside. It kind of loops back around on itself in that sense.
Tens of thousands of years ago, it's crazy some of the oldest are over 40k years old. Sure the art isn't the best and wasn't designed for future viewers, but our artwork has come a long ways. As long as they design it to be made out of material and pigments that won't decay in 100k years, we can tell a story.
So they could add stories about the dangers of nuclear radiation along the walls that repeat all the way to the end (in case sections are damaged). Even explain nuclear symbols. Just have to remember to make it basic and obvious, no symbols that could lose their meaning. I'm sure there's some people out there isolated enough to have never heard of nuclear energy, they could see how they interpret the design.
I don't think skull and crossbones alone would work. It'd be like the petroglyphs that have symbols, their meaning can be lost or changed. The real warning comes from its use as a symbol of death for hundreds of years. If we lost that knowledge, then it's just a skull and bones. They might think they found an ancient crypt and it must have been someone powerful to have themselves buried so deep and entombed in so much copper and iron.
Separate out the long-lived actinides, put them into a fast reactor, repeat. The remaining fission products are less radioactive than the original Uranium in about 1000 years, well within the range that we have experience building structures (never mind keeping and understanding literature: we are still reading The Pillow Book, The Illiad, the bible, etc.) Using just 2% of the energy and then throwing out something which is overwhelmingly usable fuel is foolish, almost as much as continuing to burn fossil fuels.
(e.g. the real danger of Yucca Mountain might be that the Mormons and Scientologists could be fighting over it in 3000 years because they want the Plutonium…. The honest sign to have in front of Yucca Mountain is “dig here to find something you can use to destroy your enemies”)
Just cover the areas with signs depicting a radioactive symbol melting a person's face off showing parts of a skull underneath. I'm sure that'd get the point across.
Though really, at the rate we're going, I see no issue. We are rather reluctant to give up information and AI is making that info easier to sort through. In the far future, someone who happens onto a back filled hole in bedrock would likely have an AI check for any historical info on the area or have already done so. They'd probably even be there specifically to dig up radioactive waste either from records or because a handheld device or satellite detected it.
A bigger question, why are we thinking of elaborate ways to bury when we should be thinking of ways to use it until it's no longer dangerous? If it's dangerous, it has power, and we should use that power.