
Ten Thousand Years - ZeljkoS
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
======
kevinconroy
Q: Why not just bury it deep enough so that no one can dig it up?

A tl:dr; Earthquakes and rain.

A: If you bury drums of radioactive material you want to make sure that they
stay sealed. However, on a 10,000 year time span, you cannot assume much. A
very strong drum right now could be very weak in 5,000 years. Or, with one
strong earthquake 2,000 years from now, it could crush the drums you've buried
deep in the desert. As rainfall seems from the surface and into the water
table, it will pull the radioactive material with it, then making the water
supply unsafe.

Yucca Mountain was a popular site for a long time because it's a deep salt
mine. Salt mines are interesting because it means that it's been impossible
for water to flow thru them for millennia, which is the time scale you're
concerned about here. From an engineering stand point, Yucca Mountain was just
about the perfect solution, but it got killed politically because being 100
miles away from Las Vegas was "too close" for elected officials to stomach.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository)

Although the design questions are fascinating, the bigger issue that we need
somewhere to store all of the nuclear waste. It's actually sitting in a
variety of temporary facilities right now that aren't as safe as WIPP or Yucca
mountain simply because it's very hard to get politicians to agree whose
backyard gets to be the forever home for our spent fuel rods.

Source: My father has spent the last 20 years of his career with the
Department of Transportation and Department of Energy working with
transportation of hazardous and nuclear waste and took trips out to Yucca
Mountain and WIPP.

~~~
sliverstorm
_It 's actually sitting in a variety of temporary facilities right now that
aren't as safe..._

My favorite kind of result. Much like how "tree huggers" celebrate blocking a
nuclear reactor or bird-killing wind farm, and as a result the old sooty coal
plant keeps running instead. Some victory. Some progress.

Sidenote, I'm sometimes a little befuddled that we would be afraid of putting
radioactive material in the ground. The ground is already full of the stuff,
and we don't spend much time worrying about an earthquake spitting up a
boulder of yellow cake in our backyards. Ok, the concentration is different,
but sometimes it seems like worrying about putting salt in the oceans.

~~~
o_brown
The public perception of the dangers of anything radioactive is quite
exaggerated, the politicians in these cases are only representing the views of
their constituents. Having said that, I don't think you can reduce the
argument to something as simple as salt in an ocean. Like you (almost) said,
the concentrations are extremely different, particularly if something goes
wrong with the containers in the millennia they are buried for.

[http://xkcd.com/radiation/](http://xkcd.com/radiation/)

Not entirely related, but an interesting read:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident)

~~~
dredmorbius
"The public perception of the dangers of anything radioactive is quite
exaggerated."

Not when you bring the timescales into account, recognize that you'd have to
scale operations up massively from present levels (15,000 or so plants vs. the
436 presently operating in the world). This would mean commissioning and
decommissioning about a plant _per day_.

Add to this questions over fuel availability (known reserves are good for
about 80 years at present levels of use, 6 if used for _all_ human energy
needs), and the need to find some way for creating transport and storage
fuels, and nuclear is at best a small part of a much larger energy solution.

------
Houshalter
I actually read the paper this article is summarizing, and it's incredibly
interesting. I can't find it anymore, but I did find this excerpt:

>The panel roughly defined the intended message with the following:

This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention
to it!Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be
a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated
here... nothing valued is here.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about
danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center... the
center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place
physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

~~~
Pirate-of-SV
> ...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

Sounds like a great place to hide a treasure.

~~~
Balgair
or a weapon. Just think of what a Genghis or Cesar would have done with such a
thing, especially if he had no idea of what the long term effects were. I
think labeling the stuff is too dangerous as well, politicians can get their
hands on the stuff. It's better to just bury it, as safely as possible, and
then remove all outside traces of existence.

~~~
krisgee
>It's better to just bury it, as safely as possible, and then remove all
outside traces of existence.

Seems quite rude to leave unmarked radioactive waste lying around where future
people might stumble over it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I side with curtis here[0]. If you burry this stuff deep enough in sealed
containers, using best tech available, then (barring any massive geological
changes) the only way for someone to stumble over it is if they have
technological capabilities comparable to ours.

[0] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8091034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8091034)

~~~
krisgee
Yes and as a person in a culture with technology comparable to ours it seems
like, miners for instance would be pretty ticked off if they were falling into
old pits of unmarked radioactive waste all the time.

------
curtis
It seems to me that if you're going to bury nuclear waste then you just need
to bury it deep enough. The idea is that any future humans even capable of
digging the material up wouldn't need any signs to tell them the material was
dangerous. Instead, they be sufficiently technologically advanced that they
could figure this out for themselves.

~~~
jtheory
I think this is part of the best answer.

Find a place where there's nothing of value under the surface (that we can
think of), bury it really friggin' deep, and then put the warnings in a layer
of, I don't know, engraved gravel about 100M above it, just in case anyone
ever _does_ dig there. In case the warning might help.

And don't put anything on the surface that'll outlast the people who can
understand what's down there.

All of these signs, finding clear ways to say "bad stuff below" \-- they're
only helpful if the future people are inclined to assume the immensely-
powerful, immensely wealthy, long-dead writer is being _honest_. Why in the
world would they assume that?

Just imagine future-Indiana-Jones finding those signs, left by a long-dead
civilization, and deciphering them. Does he say "oh, wait -- this looks
dangerous; never mind then"? Of course not; instead he rounds up a digging
party of locals, dodging future-Nazis, and after a harrowing adventure the Ark
of the Covenant is finally unearthed -- but when the future-Nazis open it up
the cavern, nothing seems to happen (but they oddly feel a bit warm), and then
lots & lots of people die slow deaths (including future-Indy, sorry) as they
trundle out the valuable "junk of the ancients" to be sold and traded far &
wide.

------
Jun8
If you want to see the futility of external marking schemes consider the case
of Gobekli Tepe
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe))
dating to 10th-8th millennium BCE. This place has inteersting structures and
reliefs of mostly animals that are not currently understood. What's more:

"The site was deliberately backfilled sometime after 8000 BCE: the buildings
were buried under debris, mostly flint gravel, stone tools, and animal bones
that must have been imported from elsewhere."

The reason for filling it up, which probably took enormous resources at the
time, is unknown. Why would they bury the site? Maybe something "bad" is
buried there. But we know that anything that can harm us now wouldn't be
technologically possible 10k years ago. Still ...

And you know what: We're digging it up!

~~~
s_q_b
Good examples of the futility of such a project are the tsunami stones of
Japan. There are hundreds of them dating back centuries, some of which quite
literally say "Do not build your homes below this line. Giant waves
occasionally destroy everything closer to the sea." We even knew the meaning
of these markers, and still chose to ignore them.

------
dhruval
We are not giving humanity enough credit here. The standard nuclear hazard
symbol would suffice.

Even assuming there is some sort of civilization ending event, and specific
knowledge of nuclear technology disappears.

People are certainly smart enough to recognize a pattern of distinctive
symbolism and learn to associate it with danger over time.

A good example is cargo cults that sprung up in the Pacific Islands in WW2.
Groups of people without much previous contact with modern civilization learnt
to associated 'airplanes' dropping aid supplies with food. Despite having no
previous knowledge of what planes are and how they function.

I imagine future primitive cultures would learn to associate the nuclear
hazard symbol with illness in a similar manner. And would probably end up
constructing their own mythical narratives around the symbols.

~~~
objclxt
> _We are not giving humanity enough credit here. The standard nuclear hazard
> symbol would suffice._

Symbols are far, far less translatable than words. We were unable to translate
hieroglyphs with any real success until the Rosetta Stone was discovered, and
the pictograms used could be matched back with known writing systems.

There are symbols today that you and I would instantly recognize but will be
meaningless to a child born tomorrow (the floppy disk icon, for example).
Symbols and pictograms can be repurposed and reused: indeed, the article gives
the example of the skull and crossbones, which has significantly changed
meaning over four hundred years.

The cargo cults you're talking about have come about in years and decades, not
millennia. The timescales being talked about here are far, far different. If
anything, you're not giving humanity enough credit for its ability to evolve
over the next 10,000 years.

~~~
dhruval
You have misunderstood.

Once some individual humans get sick or die. Even very primitive human
cultures in the vicinity of nuclear sites would very quickly notice a pattern.
Any symbol that was used consistently near nuclear sites would be come to be
associated with danger.

In a very primitive cultures with no knowledge of science, visiting the sites
with these symbols would end up becoming some sort of religious taboo.

The argument isn't the the meanings of symbols can't change. But rather that
humans are smart enough to notice patterns and communicate them with others.

------
PeterisP
This feels like overkill. What warning signs do naturally occuring underground
deposits of radioactive or highly poisonous minerals have?

Any hypothetical future large-scale miner would have the technological
capacity to detect danger and avoid an ecological catastrophe - it's not like
that you suddenly go from soil to stores of uranium, the existane of a
facility is rather obvious.

A hypothetical future band of explorers w/o capacity to detect radiation might
die, but not cause an ecological catastrophe. Death risk for such far-future
explorers exists in any abandoned facility, and is acceptable - deserves no
more attention than such risks caused by abandoned firearms/munitions,
structural integrity of those buildings, or risks of falling in concealed
holes there. A hundred thousand abandoned apartmentment buildings will kill
more explorers than such a buried waste storage facility.

~~~
Balgair
No, you are think about this the wrong way. You think that people will
obviously stay away from it, much as you would stay away from a rotting
corpse. Yes, mines may kill a lot of people, but you know that walking in. You
mention that any adequate miner will have a Geiger counter. You need
electricity for that, and an idea of not only atomic or chemical theory, but
sub-atomic theory. I'll remind that the Great Wall of China was built with
much much less and is much less than 10k years old.

Also, you think that once people figured out that the metal cans buried deep
(in what may or may not be a desert in 10k years) cause death quickly, that
they would run away. History has proven this many times not to be the case.
Disease is a similar threat to people like radiation. It moves unseen, until
recently, it's dynamics were a mystery. The cause is death or sever scarring
and discomfort in extreme cases, it is debilitating and painful and very
confusing. Often times, the cures were random attempts that may have made
things worse.

What did we do with this threat? Well, the Indians may have a word with you
about infected blankets. Or besieged castles that had rotting bodies thrown
into them via catapult. Disease has been used as a weapon for nearly forever.

What make anyone think that in 7k years another Genghis or Alexander wont use
the magic death barrels to invade Nuevo Houston? The issue is that with
disease, your crops were still fine, you water was not glowing, your cows
would still eat. With radiation, you don't get those things. The disease
parallel break down into a plague of Moses type scenario, only it won't go
away.

And that's if we just devolve into medieval savages again. Imagine what a
person with some atomic theory could do with this stuff. The horror is
unimaginable. At the end of the day, this stuff has to be very well taken care
of/totally forgotten. There are no go betweens really. And since life and
history rarely if ever forget about a potential weapon, I got bad news.

~~~
hliyan
There is another possibility we should consider: a society that has retained
the capacity to operate and maintain technology, but not create or understand
it. We seem to be increasingly moving toward such an era -- I don't have
numbers, but I think the ratio of people who understand technology versus
those who use them has been gradually dropping over the past fifty years,
mainly because more and more people are using technology and the technology is
becoming automated. A scientifically illiterate society with giant mining
machines is not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

~~~
Balgair
I've been working with a Kiwi for a bit now. He grew up on the only 'computer'
in NZ back in the 70's, a punch card machine that he had to actually fight
(with real fists he says) to use time on. This guy has seen the digital
revolution up close.

There was an article on HN a while back that mentioned the #1 programming
language being taught today was Python. I told the Kiwi this and he just
sighed. Python is a 'batteries included' type language. You don't have to
really worry about any memory issues, any special loops that will go to
infinity, none of the real stuff. Yes, it teaches you the 'idea' of
programming, but programming is much more than an idea, it is a set of
instructions you send to an electrical machine to preform a task. If you take
away the entirety of the actual physical world, you have done the kids a
disservice. Programming, real programming, is not supposed to be easy.

I'll mention the Kiwi was here in the US on a work holiday. I was trying to
get a chip working (yes, with actual registers) and spent ~6 months on it. The
Kiwi, I kid you not, spent about 3 hours. The guy really did know his stuff.

~~~
drdaeman
> none of the real stuff

It's really good to know how things works underneath, but insisting that
constantly messing with low-level details is "real" programming (and implying
high-level details aren't "real") is weird. Both aspects - high and low-level
- are important.

Beginners are taught high-level languages because it's easy to start with -
one could create something useful without learning lots of things. If they
care about their craft, eventually they will learn all the gory details of the
stack underneath down to bare metal - an occasions (bugs, weird behaviors or
just curiosity) where, say, Python programmer is invited to go and peek under
the hood of their interpreter or libc or kernel or even hardware happens every
now and then.

Unless all that pythonista's doing is bashing some boring CRUDs with Django.
Then, a knowledge of low-level stuff seems almost unnecessary. But, hey,
someone has to do that kind of programming, too.

------
rbanffy
We may eventually need to burry something nasty and difficult to destroy, but
I would assume that long before nuclear waste storage becomes a cultural
problem, we will have figured out how to build an MSR that can burn most of
that stuff. And, when that happens, whatever's left can be safely kept for a
much shorter time.

Instead of thinking about the interesting problem of keeping the next
civilization safe, could we direct some more effort to the boring problem of
spent fuel reprocessing?

~~~
adrianN
I agree with this. The current problem with nuclear waste is mostly political.
We don't actually want to bury that stuff to far away, because it's a valuable
source of fuel once we have the political will to use it. Current plants
extract only a tiny fraction of the usable energy from their fuel.

~~~
mmcconnell1618
I imagine future tech may turn nuclear waste into a treasure chest of energy.
We dig up oil today to extract energy and a waste dump would provide highly
concentrated, long lasting material to mine. Unsafe for today's tech but
highly valuable in years to come.

------
mjn
A tangential nitpick, but perhaps interesting from a history-of-symbols
perspective:

 _...the skull and crossbones permeated culture as a symbol of danger. By the
late 1800s, it was starting to be used as a symbol for poison. Then in the
1940s, the Nazis adopted it for their SS death head divisions._

The chronology here is a bit off: The death's head was not introduced into the
German military by the Nazis, but by the Prussians, in the early 1800s. It was
then used periodically by both the Prussians and later Imperial Germany.
Following the fall of the Kaiser, it was used by the Freikorps (right-wing
paramilitaries) during the Weimar Republic. And finally by the SS. The Nazis
did introduce some new symbols (especially some runic and pagan stuff that the
SS liked), but the _totenkopf_ is a classic symbol of German militarism that
they merely continued, as part of their glorification of Imperial Germany and
especially the Freikorps.

------
richardw
There's almost no message you could put there that would stop humans from
wanting to take a look. If there were warning signs on the pyramids, would we
have stayed out?

"They kept their greatest treasures here and left these warnings so their
enemies would stay out".

"How bad could it be? Surely we're advanced enough to open it! We have spears,
nothing could harm us".

"This stuff is great. Put it on your arrows. Put it under the bed of your
enemy".

------
blaze33
There's a documentary called Into Eternity[1] following the construction of
the Onkalo waste repository in Finland which is designed to last 100000 years.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_%28film%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_%28film%29)

~~~
ejr
It's on YouTube for anyone curious
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sqFyCHcbg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sqFyCHcbg)

~~~
blaze33
Thanks! Jump to 40' for the "warning the future" chapter:
[http://youtu.be/y4sqFyCHcbg?t=39m53s](http://youtu.be/y4sqFyCHcbg?t=39m53s)

------
hliyan
If the symbols are the problem, why not discard them entirely and demonstrate
the actual danger in increments? What if we create concentric rings of
gradually lower levels of radiation around the site? The closer you approach,
the more you notice the effects of radiation -- lack of bio-matter in the
soil, radiation sickness, etc. Of course, it won't be a zero-casualty
solution. A few people might become sick or die by the time they figure out
the danger. But for a 10,000 period, (high probability * low exposure) seems
better than (low probability * catastrophic exposure).

~~~
maaku
Because you don't notice the effects of radiation until it is way way way too
late

------
justinpombrio
The "sequence of events" seemed pretty solid. I like how the tree grows
between the 2nd and 3rd panel, and actually makes the order you read them in
unambiguous.

It passes the alien test: if humans were exploring an alien world, and came
across those pictures, but they were in circles instead of boxes and showed
aliens instead of humans, and the trees were instead some plant that grew
there, and the panels were shown right-to-left instead of top-to-bottom, and
the radioactive symbol was replaced with some other symbol, I think a
thoughtful human would _still_ understand.

~~~
frooxie
It could be a different tree, or the person might just have moved closer to it
(the radioactive stuff isn't there anymore, which supports this reading). But
I think you could create some more unambiguously unidirectional sequence;
perhaps something falling or breaking?

~~~
jtheory
> It could be a different tree, or the person might just have moved closer to
> it

I think the flowers are there to address these two problems -- though that's
an odd choice, because normally the flowers would change much faster than the
tree.

------
arghbleargh
It might not be an accurate comparison to consider how language has been lost
in the past 10,000 years to predict how much will be lost in the next 10,000.
Surely nowadays we leave behind many more artifacts than before, and our
literacy rate is much higher. Of course there is always the possibility of a
catastrophic event, but even in that case it seems unlikely that future humans
won't be able to reconstruct most of the English language, unless the event is
so catastrophic that digging up nuclear waste is the least of your worries.

------
rtpg
We seem to have this huge fear of humanity collectively forgetting things,
this idea that has seeped into so much fiction as well, but is it really
founded?

Even before digital storage and the like, is there really any relevant
information that has been lost in the past 150 years? And as to the whole
"language barrier" thing, we figured out hieroglyphs with a much smaller
corpus.

Hell, we know about the meaning of loads of sites from over a thousand years
ago.

I feel like we'll have ways of knowing what the site contains forever.

~~~
robbles
One problem with modern digital storage is the lifespan of the storage medium.
Compact discs only last about 10 years, and the "longer-term" magnetic tapes
are not much better at about 20-30 years [1].

It seems like we've made the tradeoff towards increased convenience of access
vs. reliability, not the other way around. Hopefully new tech is developed
that reverses this at some point, without relying on higher-level systems
built on top of unreliable media (e.g. Amazon Glacier, Archive.org, etc.)

[1] [http://sportsvideo.org/main/files/2010/08/video-tape-
white-p...](http://sportsvideo.org/main/files/2010/08/video-tape-white-
paper.pdf)

~~~
Dylan16807
A nice pressed disc using a metal that doesn't corrode isn't going to go
anywhere for a long time.

------
parm289
Why don't we launch the nuclear waste into deep space? Seems like that would
avoid the burial problem described here, and since space is mostly, well,
empty space, wouldn't inflict much harm to other bodies.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
The risks associated with a launch accident are far too high.

I googled a little to find a reliable set of launch success statistics but
found nothing I was willing to include herein (it's Sunday morning, I got up
late and am lazy right now), but overall success rates are in the high 80% to
mid 90%. Failing to launch a satellite is one thing, having radioactive
material spread atmospherically by a launch failure is quite another.

Then there's the cost. Yeah, that would be high. Especially with adding
containers to protect against the risk described above.

------
NoMoreNicksLeft
This endeavor misses the whole point. There are two possibilities for 10,000
years from now.

1\. Humanity is extinct. 2\. Humanity is extant.

The first possibility means we can ignore any need for markers, let's focus on
the second.

If people are still around, there are two possibilities.

1\. They still understand radioactivity enough to detect it beforehand, or to
recognize it after it has made people sick. 2\. People have no sophisticated
culture that can understand radioactivity.

Only if the latter is true, would any warnings be necessary.

If this is the case, what obligation do we have to those people? Literally any
action we perform right now could lead to the eventual death of some arbitrary
person thousands of years in the future. Butterfly effect and all that.

Is this place going to make the human race extinct? Possible, but unlikely. So
we're talking about killing a few hundred people in the next few million
years, supposing there is some sort of Hollywood-esque unfolding of history
with its apocalypse and long-haired swordsmen going on quests in the
aftermath.

We already do our nuclear (and other) engineering knowing that people are
going to get killed. Hell, when we build bridges, we know that statistically
one or two will be killed. And when a nuclear power plant is built, it's even
bigger... someone will likely be killed. Over so many years of operation,
someone will be killed (and not necessarily from some Three Mile Island thing,
a person will be stressed out in the office and have a heart attack).

So if in the span of 10,000 years some savage dumbasses who fucked up and
wrecked civilization die of radiation poisoning, what's the big fucking deal?
Refusing to deal with our need for nuclear power, refusing to build the waste
disposal facilities that such needs because we can't come up with some
universal symbology to mark it as a dangerous place... that might be the
reason that technological civilization does drop dead.

------
ejr
I wonder if we can apply the same lines to map English as we do other
languages. English, largely through conquest and trade, has become the de
facto language of technology and science, much as Latin was in its heyday. But
we know Latin was exclusionary as the Christian clergy and the erudite were
the most fluent in it. English, by contrast has democratised access to the
common folk.

It was even in use in the Star Trek universe aboard Federation ships, but that
may not be too unrealistic. English, I mean, not the aliens or warp drive.

~~~
krisgee
>English, largely through conquest and trade, has become the de facto language
of technology and science

250 years ago you could have said similar things about French. These things
are fleeting at geological timescales.

I'm not really sure we could do _anything_ that would stop humans from trying
to bust in and honestly the more elaborate our warnings the more people will
want to see what we were trying to hide. I mean consider the (false but
useful) Curse of King Tut. Big letters say "Sickness and death will come to
all who try to enter this place" what's your first reaction? To try and get in
there and see what the ancient people were hiding.

Anyway all this _does_ give some excellent ideas for a sort of D&D-esque game
where everyone dies at the end of the dungeon because all the warnings were
true and it was just a really old toxic waste dump.

~~~
ejr
That's a very bleak and, unfortunately, accurate observation. Our curiosity
that has given rise to such greatness may well be the double-edged sword of
our undoing.

As horrible as this may sound, the best we can hope for is the radiation will
act quickly so those venturing in will provide ample examples to those that
didn't.

~~~
krisgee
>As horrible as this may sound, the best we can hope for is the radiation will
act quickly so those venturing in will provide ample examples to those that
didn't.

Oh man so this crazy ancient tomb has this magical force that kills everyone
that goes in. I heard the last team made it further than everyone else before
it and the last guy stumbled out with all these ancient artifacts!

------
omegant
It just amazes me how most comments and even the project itself is based on
the idea that in 10000 years civilization will be much inferior than current
ones. I know you have to prepare for the worst case scenario, and that's how
it must be planed, but still seems that our imagination runs wild.

Some comments talk about it, but I think the reason is missing. ANY kind of
sign, text, symbol, phenomenon, structure, will only draw attention. No matter
how dangerous it seems, people will be attracted to the mystery. The more
dangerous it seems the more they'll get attracted to it. It´s about attention
and the lack of it.

The best option is to make it seem like nothing it's there, no buildings, no
signs, anything. Just bury it deep, restore the natural environment, create a
natural park (restricted if you want while the memory stands) and if possible
remove all economic incentives close to the park, so the population is reduced
overtime, ideally till 0.

Another option I haven't seen mentioned could be to bury it in a geological
subduction zone (at considerable deeps of course), so over time all the
radiation gets dragged deep inside the earth by the tectonic movement. This
would cover the 200000 years problem I guess. I don't know if there is such a
zone that could be useful or safe enough for this, or if the geological tempo
is fast enough to be of any use.

Edit: Iphone typos, and some editing for clarity.

------
jqm
I actually live about 100 miles north of the WIPP site. I'm fairly unconcerned
about danger.

This area was an inland sea ~250 million years ago (the continents were
gathered together in Pangaea at the time). The salt deposits in the mine that
WIPP occupies are precipitate from this sea drying down and are very deep.

If the site were collapsed (which I understand it will be at some point)
people with primitive tools won't be digging it back up. It is simply too
deep. It isn't going to erode down to the level they can either in any
reasonable period of time....i.e. millions of years. A society technologically
advanced to dig this stuff up presumably will be aware of some history and/or
be able to decipher what is written on the marker. Unless civilization
disappears in which case it will take a long time to re-develop the technology
needed to dig that deep starting from ground zero.

Also... people need a reason to go to great effort. I just don't see future
people digging that far in the earth out of curiosity and with no immediate
economic benefit.

But just in case.... if you need a marker to discourage them, how about
instead of abstract symbols we put some pictures of the effects of radiation
on humans with the material containers notably present in the picture?

The one thing I guess that could become an issue is the amount of oil well
activity in the area. It is geologically stable, there are no earthquakes, but
maybe fracking could change that. I hope they are taking future fracking into
account in their equations.

------
gdubs
I just remembered that there's an excellent Star Trek that deals with
essentially this problem. [1]

Data gets amnesia and exposes a whole society to nuclear material, and as the
audience you watch helplessly as the villagers fail to recognize the terror
associated with the nuclear hazard symbol.

1:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thine_Own_Self](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thine_Own_Self)

------
jimworm
Physical effects could be used in combination with symbols.

The current trefoil is enough to warn the people of today, so that should
continue to be used.

If knowledge of the trefoil is lost, however, the actual radiation would serve
as a warning. Much smaller, but still dangerous quantities of waste could be
stored around the world, with just enough of a barrier around it to remain
confined while curious individuals exploring around it would contract
radiation sickness, but survive for long enough to warn others about the
danger and the associated trefoil symbol.

The main storage area should have much bigger versions of the trefoil, but not
so big that a person would lose perspective and not know what they're looking
at. The size should convey to anybody who knows the meaning of the symbol that
this is serious business.

If the smaller quantities of waste are abundant and accessible enough, and the
main storage area inaccessible enough, then it would be unlikely for anyone to
come across the main storage area before learning the meaning of the symbol.

~~~
notahacker
It took decades for the very direct and tangible links between deliberate,
sustained exposure to asbestos and tobacco and subsequent terminal illness to
be widely understood. I see little reason for greater confidence in the
ability of future explorers to deduce and communicate the link between their
mystery ailment and a particular abstract decoration found on one of the sites
they visited.

If the smaller quantities of waste are abundant and accessible enough, many
more people will die unnecessarily.

------
revelation
How did humans know ionizing radiation was harmful (to them, anyway)?

And no, the answer is not "a previous iteration of intelligent life left them
dubious comics, sounds and symbols".

Any life form advanced enough to be bothered by the effects of nuclear waste
will presumably be capable of _learning_.

~~~
scott_s
We learned the hard way: by _people dying_. They're trying to avoid a future
people, who may have forgotten what we learned, from learning it the hard way.
Again.

------
rdl
I think there are two viable solutions here.

1) Reprocess high-level nuclear waste. Potentially build a storage facility
for 100-300 years (about the limit of what we can do using totally normal
techniques in technology and business/government, with minimal risk) to store
what we can't immediately use.

(Low level would still need to be dealt with, but for that you can go for
extreme dispersion or geologic storage or whatever, since the cost of things
going wrong is a lot lower.)

2) Subduction-zone storage; generally this requires putting waste under the
sea in an area like the zone off Vancouver, and having it slip into the
mantle.

------
tormeh
Honestly I would go for the "man impaled on spike" idea. If they sacrifice
like that to the gods in the future then they deserve what's coming to them.

Combine that with things that we have deep evolved fears of: Snakes, spiders,
scorpions and others and I can't see why they would enter a site containing
statues of all things associated with death. Sure, an Indiana Jones or a
couple of hundred would die, but as long as the shielding is thin enough to
inflict a quick death I doubt many would try to copy them.

------
Symmetry
Of course we always want things to be as safe as possible, but the longer
lived an isotope is the less radioactive it is. At some point this waste is
going to be less dangerous than naturally occurring uranium deposits. Maybe
that is the 10,000 year mark they're shooting for and I'm just ignorant but if
it's only 100 or 1,000 years then it's possible we're being more paranoid
about this than is reasonable, especially since all of this material is
sitting in temporary storage now.

------
mesh
Extensive information on this here:

[http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...](http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm)

and the original call for submissions here (pdf):

[http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-
control.cgi/1992/92138...](http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-
control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf)

------
amass
The problem with the comic strip drawing is that it could be interpreted as
meaning things associated with the trefoil take away sickness and sadness if
you read the pictures in the wrong order. I don't think a growing tree is
strong enough to convey the correct order of the drawings. Inhabitants of the
future could just assume the trefoil-material has some negative effect on
trees as it heals the sick.

~~~
csandreasen
I didn't interpret those trees as growing myself. It looked to me like the
trees were far in the background and he moved towards them before collapsing.

What about numbering each panel in unary? While our current number systems
didn't exist 10,000 years ago, humans could presumably count and will retain
that capability in the future.

------
industriousthou
I'm sure I'm missing something here, but why can't we drill down in a
geologically stable area (like Australia) far below any water table and bury
it?

I'm imagining a bored out cylinder in solid bedrock just wide enough to stack
barrels made of some kind of space-age material, like 15,000' down.

I don't know much about the drilling tech, so it might be totally impossible.

------
cpeterso
James Lovelock, author of the "Gaia hypothesis", suggested dispersing
radioactive material over a large wilderness area. The effects in any location
would be lessened, animals can quickly adapt, and (for the wilderness
preservationists out there) few humans would want to develop that wilderness
area.

------
VMG
I'd like to point out that 99percentinvisible is an amazing podcast and
everybody should listen to it.

~~~
voltagex_
I thought the same, but after their cast on "Multiple Chemical Sensitivity"
I'm not so sure.

~~~
VMG
Haven't listened to that one yet.

It would be sad if they fell victim to pseudoscience, but most podcasts have
one of these episodes.

------
robbles
What's wrong with just a skull by itself?

Despite all the shift in cultural significance attached to skull&crossbones,
etc. that the article discussed, I don't see how any culture could interpret a
human skull by itself as anything other than a symbol of death.

~~~
mfenniak
The human skull does seem like a solid symbol of death, but that doesn't
prevent us from turning something like the Catacombs of Paris into a tourist
ground
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris)).
The intent here seems to require more than just a symbol of death.

------
timonv
Why don't we create a rosetta stone variant ourselves? Put up the same text in
the world's current major languages, I'd be curious to see if it would be
really undecryptable. Plus, we might be doing future historians a big favour.

------
agumonkey
As mentioned in the comments, people should watch 'onkalo into eternity'. This
is IRL science fiction (if that makes sense). Scifi-esque questions we're
dealing with now.

------
Thiz
DO NOT ENTER. RADIOACTIVE ZONE.

Write it in chinese and english.

It is more likely we will be speaking two or three major languages in ten
thousand years. The trend is toward unification.

~~~
krapp
Languages can evolve rapidly and unpredictably though, based on factors which
can't necessarily be predicted or controlled. What would people ten thousand
years in the future make of the word "radioactive" if modern technology and
scientific thought had been lost for millennia due to plague or a global
energy crisis, for instance? Bear in mind how much of our current store of
knowledge and culture is tied up in a relatively fragile, energy hungry
digital infrastructure and a constant supply of fossil fuels. In a few
centuries much of what we consider modern history might be a mostly blank page
to those who come after us.

------
artur_makly
at the rate we are going.. we wont be around by then. Has someone mapped a
extinction 'curve' rate? Factoring all the eco/nuclear/virus threats?

------
alexvr
'Ten thousand years that is a long time'

------
anarchy8
Why don't we eject it into space?

~~~
jloughry
Some people talk about "dropping it into the sun", but the energy required is
approximately more like "lifting it all the way up there". It takes a lot of
kW to push a dump truck full of nuclear waste up to six or seven miles a
second, and if something goes wrong, all that energy tends to go into
spreading everything around the landscape.

The explosion of a Delta II rocket in 1997 shows the amount of energy
released:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_aHEit-
SqA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_aHEit-SqA)

------
bsherrill
Build pyramids on top of it

------
autokad
skull and crossbones would have been a terrible idea, if i came accross such a
thing i would have thought i found black beard's treasure, or something

