Come on, have modern humans actively shunned any archeological site? Have we even shunned hostile environments? I think it's the contrary, we're drawn to them.<p>A plaque with all the UN languages is a rosetta stone, something of obvious intrinsic value. The Periodic table too - to any potential future civilization that hasn't already rediscovered those things, it may be a sought after source of knowledge.<p>The site is also attractive to those who would wish to use what's there to their advantage - as a weapon against their enemies, likely w/o really understanding the consequences.<p>Too expensive to launch it into the sun, no other solution (if we're not going to derive the value of reprocessing and actually use it up).
I've been kind of obsessed with WIPP for years. Even if you don't buy the reasoning, it's just... I used to work on science in this area: colleagues were working on Synroc, and I was working on theoretical techniques which you could apply to predicting how well it'd work. So it was on my mind anyway. But there's so much in the WIPP report, the richness and depth of it, that who cares if it actually happens? Seriously, the report's worth your time anyway.<p>I really couldn't get away from this. I used to do a lot of music. Here's a track I made in '05/'06 off my record: (<a href="http://www.hiddenmusic.co.uk/releases/symbolic/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hiddenmusic.co.uk/releases/symbolic/</a>, free download);<p><a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Covert/_/A+Place+of+Honour" rel="nofollow">http://www.last.fm/music/Covert/_/A+Place+of+Honour</a><p>Like I said; obsessed...
During my work at a utility with lots of nuclear power plants, my boss talked about this very issue. He described the problem and the proposed solution being the tall objects sticking out of the ground.<p>One of the young people on the team quickly thought out loud, "Sounds like Stone Henge!"
This is a very hard problem to solve, as the very act of marking something signals "Hey, there's something important here!" The natural curiosity of whoever finds it is likely to override any respect they might have for the warnings of a long dead civilization.
They could have concentric circles of increasingly deadly threats: start with tripwires, end with landmines. If every time you get closer to the nuclear waste, you're more likely to die, you will probably get the idea.
How about a skull? Pictures of people dying of radiation?<p>I can't see giant monuments doing anything other than enticing people to dig. However, reliefs and images of people dying of radiation poisoning might be less ambiguous.
Good sci fi. Silly for the government to care about this. I mean, really, <i>10000</i> years?<p>If future civilizations are technologically advanced, detecting radiation won't be a problem.<p>If future civilizations have fallen back to the stone age, spatially localized buried nuclear waste is going to be the least of their problems. It would be a rounding error in the annual death rates.