It'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 "yes, but it's insecure against a hunter gatherer society that somehow has dynamite and plasma lances, and a religion that requires 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."
Sure, you saved an extremely hypothetical group of future humans from death. But to be honest, any human society that hasn't figured out radiation will lose more people to cutting down thousands of meters into the rock then they would to the radiation.
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't know what it is, they could be hurt by that.
If it’s merely possible but not inevitable, then some basic precautions make sense, but after that your effort is probably better expended in trying to avoid the collapse rather than trying to save some lives after it happens.
And not doing it is even easier than saying we could not produce them.
Note that I'm not antinuclear or collapsist. Maybe in 10000 years there will be so much progresses in ways we don't expect that this material could be turned easily into safe or even useful material for human beings.
There is zero cultural continuity from Sumerian merchants to us. We can read Sumerian texts because we excavated a library that included various texts meant to instruct Akkadian-speaking students in Sumerian.* We didn't know it was there before we found it.
We didn't know how to read Akkadian either - that would count as cultural continuity from Sumer, since those two cultures were deeply enmeshed. We had to figure it out based on our knowledge of Old Persian, which used a writing system adapted from Akkadian cuneiform and which was also completely lost. We figured that out by comparing an undeciphered inscription to a list of Persian kings given in another language (Greek). Akkadian is not related to Persian, except in the adaptation of the writing system, but we got lucky in that it is a Semitic language and Semitic languages still exist today. Sumerian is related to no other language we know of and required the instructional curriculum to decipher.
There has been cultural continuity from classical Greece to us, but there's a long gap between them and Sumer. We're not still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants; we're making fun of them again.
* The same texts have been found elsewhere since then - Mesopotamian documents are not in short supply - but it's always nice to have a full curriculum outlined in one place.
Our sexagesimal division of angles and time are products of Sumerian culture. So strictly speaking greater than zero.
Well above the nuclear waste, bury a tablet that teaches a language in a few different ways, like the Rosetta stone but designed for teaching from scratch. Add some easy texts for study. Add more complex texts to study after the easy texts. Add an elementary, qualitative intro into the ideas of nuclear physics. Now explain the danger of the buried substances in a sensible way!
(Better yet, build a breeder reactor, burn the "waste" as the nuclear fuel it is. Stop being deathly afraid of reprocessing plutonium, at least in the nations that already handle it and have nuclear weapons for last 60-70 years anyway.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
Another proposal was to leave no marker at all. (Or to bury the first marker.) There's an argument that anything special on the surface will only make people curious about the site.
They dig deeper.
Digging is easier than translating texts in an unknown language, especially if that unknown language is about nuclear physics.
But still, I think the natural response to a picture of a person grabbing an ancient container and dying is the stuff inside must have been valuable for them to have attached all these threats to it. At least that's the conclusion drawn by Egyptologists translating inscriptions like "the great lords of the west will reproach him [who breaks the seal] very very very very very very very very much". (I'm not joking about the number of instances of the word translated as "very"...)
I feel like if at the point we lost knowledge or technology and the ability to understand what is buried there, does the effort matter that much? Or to put it another way, if we are back in the stone age, some nuclear waste that is buried is the not biggest problem.
How does that even happen, by the way? Humans survived but somehow lost all knowledge/language and all artifacts they could have used to bootstrap? I've never really understood a realistic sequence of events that leads to that.
I do agree though, that if they could do this in the Dark Ages, we've left considerably more artifacts around to do it with today. Any moderately large town has a library with enough information to get things going.
Now consider how fast it would rebound given that those remaining 800 million would rebound, given that they'd have vastly more knowledge and resources (even just having access to pre-mined materials alone is a massive boost!).
As we have seen in the last couple years, just a couple poorly timed pandemics can set us back 50 years or so. Add a meteor impact or a nuclear war and we are in for major chaotic transformation whose results can't be easily predicted.
On what metric? I can't think of anything. Medical outcomes, crime, wealth, none of that stuff has regressed nearly that far. Some social issues might have regressed to the early 90s if you take a pessimistic view of the situation.
If either of those happens, radioactive waste will be the least of anyone's worries.
Huge asteroid impact could kill us all, but it doesn’t seem obvious how it could cause a reset to zero.
It doesn't need to be humanity, I guess. It took humans what? 4 million years roughly to diverge from something like the great apes of today to anatomically modern humanity. Does nuclear waste stay dangerous for that long?
Sorry, I don't think there's any point in spending any time designing anything for that scenario (except as art or philosophy, but nothing practical). I feel like people are underestimating how resilient and embedded and redundant our society is at this point, and how very specific the scenario would have to be to lose everything yet humanity survives.
There's lots of stories about buried evil. In Glen Cook's The Chronicles of the Black Company, we have The Barrowland, which is basically undone by assisted climate change.
There's also a bunch of brownfields in Western Europe, where buried WWI gas munitions are still causing havoc.
We’ve already extracted just about all of the “easy” energy reserves, in terms of oil and coal. Now, you need major machinery to access it. That means, a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter.
Based on our current extractions of resources, we’re in too deep and no future society will be able to have an Industrial Revolution again for millions of years, if we fail completely. And by then, the radioactive waste doesn’t matter.
even Ancient Greeks could have put some copper windings and iron together to produce electricity from wind. Add mirrors concentrated on a boiler and you can generate from solar. Availability of fossil fuels may as well be a damnation of our current civilization.
Please help me understand. Society isn't going to "forget" nuclear chemistry.
It is perfectly possible to design a container that will remain intact for ten thousand years.
It is also perfectly possible to find a location that will be geologically stable for ten thousand years. We've already done it.
Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.
Hell, write the warning in Sumerian. Or Esperanto. Or Toki Pona.
There is a strain of misanthropic doomsday fetishists who for the last two millennia have been constantly predicting the collapse of mankind.
I assume that they believe that humankind is stupid and destined to fail and that only they are smart enough to realize that in 12,000CE a neocaveman will try to dig up radioactive barrels like a moron.
I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on.
I do not understand why they have let the dystopian young adult fiction they read in their formative years infect their brain like a disease.
We are not going back to a hunter-gatherer society you (edit: deleted for "civility").
edit: And the entire "how do we craft a warning for the dumb future of idiotic humanity" makes even less sense when you spend even forty femtoseconds thinking about it. IF humanity has forgotten nuclear chemistry AND IF humanity has lost the ability to read warnings THEN it doesn't matter. They don't have the infrastructure needed to transport the waste long distances. Any pollution/harm will be localized to a deep-ass cave and the three people unfortunate enough to have opened the barrel. Fuck them. Who cares? It makes no difference.
Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.
It’s worth noting, however, that Sumerian was forgotten for nearly 2000 years: from ~200CE until the 1900s.
I agree it seems unlikely for a language to be completely forgotten again, we can’t be sure.
The rate of change of our technologies is accelerating wildly. I assume they were thinking that losing written language and replacing it with something we haven't invented yet would be a perfectly plausible evolutionary path. Whoever lives there 10,000 years from now might be a distant descendant of our civilization and, if we are optimistic, will be to us what we are to cavemen. A couple revolutions and they might even not remember we existed. Or have misconceptions about us that can hurt them - let's say they think the radioactive site is one of the cities we lived during an ice age. They might also be completely alien to the idea of industrial scale nuclear fission - because they have been using fusion for so long, and because fission existed only for a short hundred years or so - radioactive waste might be not on their top 50 guesses as for why did we build that place.
> I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on.
Looks like a worst case scenario - civilizational collapse, loss of technology and historical records... If we assume the happy path, we don't need to do anything - we can even assume they'll be able to burn all the high-grade waste in MSRs in the next 100 years and be done with that.
> Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.
Because caring for others is a hallmark of our civilization, and because we know the damage those materials can cause to our descendants and because we assume they'll be like us, we empathize with them.
We don't do that anymore. We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years. That isn't misanthropic doomsday fetishism, that's happening right now.
So there goes a lot of information. Nobody is going to see that negative Yelp I left of Knott's Berry Farm, and everybody is going to have to relearn how to build anything like we have today.
What about energy? Most of it still relies on non-renewable resources that are getting harder and harder to extract. If we ever did have a global collapse, say due to nuclear war, conventional war, a lucky solar flare or gamma ray burst, covid done right, an ice age, asteroid collision, what have you, we won't have many pitch springs just leaking fuel all over for us to burn like we did last time. Instead we'd have to find another way to bootstrap ourselves back to the level where powerful energy output is possible. There will still be plenty of petroleum under ground, we just won't know it's there.
So yeah I see lots of reasons why we'll lose the knowledge and ability to bring ourselves back to this level if there's a big enough catastrophe, and ten thousand years is a long time for something (or some things) to go down. One could even argue that the decline has already started, and we're going to go out with a long, drawn out whimper.
But in your favor I think we're forgetting that humans have been and always will be tough, curious assholes, so honestly centralizing our nuclear waste, sealing it up, and leaving it in a mountain is way above the bar we normally set for ourselves. It might kill a few of our future cave-people, but eventually they'll put up their own signs and eventually figure out how to weaponize it.
There are over 3,000 towns with a population over 10,000 people in the US. Any random Middle school or Highschool library in those towns would be more than enough to give a future society an excellent grasp of modern science and engineering. There are also over 3,000 colleges in the US, whose libraries would expect to give advanced understanding.
Just because we now have unfathomably more information digitally than Sumerians ever had doesn’t mean we also don’t have unfathomably more information printed as well. If one set of encyclopedias in one grandma’s basement is found, that is more condensed knowledge than was produced by thousands of years of early societies.
"We are on the path to ruin. I have foreseen it. You are all blind sheep."
Bitch, humanity is fine. Get over yourself.
> 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't know what it is, they could be hurt by that.
This isn't even something to be concerned about. It already happened, to us. We got over it.
I beg to differ, there’s already one that will last 10,000 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
> 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.
Where is this hypothetical future society going to get their energy from? We have extracted the coal and oil fields that are easy to access already.
But for the case of industrial society at the tech level of 1800s and no knowledge there are things you can do too. Like make some of the bad stuff reachable with a bit less of an effort and allow people to figure it out by themselves. Our ancestors didn't all die due to bad mushrooms did they? So smart people will still be able to figure it out. Just give em a little help.
Mine all the galena and store it safely with the nuclear waste. Would save millions and millions of hypothetical lives.
You can also add arrows. I think arrows are probably understandable across cultures.
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't think there's a solution.
Except maybe not to produce dangerous material that lasts longer than human memory. But that's, well, you can read the first paragraph again.
The article mentions culture as the most enduring thing humans have created, in cases having lasted millenia, but I think instinct is even more basic and has been around about as long as we have. Cater to that.
I don't think skeletons is a deterrent, quite the opposite.
- Put a lock on it (make it hard to get to. Probably by just burying it very deep and destroying access to it)
- Make it boring to future people. Put household garbage on top of it.
People have to not want to get into it and any parent can tell you that saying 'no' to a toddler isn't nearly as effective as putting brussel sprouts in their path.
It is tempting to think that human civilisation shows basically the same characteristics as human babies - it will literally put anything it finds in its mouth unless you stop it!
An away team discovers a big glowing orb that attempts communication and soon after this communication members of the team die due to an unknown cause. They then go to huge efforts and great risk to interact with the big glowing orb (the bulk of the story). Then after many deaths when they finally study the retrieved big glowing orb under controlled conditions back at base they realise it's a fairly simple machine trying to communicate the equivalent of 'stay away'. It was a warning sign, the same as a skull and crossbones. The real danger was the area around it.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/interzone-magazine-242-2012-09-1...
If nothing else they appear to have microelectronics (e.g. video playback and displays). Manufacture of that requires knowledge of radiation because you need to keep the encapsulation material low-activity. Plus the general ideas behind semiconductors and microlithography are based on physics very close to the physics of ionising radiation (e.g. photoelectric effect) and you probably use D/EUV, X-rays and ion/electron beams somewhere in the process too.
The entropy arrow definition would have worked here.
There is no defense against human curiosity :)
It seems like a related phenomenon to "there's an XKCD about that"
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.
https://youtu.be/KHY13PCeSxc?t=46
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maralinga#Nuclear_tests_and_cl...
They needed to do much better.
It's more about visual markings.
Do you consider those signs to be "communication methods"? They used visual markings.
Didn't realize it. The wikipedia page doesn't seem to cover that and youtube link is broken.
That challenge aside some would say it was a cursory and very much token effort as at that time in history indigenous Australians were considered to be part of the fauna of the unihabited Terra Nullus with no rights other than some use as test subjects for the effects of the new toy.
Probably worth mentioning they also dusted Adelaide with fallout including a young Tony Blair, a future UK Prime Minister.
But very much worse near ground zero.
Re: youtube link - that's just to a 1986 song about the testing from Gossip by Paul Kelly - I dare say it's "broken" due to geo-locking (it works fine here in AU) - https://www.paulkelly.com.au/lyric/maralinga-rainy-land/
Yes, song is likely geo-locked, but youtube just gives vague "video not available". Weird, it's usually more generous on error messages.
So pretty useless overall.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sounds_of_Eart...
[1] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-ha...
Bad idea anyway, you want geological stability and either low moisture or clay sealing. There are several good places, that are more than big enough, but putting waste everywhere would be stupid. At that point just store in dry casks like we do now.
Have panels that define arrows using increasing entropy. It's really is almost universal.
You could make a stylized arrow in addition to that, made of dots. The base of the arrow would be smaller with tighter packed dots, and as you progress along to the tip they'd be more spread out. The tip end would be larger than the base.
Then you'd use that stylized arrow for everything in the message. Make sure it's used the same way in all the comics, including the entropy one.
I am still a fan of vitrification and dumping the end results along the subduction zone of a tectonic plate, myself.
Has a very different meaning it drawn left-to-right and they read it right-to-left.
That's the entire point of defining the arrows using entropy.
Assuming the payload is well protected even if a rocket blew up in space/fell back to Earth. Too much weight to carry?
- the sun is one of the most expensive destinations in the solar system, in terms of energy budget
- underground, on the moon, even Pluto or interstellar space, would be cheaper
- very extensive & well engineered shielding would be needed to protect against release in case of a launch mishap, but once you've encapsulated it that thoroughly, it's actually safe to keep basically anywhere, & there's little point actually launching it
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.
"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"
If you follow the link, you find gems such as
"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."
Given that we can't even keep such facilities safe while they're staffed and operated with the sole goal of providing safe storage, it seems pretty clear that waste storage is not, as nuclear power proponents like to claim, a "solved problem", and is in fact most likely unsolveable.
Nuclear technology is not, never was, and never will be safe. Because people are fallible, stupid and greedy.
> CEMRC's independent monitoring data shows that except for the brief detection of americium and plutonium in the nearby ambient air samplers, there is no persistent contamination and no lasting increase in radiological contaminants near WIPP that can be attributed to the 2014 radiation release.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02659...
Specifically, vastly more radiation is released by coal plants and yet more is included via ash into civil building materials.
It also reopened in 2017 and the "bypass" was a leak around a filter, not deliberate misconfiguration like it sounds in the article, and exposure was within limits and on the scale of chest x-rays at the maximum.
Also it's only possible for the currently open "panels" to be connected to the ventilation system. Once they're sealed they're no longer able to vent to the surface at all, so it's a failure mode that is mostly irrelevant to long term storage. A additional deliberate feature of the site is that the salt is self-sealing.
For any "mission zero" system, there will be scathing reports about process flaws afterwards, because any mistake at all is unacceptable. But this doesn't actually translate into a major harm. In this case, there was a vehicle fire that damaged equipment, a breached barrel due to a mistake in filling it with the wrong cat litter, and a filter leak, and an entire "comedy" of other poor processes in place and yet the effect was undetectable outside within months (and that's really saying something for radiation detection). Sounds like it worked pretty well to me, to be honest. It's pretty much the worst possible case, short of actually setting off a bomb in there. The really high level material isn't packed into these kinds of barrels or is dispersible either - it's in solid form.
There'd be similar reports about "never events" when a plane wheel falls off and the plane crash lands with no injuries. Should it ever have happened? No. We there bad processes at play? Presumably. Can we learn and improve? Yes. Should we conclude air travel is a non-starter? No. And a plane crash would easily kill hundreds, far more than any nuclear waste release from such a site ever could even in the absolute worst of the worst cases.
I think you're lacking imagination here. The Asse II mine in Germany[1] is in danger of getting flooded, which could release large amounts of radioactive material into the groundwater.
Wrong. It was a political decision by the GREEN party to make a lot of fuss and try to dig it up again for extra political points
Check this recommendation out by the actual experts of the radiation protection commission:
https://www.ssk.de/SharedDocs/Beratungsergebnisse/DE/2016/20...
> Four of the five assessment fields (safety during the operating phase, environmental effects in the event of an uncontrollable inflow of solution, feasibility and time requirements) indicated that there was a clear benefit to retaining the radioactive waste in the Asse II mine rather than retrieving it.
And only anti-nuclear NGOs with flawed estimates think it there would be enough radiactive material released to be of danger
> Both estimates assume, for example, that after an uncontrollable inflow of solution, the radionuclides present in the waste will fully dissolve in the inflow water and then be squeezed out into the hydrosphere and biosphere as a result of convergence and gas formation in the mine. However, the estimates fail to take into account the solubility limits in the saline solution and drinking water, both of which have a significant effect on the result, and also omit the sorption effects that occur when passing through the overburden. They also fail to consider the fact that only a very small proportion of the uranium and thorium is soluble; otherwise the solubility limit of uranium and thorium would be exceeded in the saline solution.
...
> As a result, the SSK holds the view that an uncontrollable inflow of solution does not represent a hazard to the public
The green party is just trying to try to get the country to stay in fear of nuclear energy, so their favorite policy (i.e. shutting down nuclear power plants) can stay.
People get lazy and complacent even if well-compensated, even if well-rested thanks to proper staffing, and even if everyone involved fully believes in their mission. But each of those can mitigate against that risk.
On the other hand, if it’s a (typical) underpaid understaffed project to which people are assigned, you’re in for a world of hurt.
The idea discussed in the article is how do we make a sign which can even be understood in 10,000 years? They need to understand we are saying "bad, stay away" in order for them to even know if they disrespect it. There is a risk they think we're saying "this is great, come and see!"
> That bound to create a religion/cult and that would probably cause much greater harm to that society.
Sure, it could start something harmful to society. But what if there is no warning at all? They're just as likely to start their own religion which says they should spread this stuff everywhere, far across the planet. Which could render much of Earth uninhabitable. Seems worth the risk of creating a "fear of radiation" religion, to save the Earth and life itself.
Sounds like the situation when the aquatic apes uncovered Shinkolobwe and Oklo.
If you go deeper you get sicker, and you find there is an intensity indicator with the next level filled in.
Like if the structure itself will be there in 10,000 years, then making part of that structure protrude to the surface with some sort of intensity indicator that changes along its depth, as graduated exposure to radiation increases, should be pretty clear.
Recovery from Mild Symptoms
At a dose of 0.5–1 Sv, symptoms such as nausea, fatigue, and possibly mild skin reddening may appear within a few hours to a day after exposure.
Recovery is likely within days to weeks as long as there is no further radiation exposure and the total dose does not exceed the body's capacity to repair cellular damage.
----
But then it's just a machine so obviously one should consult a nuclear physicist before actually implementing this in a multi-millenia nuclear waste containment site
