I've always thought the concern of future generations finding a radioactive waste disposal site is overblown and is one of the weaker arguments advanced by the anti-nuclear movement.<p>If civilization remains on an upward trajectory of technological development, or even stays flat, we will continue to understand the risks of radioactive waste. We won't go poking through waste disposal sites for no good reason. Barring a major collapse, we are unlikely to forget about them, either - we will either reprocess the waste down the road when breeder tech catches up, or we'll continue to make risk-appropriate investments in maintaining the perimeter fence and keeping the sites secure. Now, one could argue that 10 millennia of site maintenance is an expensive endeavor to foist upon our descendants, but that's a different discussion.<p>The only scenario where we forget about these sites and the dangers of them is some hypothetical future collapse of civilization, where records are gone and the survivors have regressed to a pre-industrial understanding of the world.<p>If you're an optimist, you don't expect that scenario to happen. But suppose it could - doesn't it make more sense to invest in carbon-neutral power technology like nuclear and maybe help stave off a potential collapse, rather than worry about a small number of the survivors dying of radiation sickness?
This reminds me of a striking example during our UI design class, which eventually led me to conclude that there is no intuitive design of anything, unless you can make specific assumptions about the users.<p>You have a steering wheel, and turn it to the right. What direction do you turn? It's such a simple question. And if you're used to a car, or a bike, it's so easy to answer. Turn right, go right. Well except every captain with his boat will tell you they will go left.<p>And there are so many examples of this if you look at them. Our monitoring has a lot of graphs, but why would a rising or a falling graph be good? If it's latency, you want it low but not 0, because 0 would be weird. If it's available capacity, you want it high, but too high is right out as well, since it's a waste. In some cases, we need ports open because we kinda need to answer productive HTTP requests, in other cases, it would be rather silly to expose elasticsearch to the internet.<p>Intuition and intuitive meaning is such a hard thing.
This whole time I thought the biohazard symbol was supposed to be abstractly evocative of a microscope with three lenses, seen as if you were looking up from the slide/stage. Indicating, I supposed, something dangerous that you need a microscope to see. I thought "Hey that's a cool way to convey that idea graphically."<p>Well, come to find out they were trying to have it not refer to anything. So it becomes just another example of how we (well, I) love to find meaning where there is none.<p>Examples, none of which is from the right angle:<p><a href="http://www.scienceprofonline.com/images/science-image-library/microbiology/equipment/microscope-40x-objective-SIL.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.scienceprofonline.com/images/science-image-librar...</a><p><a href="https://abm-website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pharmpro.com/s3fs-public/featured_image/2016/04/Lens-of-microscope.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://abm-website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pharmpro.com/s3f...</a><p><a href="https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/232/512560597_fa29e4d5a4.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/232/512560597_fa29e4d5a4.jpg</a><p>This one's closer to the angle but has four lenses:<p><a href="https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/detail-microscope-3429613.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/detail-microscope-3429613.jp...</a>
> Linguist Thomas Sebeok, for instance, proposed creating an atomic priesthood, where an exclusive political group would use its own rituals and myths to preserve knowledge of radioactive areas, like a church.<p>Minor spoiler alert: this is a side element in the wonderful novel "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson.
> Even now, the power the biohazard symbol once had to inspire awe and fear has begun to diminish. Today, it appears on everyday clothing and products, slowly becoming more ordinary than extraordinary.<p>This always annoys me, though it's a form of linguistic change. The worst example of this, IMHO, is the stickers and accessories you can get for guns to make them look like children's toys (e.g. red cap on the end) -- specifically subverting something designed to make children safe. I do think people who do this have a first amendment legal <i>right</i> to do so, but just because you're allowed to do something doesn't mean it's a good idea (there's no law to prevent me from drinking bleach if I want to, but that doesn't make it a good idea).
The article references someone worrying about the problem of marking future radioactive waste dumps, but doesn't mention how real ones are marked. Here's a real one.[1]<p>That's the marker at the SL-1 reactor burial site in Idaho, from 1962. It's a stone slab, etched with a "no pedestrians" road sign symbol, a radiation trefoil, and a bottle with a skull and crossbones. Already it looks dated.<p>[1] <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/SL-1Burial.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/SL-1Buri...</a>
I think their Jolly Rodger example is a poor one. It didn't mean "danger", it meant "pirates". It still means that, it's merely our belief about whether pirates are dangerous which has changed.<p>I suspect if you are in the water off e.g. Somalia you'd feel very different about a ship flying the Jolly Rodger than if you're on a Disney cruise...
Thinking 2D for lasting symbology its not smart; the best symbol for danger will always be realistic corpses sculptures (at least for as long humans exist); If you see a corpse down your path, then later on see 2, then see 3, a few neurons is enough to realize you may become the next one if you keep walking that path.
It would seem like the likeliest scenario for a future dark age is neighboring towns (or tribes, I suppose) tell tales about how everyone who goes into area X eventually dies not long after.<p>Every few generations some brave, ballsy kid shrugs off these old wives tales, goes and camps out in area X, and gets ill and dies not long after. The legends endure... at some cost.<p>Of course, it depends how strong the radioactivity/toxicity is. If it leads to cancer 30 years down the road, and no immediate signs, then it gets a lot messier.
Radiological accidents caused by people picking up radioactive sources, because they had no idea what they were, are a bit of a hobby of mine (and in general radiological accidents).<p>The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is normally called to help local authorities deal with such accidents and of course the first thing they do afterwards is compile a report. Unfortunately they don't have those reports in one place- you have to trawl through their site and their yearly publications to find it.<p>So I've taken the liberty to put all the reports I could find on my server, here:<p><a href="http://www.goblinopera.com/iaea_reports/" rel="nofollow">http://www.goblinopera.com/iaea_reports/</a><p>These include the most well-publicised cases, like Goiânia, but also more obscure ones, including my favourite ones, the three accidents in irradiation facilities in San Salvador (El Salvador), Nesvizh (Belarus) and near Soreq (Isral).<p>Apologies that these are just on my (rented) server- I understand people might consider it a non-trusted source. I'll try uploading the lot on github if enough people are interested.<p>Btw, the IAEA copyright gives premission for copies to be made and distributed over web pages:<p><a href="http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/rights-and-permissions" rel="nofollow">http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/rights-and-permissions</a>
I thought the article too quickly dismissed the skull-and-crossbones. Sure, it has been trivialized, but if you came across a door with a skull-based symbol on it, I would guess you would give that more thought than an abstract shape that you did not recognize, and words in a language you do not know. My guess is that skulls and skeletons will hold up better as warnings than abstract shapes, in which case the desire for a meaningless and abstract shape was counter-productive.<p>Similarly, the symmetry criterion strikes me as unnecessary, as people are good at recognizing shapes regardless of orientation, especially when the shapes are figurative.<p>On the other hand (literally), the corrosive substance symbols (not shown in this article - [1]) are figurative, asymmetric and, IMHO, pretty clear.<p>The one other figurative symbol in this collection is the postal one with a snake, but it could be mistaken for a caduceus as long as that symbol is known. There is also the possibility that we might drive snakes to extinction.<p>There is a need for distinct symbols for different types of danger, but perhaps they should all include a skulls-or-skeleton generic danger motif.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosive_substance" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosive_substance</a>
That's partially why I like the idea (if not the implementation, apparently) of Mr. Yuck and his friend that I just learned about, Mr. Ouch [0]. To me, it looks like he gets the point across pretty well-- come near here and die. There's no need for left-to-right reading and the cause and effect are in one clear image.<p>[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ouch</a>]
I wonder why we didn't go for stronger legal protection for these symbols? Water bottles with the biohazard logo on them and other gratuitous uses reduce how much caution it induces and diminish its value as a symbol.
There is a 2010 documentary called "Into Eternity" about building an underground nuclear storage facility in Finland. It also covers the problem of how to warn people very far into the future.
At my last job they were constantly asking me to create symbols to represent abstract concepts. They wanted them to be instantly, universally recognizable at 24 pixels by 24 pixels with no text.<p>This is sometimes easy, often impossible. I ended up finding a simple rule of thumb to cut through that work quickly, if I couldn't think of one clear symbol for the concept in 10 seconds then I would never find one that fit all the requirements.<p>I passed that rule on to my project manager and he got a lot better at not making impossible symbol requests.
The comic that's suppose to demonstrate the meaning of the radioactive symbol.. I viewed it as a story about how symbols lose their meaning: guy finds box with weird symbol on it, makes a t-shirt with the symbol on it, walks off to lay around in the grass taking a nap, the symbol now some random thing sold on t-shirts. Like the three-armed-spiral icon that represents some part of a turn table my father has a shirt of. Most don't know what the is shirt of
The article begins by saying the jolly roger has lost it's original meaning.<p>I doubt the author would be very successful getting people to interact with an unknown substance of unknown origin if it's in an old unfamiliar container with a skull and some text in an unknown language on it.