Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/28/a-live-laugh-love-sign-but.html
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Part of me is concerned about diluting the important WIPP message. Part of me wants to whip this down on the ol’ CNC machine this weekend and leave it out for the wave of political solicitors about to start appearing at my front door.
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My only notes are the use of “unleashed” and “shunned” in the last sentence. Both are metaphors (unleash a dog, shunned is a cultural practice) that might be misunderstood. “Released”, “freed” or “avoided”, “keep yourself at a distance”, maybe?
Tough problem.
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Nuclear waste. The gift that keeps on giving.
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Look at it fondly while you pet your ray cat.
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I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot since I first read Benford’s Deep_Time back in the 00’s.
But this is the first time it occurred to me that nuclear semiotics -before it can communicate anything important to distant descendents- has first got to communicate this exact same message to (enough) people in this century.
And that job has got a very long way to go still. We will know this job has been successfully accomplished when a permanent nuclear waste repository has been built and used.
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Can we get one of these for the White House?
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I’m fudging the numbers here a bit to make a point:
Humans (as in Homo sapiens) have been around for 300,000 years, give or take.
80 years ago, humans started making plutonium.
239Pu, the go-to Pu for fission, has a half-life of a bit over 24,000 years.
Radioactive contaminants are dangerous for 10 to 20 times the length of their half-lives, depending on who you ask and how you define “dangerous” or “safe”.
So whichever way you look at it, a permanent nuclear waste repository we build now must be built to last at least for the same amount of time the entire human history has racked up until now.
Edit: mispeling noticed after posting.
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I LOVE this like I’ve never been hurt…
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I am going to buy this on Etsy, and I am going to hang it above my toilet.
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I found my epitaph!!
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This sounds like the translation of a curse inscribed on a Pharaoh’s tomb.
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What if plagues and right wing demagogues are a result of defiling the pyramids which are just waste repositories for gravity-harnessing alien technology?
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That would be a a hopeful and liberating explanation for the current state of the world, rather than the ACTUAL reason, which is that humanity sucks.
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And @FGD135 ;
And yet, you don’t have to look very far to find someone asserting that nuclear power is the answer to all our problems.
Ok ok, but Three Mile Island was a one-off. That would never happen again. Well, ok, it happened again at Chernobyl, but after that we totally have it nailed. Oh, sure, I mean yes it did happen again at Fukushima, but this time we’ve totally got it sorted. Trust us.
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To be fair, this quote isn’t actually intended to be written at the site of a nuclear waste dump. It’s a set of guidelines for what the authors hope to communicate through nonverbal means, though no one’s come up with a very good suggestion of how to do so yet.
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Okay, I have a question here that might seem stupid, but if there’s anywhere with a nuclear scientist, it’ll be the Boing Boing forums. So . . . why don’t we just take the nuclear waste we produce and mix it with a sufficient amount of concrete to return it to the level of radioactivity of the original ore, then rebury it where we dug up the original radioactive ore? Is there anything (other than legality, EPA, etc.) that prevents this from working? I’m almost sure there is, because while I’m a smart guy, my degree is in linguistics, not nuclear engineering, so I’m probably not seeing something that’s just blinding and ridiculously obvious to an actual expert.
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The line, “this is not a place of honor” seemed to refute every safety award, every design award- every honor that collects dust on some engineer’s mantlepiece. And I get it. People want their toast now. We want our aluminum foil and our neon lights and our all night drive-throughs now, so of course its imperitive to write as big a check as we have paper for.
When future generations are coping with -or not coping, as the case may be- I hope they can appreciate how important it was for this generation to get cheap, consequence-free energy, without all that acid rain and lung cancer and bad stuff. So someone not yet born could pay for it down the line.
It’s very difficult for me to hear people clamor for more nukes today, with anything other than contempt.
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No one else so far has mentioned this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) It’s ten years old now but I think it’s really interesting, covering pretty much this subject.
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