Stopping people from disturbing radioactive waste for 10,000 years

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Anthro/Anth101/wipp.html

by mhansen • 17 years ago

21 14 17 years ago

rms• 17 years ago

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-...

lionhearted• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

fhars• 17 years ago

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?

mhansen2• 17 years ago

I believe human curiosity is taken as a given. I hope it will lead them to look at the information given. The trick will be making them believe it.

This is a hard problem. I wish it were a problem we didn't have.

sili• 17 years ago

Humans did not believe similar threats of sicknes and death on Egiptian piramids, I do not see how these warnings would be treated differently.

karzeem• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

ashleyw• 17 years ago

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.

DougWebb• 17 years ago

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.

shalmanese• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

wmf• 17 years ago

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

Stopping people from disturbing radioactive waste for 10,000 years

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