Ten Thousand Years

It&#x27;s a fun exercise to think about every time this comes up, but it always strikes me as very much perfect being the enemy of the good.<p>It&#x27;s impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years, and is inpenetrable to an hypothetical worst case society: one that forgot literally everything about the concept of radiation and all current languages and semiotics but does have the ability and motivation to find and excavate though deep rock and concrete, for no practical reason like mining some ore, and then get into the armoured casks and spread the material around their society before realising something is wrong. The more defences you add, the more someone can say &quot;yes, but it&#x27;s insecure against a hunter gatherer society that somehow has dynamite and plasma lances, and a religion that <i>requires</i> them to seek out, excavate, cut open, grind and feed to babies anything in gigantic, obviously artificial steel containers deep in solid rock and they also think that any warning or sickness is a test from God.&quot;<p>Sure, you saved an extremely hypothetical group of future humans from death. But to be honest, any human society that hasn&#x27;t figured out radiation will lose more people to cutting down thousands of meters into the rock then they would to the radiation.<p>In fact, if we take it to the extreme, should we proactively mine out all natural radioactive material on Earth and rebury in proper containment? Just in case someone starts mining uranium in the year 15000 and doesn&#x27;t know what it is, they could be hurt by that.

People are curious and adventurous. And greedy, power-hungry, and short-sighted. It doesn&#x27;t even work today to warn people of something dangerous.<p>As has been said many times, any warning sign, particularly pompous ones, may always be interpreted as a sign of worship instead. So just pile a few hundred thousand skelettons on top -- a literal sign of death. We probably cannot do better. If anyone in the future does not understand this when digging it up, then a few people will need to die until they do. I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s a solution.<p>Except maybe not to produce dangerous material that lasts longer than human memory. But that&#x27;s, well, you can read the first paragraph again.

Consider how serious you take the curses that are on the outside of tombs and sarcophagi in Egypt. No matter what kind of things they said, even if we perfectly understood them, would we believe. Every single kind of imagery which might imagine might frighten or scare or inform future civilizations would probably just be viewed as a quaint relic of a forgotten era.

Ken Liu&#x27;s chilling short story &quot;The Message&quot; [0] explores what this might look like on the receiving end.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;interzone-magazine-242-2012-09-10&#x2F;page&#x2F;n15&#x2F;mode&#x2F;2up" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;interzone-magazine-242-2012-09-1...</a>

If you read on the news that a sealed cave with ancient symbols of death and destruction had been discovered in the New Mexico desert, what&#x27;s the first thing you&#x27;d expect us to do?<p>There is no defense against human curiosity :)

If I were to give them a suggestion, I&#x27;d try to build the place not only as a warning, but also as a tool to try to preserve language (or encircle the dangerous site with language-learning sites). If language is preserved enough, complex information can be conveyed about the site. We don&#x27;t need to assume that our language (or language) will be a lost skill (although, if we can make the site human-proof at that level, good on us).

There is a beautiful, somewhat depressing Danish documentary about this issue called Into Eternity (2010) [1] (it&#x27;s also on YouTube [2]), about the Finnish nuclear reactions at Onkalo.<p>They faced the exact same problem as in the U.S. about how to store the waste safely and warn future generations about the dangers of accessing the waste.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Into_Eternity_(film)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Into_Eternity_(film)</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ayLxB9fV2y4?si=4VoMTuV6aWTzpquA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;ayLxB9fV2y4?si=4VoMTuV6aWTzpquA</a>

We still have remote tribes who have very little interaction with nuclear technology. We could test some of these communication methods and see how they interpret them.

There&#x27;s no reason to think any of this gobbledygook is necessary. Sure put up a warning sign and explain, in English, what&#x27;s going on here. What&#x27;s more interesting to me is that in 100 years, our descendants will still remember us, and have to maintain this thing, that they had no hand in making.

The issue of communicating something in a universal language to an unknown audience reminds me of the cover diagrams on NASA’s Voyager golden records. In that case, the challenge is the density of information that needs to be packed, as opposed to the simplicity and clarity of a radioactive sign (“here’s precisely how to read the contents of this record” vs. “you will die if you come close”)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.m.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:The_Sounds_of_Earth_Record_Cover_-_GPN-2000-001978.jpg#mw-jump-to-license" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;commons.m.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;File:The_Sounds_of_Eart...</a>

Nature around Chernobyl seems to be doing well.[1] Maybe we have the wrong goal here. Why not use this stuff to protect sensitive areas from the most dangerous and destructive force on the planet, people. Find a few endangered habitats, post some signs, bury it shallow and then walk away.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unep.org&#x2F;news-and-stories&#x2F;story&#x2F;how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unep.org&#x2F;news-and-stories&#x2F;story&#x2F;how-chernobyl-ha...</a>

I find all of the geeking-out about how we might warn people not to mess with such a facility kinda irrelevant relative to this little sentence:<p>&quot;in fact, the jury’s still out on whether WIPP has solved the basics of the storage problem at all. In February of 2014, a leak was detected at WIPP which exposed several workers to radiation and WIPP has been closed since&quot;<p>If you follow the link, you find gems such as<p>&quot;The report states that it took 10 hours to respond to the initial emergency alarm, then a bypass in the filtration system allowed the radiation to escape above ground. “They failed to believe initial indications of the release,” said board chairman Ted Wyka. It also found that much of the operation failed to meet standards for a nuclear facility; a lack of proper safety training and emergency planning; lagging maintenance; and a lack of strategy for things like the placement of air monitors.&quot;<p>Given that we can&#x27;t even keep such facilities safe <i>while they&#x27;re staffed and operated with the sole goal of providing safe storage</i>, it seems pretty clear that waste storage is not, as nuclear power proponents like to claim, a &quot;solved problem&quot;, and is in fact most likely unsolveable.<p>Nuclear technology is not, never was, and never will be safe. Because people are fallible, stupid and greedy.

Have enough of such sites and you have prevented establishing a civilization that doesn&#x27;t care about radiation.

Some of the actual reports that the Human Interference Task Force produced are available online, and they&#x27;re super interesting:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.gov&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ML0400&#x2F;ML040080812.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nrc.gov&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ML0400&#x2F;ML040080812.pdf</a>

Ray Cats isn&#x27;t a good idea. I never figured out why the comic strip with arrows wouldn&#x27;t work.<p>Have panels that define arrows using increasing entropy. It&#x27;s really is almost universal.

Honestly, this whole &quot;how we warn other people in 100000 years&quot; is nonsense.<p>Just bury the materials several hundred meters below the ground and then pour concrete down the shaft. Then just landscape the area to look normal. If a civilization is savvy enough to dig thorough hundreds of meters of concrete, then they are going to be savvy enough to know what the radioactivity is.

There&#x27;s a great documentary called &quot;Into Eternity&quot; from 2010 about the Norwegian solution for the nuclear waste problem.

Would someone who knows more than me please weigh in on why we even bother with storing these waste products? Can&#x27;t we build other things to use the waste products in series until the material is much easier to deal with?

Today the radiation can even be detected by image sensor in smartphone. The tomorrow&#x27;s civilization with drones&#x2F;robots everywhere (and probably not much of pure meat people) would definitely not be caught off-guard by a pile of radioactive material.

Anyone want to humor why we can&#x27;t launch it into space (sun).<p>Assuming the payload is well protected even if a rocket blew up in space&#x2F;fell back to Earth. Too much weight to carry?

(2014)

this episode also ended up in video[1] form in partnership with Vox<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lOEqzt36JEM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lOEqzt36JEM</a>

This debate is so tiresome. Just reprocess nuclear &quot;waste&quot; which is really just dirty nuclear fuel and then vitrify the actual waste and then bury it very deep underground in geologically stable and impermeable areas sealed in copper or lead canisters.

Pretty sweet. I wonder if there is a way to store a less harmful dose of radiation close to the surface so that everyone who goes there gets a bit sick and the longer they spend there the more sick they get, and then progressively make the exposure worse the deeper you go until you get to full exposure and die.