Recently I forgot about this half-finished entry for a while, but a few blogs I read have been discussing nuclear power, which naturally leads to: “What the hell do we do with all this radioactive waste?” Since spent fuel is radioactive for thousands of years, the question then morphs into “How will future generations know to avoid these dumps?”
In Slate, Juliet Lapados suggests the best “keep out” sign ever:
Dozens of granite message walls or kiosks, each 25 feet high, might present graphic images of human faces contorted with horror, terror, or pain (the inspiration here is Edvard Munch’s Scream) as well as text in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Navajo explaining what’s buried.
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Proposals for the “earthworks” component demonstrate that the whole project of communicating with the future is really a creative assignment, more dependent on the imagination than on expertise. What’ll really scare off 210th-century tomb raiders? The report proposes a “Landscape of Thorns” with giant obelisklike stones sticking out of the earth at odd angles. “Menacing Earthworks” has lightning-shaped mounds radiating out of a square. In “Forbidding Blocks,” a Lego city gone terribly wrong, black, irregular stones “are set in a grid, defining a square, with 5-foot wide ‘streets’ running both ways. You can even get ‘in’ it, but the streets lead nowhere, and they are too narrow to live in, farm in, or even meet in.”
I’m pretty sure this is concern is unfounded. Modern archaeological methods already use equipment that can detect magnetic and electromagnetic disturbances underground, and I imagine a U-shaped, five-mile-long tunnel with “several cathedral-like alcoves” would raise some eyebrows.
Anyway, if these “no trespassing” signs from hell are literally the only thing tying us to whatever life form finds our nuclear poo piles, it’s probably not humanity’s most pressing concern. As Matt Yglesias points out, “If we can’t avoid a major civilization-collapse, then the collapse, rather than the post-collapse nuclear waste incident, is the really the main problem.”
Slightly-embarrassing tangent: For a long time, I honestly thought “loading the spent fuel onto rockets and shooting them into the sun” was a solid solution to the problem. Then I learned uranium was really friggin’ heavy.
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