Church of Radioactive Waste?

Factual Questions
1

Couple of years ago, I saw a program on Discovery channel or TLC about how to safely interr radioactive waste, which (I believe) has a half life of 20,000 years.

They would take the waste to a secure site, free of geologic activity, away from populated areas, on land built on solid bedrock with no cracks leading to groundwater.

Of course, in a couple of millenia, chances are our nation and language won’t be around to keep future archaeologists and prospectors from digging up still lethal waste.

So the theory being bandied about is that we establish some kind of “priesthood” ,whose purpose is to keep everyone out of the “Sacred repository” for eternity.

I, of course, simply thought a bunch of “KEEP OUT” signs would suffice, But how do you leave a message specifically for those whose culture is absolutely unknown and therefore unpredictable?

I figure, placing on top of each hatch on the pit, a giant multi-ton granite obelisk, enscribed with a warning in all the major languages today. I reason that, to make a modern Rosetta Stone, you’d need to emphasize certain words.
Take a pneumatic router with a diamond bit, and inscribe the nouns with a square relief, verbs with a V relief, adjectives with a round relief, etc etc. Also, etch and paint each noun, verb, adjective, etc with an appropriate pigment thought to last several millenia.

The message should be:

WARNING: THERE IS POISON HERE. DO NOT ENTER.
WE MADE THIS PLACE TO STORE THAT WHICH WE CANNOT MAKE SAFE.
WE DO THIS TO PROTECT YOU…OUR CHILDREN.
PLEASE…HEED THIS WARNING AND LIVE HEALTHY AND SAFE.

I figure much more can be done.
What suggestions do you have to keep this site secure?

2

I think the very placement of the stuff should send some kind of message: They buried it this deep for a reason, maybe it isn’t safe to be anywhere close to. The idea of a priesthood seems stupid to me: Any time you create a philosophy, fundamental tenants get mangled over time. Maybe the priesthood would come to power and start shoving sacrificial victims down there to ‘meet the deities’. More likely, the Order of the Waste would die out and nobody would remember them. The embossed message sounds like a better plan, but only marginally. Remember, we’re talking thousands of years here. The English language has arisen from Proto-Indo-European in less time than that. How can we be sure English or French or Chinese or any other language will still exist even a quarter of the way into the waste’s half-life? Granted, writing and sound recordings will slow the process of linguistic change, but try this for me: Look up a copy of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, a version with the Middle English (the language of Chaucer) alongside the Modern English (current since Shakespeare, or the 1600s). See how well you can read English text not a thousand years old. Then realize we’ll have to keep this shit safe for 40,000 years (two half-lives). We should think of a system of picture-writing, as used on international signs. Make it as self-evident as possible, train as many people to read it as we can, make as many durable records of it as we can (monuments in stone with text alongside (think Rosetta Stone, if they know one they can derive the other), optical computer records in satellites, etc.), and then make the original copy as durable as we can.

Damn, I wish we could make Monoliths. :smiley:

3

No, we’re talking tens of thousands of years here. Big difference.

4

Someone has already done something like the OPer describes at Hanford in Washington State.

When I worked there in 1980 they were embeding titanium plates with pictographic language on stone obelisks around the eight retired nuclear plutonium plants abandoned in the 1950’s.

The plants are apparantly to hot to dismantle.

Wish I’d made a tracing of one of them.

5

I vaguely remember them kicking around ideas similar to monoliths and pictograms - ideas of putting up huge stone spikes, or slabs with grimacing faces, to give the idea that this place was bad or menacing in some way (which it is, in effect). They were working on the assumption that English and all other current languages would be so mutated by then as to be unrecognizable, and so even storing information (i.e. ‘indestructable’ books) warning about the site in all libraries of the world would be futile.
Of course, threatening and menacing designs by civilations in previous eras have done a great job of keeping our era’s archeologists, tourists, and grave-robbers away from their tombs and temples.

Additional note: A book was written on this (the whole long-range warning concept, not just the monoliths), from one of the member of the 1991 panel which discussed this very topic:
Deep Time by Gregory Benford
Bard, February 1999.
Hardcover, 225 pages.
ISBN: 0380975378.

6

This topic oddly reminds me of one of the movies from that interminable Planet of the Apes series – was it Son of Planet of the Apes? Or Bride of Planet of the Apes? Deep underground in vast caverns there’s a church that worships a nuclear missile. It’s done up as a broad parody of the Catholic Church. They wear robes, play the organ, etc. Then they pull off their masks and they’re all horribly deformed from radioactive burns.

7

You have all spoken of things that must not be discussed, and done so in a public forum. Og, of the Line of Enforcers, will be tracking you down and placing you in the Room with the Metal that Destroys so that none may question the Holy Practices of we, the Guardians of the Waste.

8

I’m also reminded of A Canticle for Leibowitz.

9

Isn’t this assuming that civilization will regress rather than progress?

Somehow I’m thinking for the next 40,000 years, folks are going to be well aware of the dangers of radioactvity and they will likely have airborn sensors circling the planet that will remind them of the dangers stored there with every orbit.

Of course hopefully by they we will have found a use for the stuff and it won’t be stored there anyway and the future equivalent of radioactive Superfund will have cleaned up the site.

-Doug

10

dublos, civilization won’t have to regress for our distant descendants to forget where exactly we stashed all that crap. Orbital geiger counters sound like a great idea anyway, but imagine this: Rome was the pinnacle of European civilization for thousands of years. Its decline and fall left a vacuum other powers tried to fill, with varying levels of success (Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, for example), and each of those different civilizations altered the landscape, both physically and socially. Latin died, and a plethora of Romance language took its place, supplemented with the tongues of those uppity barbarians to the north (:D). The old Hippodrome and the Imperial Palaces fell into ruin. But civilization as a whole eventually progressed beyond the Roman Age, leading to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. But in the interim, we forgot something of Rome, and we lost what we once had. Like Greek fire, ferexample. Hell, we thought the Trojan War was pure fiction until we began to see physical evidence of it! So, have we regressed since the days of Imperial Rome and Classical Greece? Not by a long shot. Have we forgotten some of what those civilizations knew? Yep.

The project we’re talking about here is a hedge against a catastrophic collapse of our civilization. Even if humanity ends up ahead in the long run, things get forgotten and history gets compressed in hindsight. So don’t think in terms of progression or regression. Backtracking is a perfectly valid way to get ahead. We just need to protect against forgetfulness.

11

It’s also reminiscent of the Temple of the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud in the post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland.