

Stopping people from disturbing radioactive waste for 10,000 years - mhansen
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Anthro/Anth101/wipp.html

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DougWebb
Perhaps they should have included a nuclear engineer on the team, who could
have told them to use a breeder reactor to process the 'waste' into useful
energy so that the remainder would only be dangerous for a few hundred years
instead of 10,000. That would make storing it safely a much easier problem.

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fhars
I miss some discussion of human curiosity. Isn't a large part of contemporary
culture structured around stories of going past ominuous warnings to find the
arc of covenant/holy grail/amulet of yendor?

So what is the convincing argument that a _huge_ designed structure will not
trigger exactly the behaviour it is supposed to discourage? And even if the
political elites of a 10000AD culture believe the warnings they read in the
accepted translations of the inscriptions, who is going to stop a well
equipped fringe scientist of trying to prove these boring, timid bureaucrats
wrong?

~~~
karzeem
They note toward the end of the essay that the best deterrent may be the
illness suffered by the first explorers of the site and that in fact, that may
be a cheaper warning system than everything they've discussed building.

In any case, if we can make the arguably optimistic assumption that technology
won't suffer any major setbacks in the next 10,000 years, cultures at the end
of that time frame should have figured out how to safely explore a radioactive
waste site. Even we know how to do it today, if you count sending in robots as
exploration.

As the writers say, as long as the radioactivity stays contained, the damage
it can/will cause is relatively self-limiting.

~~~
delackner
Read more closely. Early in the paper they discuss that strong warnings might
go unheeded as the danger is far below ground. They then suggest that it might
be most effective to actually contaminate the surface level of the site with
low-levels of radioactive material so as to purposefully kill people that
invade the site. They then suggest doing calculations to see whether the
expected casualties over 10,000 years would be worth it. Icky but cold and
calculated thinking about a cold topic.

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ashleyw
I'm nowhere near as qualified as that team — but wouldn't it be better to not
mark it, at all?

Whatever landmark you place, people will explore. Whatever warnings you place,
people will ignore. At least with no markings, and the spot being remote like
in the middle of a desert or something, you've got a chance that nobody will
_ever_ find it.

And that's if future generations are somehow less smart than us, otherwise
they'll most likely know the human history, and still be able to measure
radioactivity anyway.

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lionhearted
Three thoughts:

First, what really fascinated me about the article was how it highlighted a
number of things so obvious about how we design things - with a focus on the
center and craftsmanship, for instance - that I'd never thought of quite that
way before. That was fantastic.

Second, I thought it was interesting that they were imagining apocalyptic-type
scenarios where all knowledge of the inscribed written languages are lost. I
suppose that's sensible if you're looking at a 10,000 year time horizon.

Third, while I learned a lot and was generally really impressed with this
piece, this line turned me off a lot:

> We can never know if we indeed have successfully communicated with our
> descendants 400 generations removed, but we can, in any case, perhaps convey
> an important message to ourselves.

That line came after talking about how the project is six times larger in
scale than the Pyramids were to build, and how to "to ensure the probability
of success, the WIPP marker undertaking will have to be one of the greatest
public works ventures in history."

And therein lies the problem - buried in a couple quick lines is a very
powerful secondary motivation of the authors of the spec. The go on for pages
with concrete details and supporting theory as if they're just trying to meet
requirements, only barely acknowledging that, "and hey, it might not work, but
we'll have done something impressive and made a statement in our own day and
age." This seems like the stuff that boondoggles are made of - propose a
seemingly functional process, while sneaking in, "...and regardless of if it
meets its goals, it'll sure be impressive and send a message."

~~~
eli
I think it's just a recognition that it might well be impossible to pull off.

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rms
My attempted title was "Message to 12,000 A.D.: This place is not a place of
honor."

Alternatively, see this breezier (but pretty good) summary:
[http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-
of-...](http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor)

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shalmanese
Whatever catastrophe that would lead to the eradication of knowledge of
English is going to kill a million times more people than the worst case
scenario of a nuclear waste exposure.

~~~
flipper
Maybe, but it could still be a pretty big number. And don't we owe it to our
descendants to warn them?

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wmf
Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773137>

