They might know of nuclear waste and its dangers, but you can still fear that our symbols for it may be lost to time.
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Don’t change color , kitty . Keep your color , kitty . Stay that pretty gray. Don’t change color , kitty . Keep your color , kitty . Keep sickness away. Don’t change color, kitty. Keep your color, kitty. Please, 'cause if you do, Or glow your luminescent eyes We’re all gonna have to move.
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…eventually may rebuild the field of archaeology (and have no idea what nuclear waste is, or at least have no understanding of our current symbolic systems). Although I say “archaeologist” when I could just as well mean “looter of the remains of the previous society” (not that there’s often a difference).
Alternate version:
Scavenger, digging: “Look, it’s one of our traditional tapestry patterns, but on a plaque.”
Oh, I am familiar! I have worked projects where we were sent in mitigate an area because they were planning to removed lead contaminated soil afterwards. Projects with unexploded munitions. The one with the TCE contamination where the safety plan was literally “if the guys in the hazmat suits start running, you should, too.” (Just hard hats for us, and my coworker was pregnant.) Multiple sites where they wanted us to screen coal ash with no PPE. The cemetery relocation with the mysterious purple goo. The project that put two coworkers in the hospital for cadmium poisoning… By the time OSHA gets there you’re on to the next project, and who wants to be blacklisted?
And academic projects are worse, because they hire local laborers and/or use students and somehow there is never time to train grad students in field methods before they are running a project on the site of a former tannery or silver mine!
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This one’s already a little dicey. Hands up everyone who knows what rad cats are.
Anyone?
Anyone?
Beuller?
Granted, the number of people in this thread who do is not going to be a good indicator of awareness in the general population.
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You could argue that the obligation is to make it as safe as possible and not mark it. The most Eloi-proof waste dump is the one they don’t breach in the first place, and there’s little reason to dig 300m below a random desert location unless it’s surrounded by portentous runes and mysterious ancient structures.
Or another option would be to store high-level waste (or better still reprocess it) at active power plant sites with competent staff. Except, you know.
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While it’s a fun thing to think on how to talk to a civilization tens of thousands of years in advance. As time goes on I keep gravitating towards the camp that says we should do nothing to mark the site. The plan being have the site, keep guard of it while it’s operational, demolish the infrastructure to get to the site and then forget about it.
It takes a considerable amount of effort to dig hundreds of meters down in the ground. It’s something that you need to install infrastructure to do and any attempt to get at it is something that is going to take years of planned and careful work. With that amount of rock in the way the radiation is shielded against and life can live atop it unnoticed. Given the scale of the earth it’s very unlikely that the site will be found by happenstance tens thousands of years in the future. It took 20 years of actively looking to find the first naturally occurring “nuclear reactor”. Thanks to that discovery and others like it we know quite a bit way this stuff moves in the ground. By the time the Earth is consumed by the Sun, the waste is to likely to move 3 meters higher than it was originally placed. It’s very likely once it is put somewhere it will stay there.
Another thing worth considering is all the transuranics don’t need to completely be gone, just at acceptable levels. Remember radioactive elements are natural and are part of the reason we haven’t been killed by the radiation from the sun. Another option that hasn’t been taken very seriously in the US is reprocessing. The US hasn’t seriously invested in reprocessing high level waste or any of the other reactor designs that take high level waste as an input after the meltdown at the Sodium Reactor Experiment in the 1960’s.
While it is waste to the reactors we use now. What is actually in that waste is still really fucking valuable. Sold fuel reactors are insanely inefficient and don’t actually burn all their fuel in the rector. Most reactors have a U-235 concentrations at 3-5% when they go in and the waste comes out of the reactor with U-235 concentrations at 1-3%. The fuel has to come out early because it cracks when things eventually decay to xenon gas.
Some the most radioactive transuranics are actual useful for nuclear medicine, but thanks to regulatory and reactor design restraints these products get wasted while we wait for the waste to stop being “hot”. The waste that is leftover after it stops being hot, still has fissile material in concentrations that can still be burned if we actually put in the time, effort and political will to develop the technology to do so. We still will need a long term disposal site for low level waste and the waste that comes out of these reactors but it is technically possible to reduce the waste we have.
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Communication with future generations with long-term warning messages plays a great role in the book “The Old Man and the Wasteland”.
Just post signs saying “Covid masks required for entry” and watch all the dumb-asses stay away.
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Burial at sea makes a lot more sense once you realize that all the places you put it on land can eventually be accessed using ancient technology (spades, hammers, drills.)
Sea disposal would be done by boring really deep holes in the sea bottom located thousands of feet below sea level, well beyond the continental shelf and far from geologically active areas, dropping the logs down the holes, then filling them back in with something like 30 meters of clay.
Theoretically, nobody’s going 1000 meters down without serious technology. There’d be no chance of accidental discovery, especially in a post-WW3 hellscape. There would also be a reasonably low chance that a nation state or other well-financed terror group would be able to recover the materials without being detected.
I think the biggest reason this plan isn’t being pushed harder is that the current waste still has really high value; it’s just not good enough for current reactors. If it’s buried at sea, it would take millions and millions of dollars to recover, whereas if it was stuck in a locker under Yucca Mountain, they could just open the door and pull it off the shelf.
Can anyone tell me whether any of the various proposals have actually been put into practice?
My admittedly now long out of date understanding was that we don’t actually have any long-term storage facilities, only an number of “short-term”, temporary storage facilities where nuclear waste is supposed to be stored until the many, many so far unsolved problems with long-term storage are solved.
Which happy time has, like economically viable fusion, been “decades away” since the problem was first identified.
A quick wiki walk indicates this is still the case.
If so, I wouldn’t worry too much about future generations confusing our merch with actual warning signs.
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The closest to going live is the Onkalo repository in Finland.
Tom Scott did a video about it I suggest giving it a look:
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Not at all. Much as I am fascinated by this problem, it is all a big wankery thought experiment for archeologists, architects, and linguists.
There are plenty of plans on the table for burial sites, and Yucca Mountain almost started construction, but transportation of waste to the site (for which they designed amazing special containers) has been too controversial to proceed and funding dried up.
Nuclear waste is (AFAIK) all stored under water on site at each reactor. One more reason that a really reasonable thing to do is build better reactors to simply use the waste as fuel. It’s all sitting right there, no processing needed.
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I think this would be considered unethical, in the same way that placebo medicine is unethical. Withholding information that someone else might have used to make a better decision for themselves is presuming we know better and is ultimately (intentionally or not) manipulative. I’m not an ethicist, but that’s a position I would agree with. It is our responsibility to equip others to make good decisions with the information we have, not to try and manipulate them into doing something good in spite of themselves. In addition to the latter basically never working in real life, it’s also patriarchal bullshit.
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Instead of trying to create this “universal language” of warning, just do what they do at banks to prevent theft: throw in a few dye packs.
Also, it seems very odd trying to communicate with a future pre-industrial civilization. And we can’t even take rudimentary acts to prevent our own civilization from falling into a cataclysmic state (vis a vis climate change).
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A lot of these ideas were proposals for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which is currently under construction in New Mexico.
It’s been close to 20 years since I read Deep Time (I refer to it above), but Benford does a good job articulating that warning the future was only one scenario that the group explored. They also considered highly advanced civilizations that would be interested in using our waste materials, and highly advanced robotic civilizations that drill through the earth (making surface warnings unnecessary).
The idea of warning humans would be that, as humans advance through different levels toward the facility, the warnings get less cryptic and more specific. So, the outermost levels would be black rock and jagged stones, indicating that it’s lifeless and dangerous. The next level would be solid walls with warnings. Then you get star charts indicating periods of time where the materials are dangerous, unsafe, and safe; then you get detailed examples of atoms and isotopes so that (presumably) scientific-based invaders would have a good idea of what is stored there.
It’s doubtful any of the ideas will be used, but they were seriously explored in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Just the stuff that is literally still too hot to handle, like spent fuel rods straight out of the reactor.
After a while they are sealed in caskets that… just stand around on site.
Or are transported to other sites to stand around in a warehouse or on what is basically a parking lot.
And they’ll stand there until long term storage is figured out.
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