How To Build a Nuclear Warning For 10,000 Years' Time (bbc.com) 273
Faizdog writes (edited for clarity): The BBC has a fascinating story about the struggle we are facing today as we work on finding ways to warn future generations about nuclear waste dumps. How does language or knowledge survive over 300,000 years? Even today, only about 6% of the world's population recognizes the nuclear danger symbol, and we've forgotten the purpose of Stonehenge. Language, culture, history all change and are forgotten in a relatively short period of time on a nuclear scale. From a report: "This place is not a place of honor," reads the text. "No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger." It sounds like the kind of curse that you half-expect to find at the entrance to an ancient burial mound. But this message is intended to help mark the site of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) that has been built over 2,000 feet (610m) down through stable rocks beneath the desert of New Mexico. The huge complex of tunnels and caverns is designed to contain the US military's most dangerous nuclear waste. This waste will remain lethal longer than the 300,000 years Homo sapiens has walked across the surface of the planet. WIPP is currently the only licensed deep geological disposal repository in operation in the world. A similar facility should also open in Finland in the mid-2020s. When the facility is full sometime in the next 10 to 20 years, the caverns will be collapsed and sealed with concrete and soil. The sprawling complex of buildings that currently mark the site will be erased. In its place will be "our society's largest conscious attempt to communicate across the abyss of deep time."
Subduction zone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Subduction zone? (Score:5, Insightful)
A subduction zone is not something that you just dump something on, it's not a big truck. It's a loading dock. And if you don't understand, that loading dock can fill up and you need to wait for the big truck to take away your stuff.
With apologies to the late Ted Stevens.
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So, don't just dump it. Drill down a few hundred meters into the zone, then concrete over them. Since it is a conveyor belt down, all you're really worried about is making sure it doesn't come back up.
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Drill down dump the waste in the hole then concrete over them.
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Why not just put it into a subduction zone and let plate tectonics get rid of it for a few million years?
1. "10,000 years" is a total BS number. Nothing magical happens when waste is 10,000 years old.
2. Subduction zones move a few centimeters per year. So in 10,000 years, that is a few hundred meters. That is not enough to make a difference.
Radiation in waste diminishes quickly at first and then tapers. After about 500 years it is no more radioactive than the ore from which it was mined.
Drilling tech has improved enormously since Yucca Mountain was designed. So we drill down a few kilometers into deep r
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>1. "10,000 years" is a total BS number. Nothing magical happens when waste is 10,000 years old.
Sure it does - depending on the waste. Waste becomes less radioactive over time. At some point the radioactivity decays to the point that standing next to it won't kill you, which is pretty magical (in an "I'm not going to die (soon)" kind of way). 10,000 years seems a little optimistic for that, but a lot comes down to exactly what sort of waste you're burying, and how much unspent fuel you leave mixed in
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Radiation in waste diminishes quickly at first and then tapers. After about 500 years it is no more radioactive than the ore from which it was mined.
That is nonsense, and you know it. Why post this bullshit?
And even if it was true in the literal senses: uranium i not more radioactive than uranium ore, it is still deadly to inhale it or get it in any other way into your body.
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It is in no way nonsense, it is how physics works.
That doesn't mean you should sprinkle it on your breakfast cereal, but the same applies to natural rocks found out in the Arizona desert, which somehow didn't end the human race in spite of the lack of warning stickers.
Other notable cautions include not making toilet paper out of wildly growing poison ivy or dicing hemlock up into your vegetable soup. Some berries and mushrooms may be bad for you. Most do not have warning labels on them.
So realistically, the
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uranium i not more radioactive than uranium ore, it is still deadly to inhale it or get it in any other way into your body.
Not much more than any other heavy metal. I mean, it's industrial waste, and should be treated as such, but uranium is just not the issue here.
The issue is decay products that are biologically active (will be incorporated into new cells) and have moderate half-lives: thousands of years. Even the very low radioactivity of a material with a 10k year half-life can be deadly once incorporated into your body, and it will take a 100k years to stop being a problem.
Materials with a 5-year half life can be deadly
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Depends on the materials. U-235 has a fairly short half life (a few years). However its byproducts are far more stable and have half-lives in the timescale of thousands of years.
The 10,000 year thing is not magic, but the scope of the problem is. You're designing a warning for someone far in the future. You won't know if they speak English or if English is even
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You're designing a prop. 64 warning for things that will, by then, be less dangerous than a lot of unlabeled natural substances.
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Re: Subduction zone? (Score:4, Informative)
Thank you for playing. But your inability to check the simplest of your assertions indicate your total lack of knowledge and hence the lack of useful information.
The half-life of U-235 is 703.8 million years, which by no stretch of the imagination is "a few years". For U-238, the half-life is about 4.5 billion years.
Re:Subduction zone? (Score:4, Informative)
Because you'd probably have to do more than shove the waste off the back of a ship to do a proper job.
If you just drop your waste capsule on top of the the subducting plate, it will move toward the upper plate at a rate of about 100m/century. When it reaches the the boundary it won't necessarily go *down*. It could end up getting munged with other debris scraped from the subducting plate's surface and piling up on the upper plate's edge.
If you want to do a proper job you're going to have to actually bury the waste in the rock of the subducting plate. Keep in mind you'll have to dig a borehole that starts five miles under the ocean surface. That's physically possible, but not necessarily easy or cheap. This is the difference between sci-fi and engineering. In sci-fi you can handwave all the practical difficulties away. In engineering those difficulties add cost and complexity to simple ideas.
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Just what we need - a radioactive volcano forming.
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How else are aliens going to find our planet?
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By far the easiest way. Put it in a tungsten carbide launch vehicle. Put that vehicle in a negatively charged tunnel say 10K long and charge the vehicle negatively so it is suspended and then fill the space behind the vehicle with a negatively charged plasma. The tunnel is in vacuum and off goes the vehicle, you will have no problem achieving orbital velocity.
Once up there, the back door of the launch to orbit only vehicle opens and another space craft comes out and rockets of to the sun and the orbital la
Goatse (Score:5, Funny)
Just put pictures of the goatse guy on the warnings.
Re:Goatse (Score:4, Interesting)
Just put pictures of the goatse guy on the warnings.
That might actually attract some people.
And I mean that respectfully, not as a snark.
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Hmm, that gives me an idea - how about we put up a big "hugely unethical secrets to wealth and power stored here" sign instead? Then not only will decent people stay away, but it will also help eliminate the parasites from society for millenia to come.
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Well, it's goatse we're talking about. Wouldn't that be considered cleaning the gene pool?
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A cartoon showing radiation melting a person into a distorted blob in 3 steps seems like it would be effective. (Unless maybe they read from bottom to top and think it's a cure?)
Pictogram (Score:2)
Some would interpret that cartoon as showing "a weapon of immense power is buried here" (which is sort-of true, but it's a weapon that will kill the finder before he has a chance to use it on someone else).
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The parenthetical might actually be a benefit to our descendants.
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Technology (Score:4, Insightful)
If you envision the population of the future going back to stone age technology levels - you have a problem - assuming they have the ability to reach the depths of the locations specified.
If you envision the population of the future becoming more technologically advanced - then they should be able to measure the waste location's radiation themselves (if leaking which some almost surely will) and avoid it. What it was or why it's there really isn't relevant.
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I think the most likely case they are considering is a collapse(ie from war or climate change or whatever) followed by a new civilisation rising. Based on history this is a likely projection for us.
i agree. further, the chances for this to happen simply add up the longer a time period you consider. given a time period long enough, who is to say that geological activity couldn't bring those dumps to the surface where they would be a problem for likely any living things, not necessarily 'deep miners with geiger counters'.
anyway this poses an interesting question about universal language, but really doesn't change a bit the recklessness of creating this waste in the first place for which there is no poss
Re:Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the most likely case they are considering is a collapse(ie from war or climate change or whatever) followed by a new civilisation rising.
As was pointed out once (by Jerry Pournelle, of all people), a total collapse of civilization would be an event that kills something like one to five billion people. We don't have the means to feed 7.6 billion people without agricultural and transportation infrastructure. Civilization collapses, billions of people die.
Compared to that massive killing event, whether a handful of people find the waste and die before their civilization understands the danger is relatively trivial.
If we are concerned about the lives of people in the future, we should work to make sure civilization does not collapse.
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The next civilization will inherit abundant shallow landfills full of plastic, glass and pre-refined metals. They've got it easy.
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Next guys won't have this luxury.
Of course they have. Or where would magically all the metal go we have mined and put into our constructions?
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Doesn't have to be us. Maybe some other kind of creature replaces us after we take ourselves out, or an asteroid hits.
Warning? (Score:2)
Can't the armed guards* at the gate not inform people?
* that the nuke firms are paying hopefully in advance for 184000 years?
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really think the same people squandering the Earth's precious remaining resources on SUV's and Bitcoin mining really give that much of a damn about the next 10,000 years?
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
the same people squandering the Earth's precious remaining resources
That very much includes you and me, mr. high & mighty.
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how about recycle? (Score:2)
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Instead of throwing away find a way to recycle?
We have already found ways to recycle or continue using spent fuel:
https://whatisnuclear.com/recy... [whatisnuclear.com].
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j... [forbes.com]
Re:how about recycle? (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of the "waste" in WIPP is not actually nuclear material (like fuel)... it's other things like gloves, suits, etc. that have been in contact with high-grade nuclear material. Indeed - I would expect that _most_ of what is in WIPP is not directly decaying material: but things that have been contaminated.
Credentials for my conjecture: I have a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from MIT and I have been down in WIPP. That said, it was a while ago, so I don't know what their waste mix is currently.
BTW: WIPP is really freakin' cool. It's burrowed out of salt deposits... so when you're down there it's like you're in some sort of crystal cave. Also: the salt will "creep" over time and close in around all of the waste and create an incredibly effective seal.
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I'm curious. What area are you working at now? Hopefully, one of the newer SMRs.
Question (Score:2)
Given all the costs involved; wouldn't it make sense to shredded into dust and dilute the materials in a massive amount of waste muck? (how about recycled plastic) more like how the ore that was mined wasn't so bad until we refined and concentrated it. I'm talking heavily distributed, as in not in 1 location and spread out into every landfill.
just wondering.
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According to Wikipedia
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, is the world's third deep geological repository (after Germany's Repository for radioactive waste Morsleben and the Schacht Asse II Salt Mine) licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years.
They may well dispose of other waste there as well, for lack of a better option, but such waste doesn't call for nearly such a long-term solution.
I'm also dubious as to the long-term effectiveness of salt to contain nuclear waste against water seepage - just because NM is mostly desert today doesn't mean it will remain that way for 10,000 years.
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It's too expensive and nuclear power is getting less and less attractive every day.
wrong. It is actually looking better every day.
Some truth in both. But the anti-nukes aren't willing to notice the good things about nuclear power, and the pro-nukes won't listen to any of the problems with nuclear power.
... but, going back to the original topic, yes, recycling nuclear waste (instead of burying it) would be a very good idea, whichever side you're on, yes.
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"Inexpensive, small...pick one"
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Push all you like, it's got to be cheaper than wind or no one cares.
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There's a conceptually simple option to fix that - tax all freshly mined uranium, etc. at a rate sufficient to safely store the inevitable waste until it decays to safe levels. Said tax to be refunded when spent fuel is delivered to a reprocessing plant (minus the costs of safely storing the post-reprocessing waste).
Not unlike charging a recycling deposit for bottles, except that the deposit would greatly exceed the cost of the material itself.
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Nuclear is already heavily subsidised. If it gets more expensive they will just demand more subsidies or not build it.
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How to... (Score:2)
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Indeed - every time I hear about WIPP I think about Anathem from Neal Stephenson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Obligatory Futurama (Score:4, Funny)
Fry: You guys worship an unexploded nuclear bomb?
Mutant woman: Yeah, but nobody is that observant. It's mostly a Christmas and Easter thing.
Don't waste it (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's incredibly short-sighted to bury nuclear waste in a manner that makes it difficult to retrieve. There are already new designs for safe reactors that can burn the waste as fuel to get out the remaining 95% of energy not extracted by the legacy reactors. It's crazy to pick a solution for the next 300,000 years when in the next 50 years we'll have much better ideas what to do with spent fuel, and in the next 100 years humanity will be utterly unrecognizable.
^This
It's also quite likely that small children will be smarter that far in the future than the adults obsessing over this are today.
A better immediate solution would probably be something like Prozac.
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Nuclear-Waste-Idiot#131 (oki, I do it, I call now every idiot out and number them up. Obviously you get increasing numbers when you behave like an idiot again):
Nuclear waste can not be used as fuel! Idiot! You are mixing up nuclear waste with spent fuel!!
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It's incredibly short-sighted to bury nuclear waste in a manner that makes it difficult to retrieve.
You are mixing up nuclear waste with spend fuel.
Perhaps I should start counting those idiots and introduce every of my posts with:
Nuclear-Idiod#130 etc. as you must be around 100 - 150 of those idiots.
Not an issue (Score:2)
There's really only a few scenarios you can think of:
1) Humans continued to advance: In which case we could identify radioactive waste and the danger associated with it. The language becomes unnecessary.
2) Humans bombed themselves back into the stone age: I highly think someone digging up radioactive waste is the least of our problems.
But all of this ignores two additional points:
1. We lost connection to ancient languages because they were rare and not written. Much of what we discovered we preserved. There
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1) We can recognize radioactive waste today. That doesn't mean that explorers that came across an obviously artificial cavern full of ancient technology would necessarily think to check for it. When's the last time you saw a field archaeologist with a geiger counter in their back pocket?
2) Every civilization eventually collapses, taking much of its knowledge and technology with it. And most modern civilizations are showing signs that such a collapse may be imminent,. We don't have to bomb ourselves into
Re: Not an issue (Score:2)
1) So they come across the material and...? What so horrible do you think may happen next?
As of now, the nuclear material is stored within the power plants. It doesn't emit that much radiation unless you take steps to trigger a criticality.
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It doesn't emit that much radiation unless you take steps to trigger a criticality.
It does not emit "much radiation" because it is stored under water, moron.
If you would jump into the pool you would either got boiled or if you can get close enough burned by radiation that you die in a few hours. Are you really such an idiot? Moron?
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Nuclear waste is stored under water only for some time, mainy to cool it down. The water does shield some radiation, but the heat is the main concern.
The dry waste storage in nuclear power plants does have concrete shielding, but this is to reduce the accumulated dosage received by workers moving around the area. A random visitor would suffer no harm.
The container with the radioactive material doesn't emit that much radiation to instantly burn or fatally wound you. If it were so super radioactive, how do yo
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I hope someone brought a geiger counter to stonehenge, surely we can't be that naive that we were here first.
Chernobyl Fungus (Score:2)
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The fungus is surviving on metabolizing radioactive material.
That does not make the radioactive material go "away".
It is just now part of the fungus instead of lying around.
(*facepalm*)
Seem like a non-issue (Score:2)
If there are no people, then it doesn't matter.
Arriving "complete strangers", who somehow don't interact with informed locals first, will unfortunately have to learn the hard way if they are ignorant to such chemistries.
Why would we need to? (Score:2)
If people can't figure out that it's nuclear waste, then we shouldn't worry about them opening it.
BBC is predicting the future 300,000 years out? (Score:2)
I think it's safe to say the BBC can't predict the future 300K years out.
They are busy worrying about how to put up a super long-lasting "do not enter" sign, and ignoring the likely possibility there will be technology developed that renders the nuclear waste inert. Future generations will likely be engaged in cleanup efforts just like we are cleaning up past environmental destruction.
I think it's also possible there will be something much worse than nuclear waste that is a byproduct of some future technol
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ignoring the likely possibility there will be technology developed that renders the nuclear waste inert
This.
And then our descendants will be muttering darkly about what idiot buried this stuff a kilometer deep instead of just warehousing it someplace convenient to ship it to the new reprocessing plant. Like next to a building on the Beirut waterfront.
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and ignoring the likely possibility there will be technology developed that renders the nuclear waste inert.
And how would that be physical possible? Idiot?
This is why... (Score:2)
when people say .. nuclear power is the best option for sustainable energy. I think ... are you kidding?
piles of super poisons waste and poisoned land that can last far beyond any government that has ever existed.
Reckless if you actually care about future persons. Fortunately for most nuclear enthusiast atheism is on the rise and there is no good reason an atheist should care about anything that happens after they are dead.
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Actually even with current technology a lot of that waste could still be used to produce huge amounts of energy.
The reasons we don't do this are political and psychological. Nothing to do with science.
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The reasons are financial first and foremost. Breeders are so difficult and expensive to operate that nobody except Russia does them and even they are only operating a couple of them.
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Cost is the direct side effect of the political and psychological issues.
Which explains why Russia can do things we cannot. I expect China and India to get in the game soon as well.
The West is crippled by too many lawyers.
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Nuclear-Waste-Idiot#132
You are mixing up nuclear waste with unspent fuel.
Idiot.
'repulsive' (Score:2)
Wrong word. Implies judgement, emotion, wrong.
'fatal', 'lethal', better choices. Several languages with similar and corresponding meanings.
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Wrong word. Implies judgement, emotion, wrong.
As in "the electric force between two positively charged particles is repulsive."
Re: 'repulsive' (Score:2)
As in 'we made this place repulsive'.
Entirely appropriate use also. Less precise than 'we made this place lethal'...
They should use it to make a shitty superman movie (Score:2)
...oh wait they already did.
You'd want it in as many languages as feasible (Score:2)
You'd want the message to be in as many current languages as feasible. Who would have predicted that the language of an central Italian tribe would become the basis of languages for a quarter of the planet, and have such a rich recorded history that we have scholars who can still read it? Similar for the winning variant of Chinese and of English.
What About Toxic Waste That Is Toxic Forever? (Score:2)
A case where "what about" makes sense. Inorganic poisons have in effectively infinite lifespan, and we have toxic dumps of this type of stuff all over the place. Also, nature has created toxic hazards without making any signs, yet somehow we manage (give or take the occasional exploding African lake). After several thousand years you mostly just have the transuranics, which are toxic to inhale or eat though less than you probably think, or tow make bombs out of, but otherwise not a serious exposure hazard.
M
It'll become a resource long before then (Score:2)
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There's a risk.........dishonest employees could sneak it out and sell it.
They might even hide it in their body cavities.
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Nuclear-Waste-Idiot#133
Waste != unspent fuel.
Can't be so hard to grasp. The unspent fuel/not "burned" uranium is not what we call "nuclear waste". It is the actinides, which is waste!
Does Elon know about this problem? (Score:2)
May be if he is made aware of this problem, he will launch another company to solve the issue.
He will promise to solve the problem in 12 years, usually.
There is some chance he will actually deliver on his promise, usually taking 50% to 75% longer.
If he actually delivers what he promised, most people will be griping about missed deadlines and taking so much longer
Why are we hearing about this again? (Score:2)
How could any organization have time to copy-paste this story again in the middle of 2020?
Nope (Score:2)
That just makes me want to dig it up even more!
It's obvious (Score:2)
This is kinda silly and very pessimistic (Score:2)
The optimistic plan is that, in the future, the material will be useful or tech will be developed to safely neutralize it. The pessimistic plan is that tech will never advance, civilization will collapse, and people of the future will revert to the stone age. Yeah, it's possible to plan for every unlikely future, but this seems like a silly waste of time with a not-so-hidden political agenda
They should have thought about this... (Score:2)
long before they made so many nuclear weapons, and so much nuclear waste. But thinking isn't The Blob's strong point. Making thousands of weapons that can't be used (when a much smaller number would have provided deterrent) is a pretty historically dumb idea. But we got to keep those weapons manufacturers humming along, right?
People always break into stuff (Score:2)
The fact is, people will dig into anything if they think there might be something of value stored there.
The only thing you can do is put it far, far away from people. That way when someone does break into it (and they will), they'll die before they get anywhere.
Not needed OR wanted (Score:2)
Jerry Pournelle's take (Score:3)
Put a fence around it, and put up a sign:
IF YOU CLIMB THIS FENCE YOU WILL DIE
um (Score:2)
It's a circle of granite pylons around the perimeter, and then a small quadrangle of similar pylons around a central mound.
Did we just re-invent Stonehenge?
Maybe we should connect some of the pylons with massive horizontal lintels, to signal this is unquestionably a human construction?
Dupe! (Score:4, Informative)
This story is a duplicate from 2002.
This Place is Not a Place of Honor [slashdot.org]
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Just post it as a story on Slashdot. (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll get duped for at least that long.
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A person + plus a tiger
Beware of the leopard.
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If society has collapsed and regressed to a primitive level, and no knowledge or common sense remains, our less-cultured descendants can be kept out by simply putting a large warning reading "Masks required here".
Yeah, like that works today. ;-P