A Warning Across Deep Time: How to Warn The Future About Nuclear Waste
"This place is not a place of honour... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us."
2160ft underneath Eddy County, New Mexico, the United States’ only deep geological repository has been constructed; the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Beneath a scorching desert with routine temperature highs of 40°C, the United States stores its radioactive waste - in this case largely the by-product of the production of atomic bombs.
From first ground being broken on the site to its designated seal date in 2038, the project will take nearly 40 years, and cost $19 billion. The huge scale of the investment is tolerated because of the project’s importance. The waste deposited here includes some of the most dangerous substances humanity has ever created, easily able to deliver a lethal dosage to anyone who comes into even brief contact with it.
The danger is not just from the severity of the radioactivity of this substance, but also the lifespan of it. All of the radioactive material due to be deposited here has a minimum half-life, a term used to measure the decay of radioactive material, of at least 20 years, with much of it far longer.
A large amount of the waste stored will remain lethal for around 10,000 years, whilst some of the material buried in this repository is thought will be able to deliver a lethal dose to a living organism for more than 300,000 years, longer than Homo Sapiens have existed on our planet.. This astonishing timescale raises a unique question. How do you warn the people of the future of the danger that sits under the New Mexico desert?
. Within that timeframe, the very concepts of semiotics, language and culture may have completely collapsed and risen anew, perhaps a few times over. A brand new civilization far in the future may not respond to a keep out sign and a skull and crossbones. Their language could differ, and their interpretation of symbols that may be simple to us could be entirely different.
Welcome to the world of nuclear semiotics. It’s a discipline dedicated to saving the lives of future beings we know nothing about, will never meet, and may never even exist. The danger of radioactive waste is unmistakeable, and should a civilisation stumble upon it, or build on top of it, the consequences could be disastrous.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP designers, have developed some of the most elaborate plans to warn future generations of the dangers it holds. The plans to deter people from the site are extensive and intricate and assume that today’s languages will likely not survive and will therefore not be able to communicate a sufficient warning by themselves. A variety of other methods have therefore been developed to deter visitors, including pictograms and diagrams, as well as the use of hostile architecture within the design itself
These are laid out in a report for the US (?) Department of Energy. The perimeter of the 2,560 acre site will be marked by 32 25ft stone monoliths, to be constructed of granite for maximum weather resistance and minimal economic value. The huge pillars are meant to be clearly anomalous, and starkly ominous, warding off intelligent visitors with no language necessary.
On top of the site will be a berm, a granite building which contains the most straightforward warnings on site. Etched onto granite slabs, a warning, succinct but clear, will plead with visitors not to dig. The message will be translated into English, Spanish, Russian, French, Arabic, Chinese and Navajo. While the message has not been decided upon yet, an early draft begins:
“This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honour... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a centre... the centre of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited”
For further messaging, small discs covered in danger symbols and concise messaging will be scattered in the ground below the berm, warning those who have begun digging to stop. For civilizations in the medium future, it is possible modern languages will still be known enough to be translatable, even if the language itself is dead. Modern archaeologists were able to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, despite the language not being used for millennia.
Further use of pictograms and diagrams, as well as symbolism connoting danger, will also be placed around the site, upon the stone monoliths and inside the berm. These may include stick figure diagrams, depictions of the process of depositing the waste, or even primal depictions of fear and danger. A proposed plan would employ famed symbols of terror, such as Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, to convey the harm the site holds.
Exact details of the nature of the waste at the site will not be on site. Instead, detailed reports will be scattered in libraries and archives across the world, to maximise the chance of preserving the knowledge.
Despite the great lengths the designers of the plant are going to deter future civilizations, there are many sceptics of the proposed deterrents. The hostile architecture, while an attempt to prevent future explorers, may just pique their curiosity. If whatever civilization stumbles upon these monoliths share the same thirst for knowledge as our own, it will only encourage visitors.
The symbolic nature of these monoliths can also be easily lost to time. It conjures images of Stonehenge, a marvel of human achievement that’s meaning has long since been lost to time. While the structures may appear hostile now, their meanings may be completely different for another society and culture.
Every step the designers of the plant have taken to deter its exploration may just serve to exacerbate the problem it attempts to prevent. Imagine modern explorers stumbling upon an ocean of giant stone monoliths in one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world, and a building covered in indecipherable writings etched into stone. Tell me we wouldn’t start digging.
There has been no sign of danger or fear that humanity has ever ignored. Every tomb or pile of skulls human explorers have discovered has been explored thoroughly. The attempts to dissuade future civilizations from exploring could just become an invitation. Egyptian tombs were filled with traps and winding hallways. They begged not to be disturbed or explored. But we did it anyway. How could you prevent the next society from doing the same?
Other nuclear depository sights have similar methods. For Yucca Mountain, a now defunct site for nuclear waste storage in Nevada, mausoleums were designed to sit on top of the site with messages of danger, in the simplest terms possible. Even the mausoleums themselves form huge warning signs with their very structure, designating the location of radioactive material. The other two deep geological repositories, both located in Germany, have not yet decided on whether nuclear semiotics is the solution.
One solution that has appeared is a little more complex. The belief in the need to preserve the knowledge of the threat of radioactive waste spreads beyond governments and nations. A group of artists, historians, designers, and craftsmen grouped together to form the Atomic Priesthood. United by a belief that knowledge of nuclear threats must be preserved, the collective plans to form a religious order of sorts, acting as stewards of nuclear knowledge. The knowledge of the dangers of radiation, as well as the locations of nuclear waste sites, will be passed down through generations by designated stewards, preserving knowledge though writing, spoken word, even rituals and myths.
The group’s plan is by definition long-term. For it to work, the society that stumbles upon the plant in the future will have to have been fed by our own for this knowledge to pass down. Despite this, the effort to create an archive of information unattached from governments and borders is brave, and hopefully will be fulfilled by future generations.
It still leaves a question of deterring a society with no link to our own. Hostile architecture, symbols of danger and written warnings are all well and good, but for a culture with no understanding similar to ours, their impact might only be detrimental. There is an alternative to all this, and it’s doing nothing at all. Leave written records of where the waste is stored, seal it for eternity, and move on. Why make such a dangerous place a landmark at all, even if the landmark is designed to keep people away. WIPP’s sight is in the middle of the New Mexico desert, far from heavily populated areas and virtually inhospitable, even for other animals and plants. Why would anyone go looking there? Why would someone stumble upon it?
It’s a dangerous train of thought to follow. One can imagine a similar thought process befell the designers of the tomb of famous Egyptian Pharoah Tutankhamun. A sealed tomb with no markings on the surface, designed to stay sealed for all eternity. Next to the colossal tombs of the Pyramids of Giza, it was almost forgotten. And then Howard Carter and the British found it in the 20th Century, millennia after it was sealed, and his tomb was disturbed.
The fact is, nuclear semiotics is a field where there will never be a a definitive answer. By definition, we will never know if the solutions of these academics were correct. Despite every warning, an intelligent organism’s curiosity may overpower any attempt to prevent their death.
Bibliography
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/01/what-should-we-do-with-radioactive-nuclear-waste
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
https://cen.acs.org/environment/pollution/nuclear-waste-pilesscientists-seek-best/98/i12
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
https://medium.com/@mhscho0096/nuclear-semiotics-c10c434a0407
https://www.theatomicpriesthoodproject.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository#Cultural_impact
Reducing the likelihood of future human activities that could affect geologic high-level waste repositories https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6799619
Permanent Markers Implementation Plan https://www.osti.gov/biblio/990726/