see url:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
read full article...
One of the four prongs of the reasons for my concerns about the planet
and the existence of our progeny on it...is nuclear power, whether it be
nuclear weapons, or nuclear power plants. I think that this is a very
interesting article, because it looks at the long term, the future for
our species a long way ahead, and what we should be doing about it now.
Mind you...all of us on this mailing list will be long dead by the time
these events come about, and the one absolute about the future...is that
it is uncertain. We can only look at trends and try to make assumptions
from them on how the future will develop...predictions are just that,
and it is luck more than judgement...
I hope you enjoy this article...to me it is certainly food for thought.
It makes our present problems bizarre to say the very least... There is
an old mine here in England, which was a lead mine...only a few know of
its exact location, and some brave souls have visited it, specialist
archaeologists, forensic geologists, and all those other specialisms to
do with the human species. It was a mine in Anglo-Saxon times, and it
is still a very dangerous place to go...People worked and died there,
and now even visitors are only allowed to spend a short amount of time
there...that is the legacy of humankind who didn't know what they were
dealing with in the past...
ATB
Dougie.
Quote<<<
The nuclear waste buried far beneath the earth will be toxic for
thousands of years. How do you build a warning now that can be
understood in the far future?
“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”.
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The plan calls for huge 25ft (7.6m) tall granite columns marking the
four-sq-mile (10 sq km) outer boundary of the entire site. Inside this
perimeter, there is an earth berm 33ft (10m) tall and 100ft (30m) wide
marking the repository’s actual footprint. Then inside the berm will be
another square of granite columns.
At the centre of this monumental “Do Not Enter” sign will be a room
containing information about the site. In case the information becomes
unreadable, there will be another buried 20ft below, and another buried
in the earth barrier itself. Detailed information about the WIPP will be
stored in many archives around the world on special paper stamped with
the instruction that it must be kept for 10,000 years, the rather
arbitrary length of the site’s license.
Welcome to the world of nuclear semiotics. The vast landscape proposed
for the WIPP is partly influenced by science fiction. Nuclear
physicists, engineers, anthropologists, sci-fi writers, artists and
others have come together in the very broad, esoteric field of research
into the way that future humans – and anything that comes after us –
might be warned of our deadly legacy
Sadly, the idea to cover the site with a forest of massive concrete
thorns was not taken up, nor the idea to create a self-perpetuating
atomic priesthood who would use legend and ritual to create a sense of
fear around the site for generations. Linguist Thomas Sebok first used
the phrase “nuclear priesthood” in 1981. Neither was the idea of
breeding cats that would change colour when exposed to radiation and –
it was hoped – give birth to the idea of the ‘ray cat’, the feline
Geiger counter, which would over the millennia teach humans to run if
their cats change colour. Ironically, there is now Ray Cat movement with
its own t-shirts, songs, and documentary.
The bright, modern meeting room in rural Oxfordshire feels a long way
from the desert of New Mexico and talk of atomic priesthoods, but it is
closer than it appears. The former World War II airfield at Culham is
home to the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority and to the Culham Centre for
Fusion Energy (CCFE), the UK’s nuclear fusion laboratory. Then the first
nuclear reactor in Western Europe, which began operating just down the
road at Harwell on another former airfield in 1947. Here also lies the
HQ of the UK’s Radioactive Waste Management Ltd (RWM).
The initiative came up with a number of suggestions as how to help
humans in the future make informed decisions, such as libraries, time
capsules and physical markers
Sitting on the other side of the table from me are two of the people
whose job it is to think about this rather big problem. Professor Cherry
Tweed is the chief scientific adviser to RWM, and subject matter expert
James Pearson is at the same company; it is their job to consider the
options for marking the UK’s own repository, a facility that will take
200 years to plan, construct, fill up and seal. Like similar bodies
around the world, the RWM has an obligation to consider the options for
marking any proposed site.
On the video screen above us is a picture of the huge prehistoric mound
Silbury Hill, near Stonehenge. “It is 340,000 cubic metres. It is more
than 4,000 years old,” says Pearson. “Its use is highly debated, but
essentially unknown. Is it an ancient marker? Can we do better? Should
we even try?”
The Human Interference Task Force was set up in 1981 to answer precisely
these questions for the proposed Yucca Mountain repository near Las
Vegas, Nevada. The task force is widely credited with creating the field
of nuclear semiotics. Today the Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA)
carries on the work of the now defunct task force’s through its
initiative on the Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory Across
Generations (RK&M Initiative) which began work in 2011 and whose final
report was published in 2019.The NEA is an intergovernmental agency
which encourages cooperation among the 33 countries with advanced
nuclear technology infrastructure.
>>>End of Quote
