Pirates!
The nuclear industry attempts to communicate the nature of its legacy to future generations:
A couple of years ago the US Congress established an expert commission to develop a language or symbolism capable of warning against the threats posed by American nuclear waste dumps 10,000 years from now. The problem to be solved was: how must concepts and symbols be designed in order to convey a message to future generations, millennia from now? The commission included physicists, anthropologists, linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists, molecular biologists, classical scholars, artists, and so on.
The experts looked for models among the oldest symbols of humanity. They studied the construction of Stonehenge and the pyramids and examined the historical reception of Homer and the Bible. But these reached back at most a couple of thousand years, not 10,000. The anthropologists recommended the symbol of the skull and crossbones. However, a historian reminded the commission that the skull and crossbones symbolised resurrection for the alchemists, and a psychologist conducted an experiment with three-year-olds: if the symbol was affixed to a bottle they anxiously shouted “poison!”, but if it was placed on a wall they enthusiastically yelled “pirates!”
There you have it. Nuclear waste will be one of humanity’s longest lasting cultural artifacts. Let’s hope that’s not lost on future archaeologists when they’re killed by horrible tumours after misreading the ancient runes. It’s going to be a disaster. We can barely communicate with each other let alone a civilization 10,000 years away.
Posted on July 17th, 2008 at 2:29pm under The coming apocalypse
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When all these archaeologists die in horrible ways, it’ll just be blamed on a curse, with lots of conspiracy theorists coming up with stories of governments of old burying extremely nasty substances all over the place. And no-one will believe them.
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A lot easier digging for buried treasure if you’ve got a Geiger Counter to help you.
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And as usual when this subject is raised, the comments on CiF include a healthy smattering of true believers who think that long-long-long-term management of nuclear risks is a process governed by science…
The choice of locations for deep burial will be based on speculative computer modelling of activities for which no body of past empirical data exists. Why anyone imagines that the simplifications and level of abstraction involved would make this method any more scientific than rooting through some donkeys’ entrails I have no idea.
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Getting rid of nuclear waste safely is simple: bury it kilometres deep in a subduction zone.
Chances of our government pursuing this option safely and efficiently and communicating the rationale behind it to the public clearly: Zero. Let’s not pretend for one second that private companies are ultimately going to be responsible for disposing of their own waste.
Serious problems lie with the requirement to transport such material across the globe to the designated disposal site in the current political and security climate.
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Burying it in a subduction zone is anything but simple – as you point out, the waste has to be shipped round the world to one of the countries on whose territory subduction zones exist, meaning that effectively these countries (mostly in Asia and South America) will be turned into the HLW-dumping grounds for the world. Further, we know even less about the long-term feasibility of subduction zone disposal than we do about geological disposal.
The Government’s Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) looked at this issue a couple of years ago: see here and here for comments on the complexities involved.
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Or, indeed, in any conceivable political or security climate. People screw up – they always have and they always will. No matter how good your policies and procedures, if you’re shipping large amounts of anything around the globe, some of it will inevitably end up somewhere that it’s not supposed to be.
Then, of course, there’s the minor point that stuff that ends up in subduction zones has a habit of being erupted from the associated volcanoes and spreading throughout the atmosphere. Whether that’s a serious risk here or not I don’t know, and I’m not entirely convinced that anybody else knows either.