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Comment by orbitingpluto | Hacker News Reader

I'm never understood this marker system. Graves have been marked in a threatening manner so that they would not be plundered. It doesn't work.

The point is to hide the waste. The system should be designed to progressively unveil warnings if some future man starts digging. Otherwise, you're just asking for them to dig it up.

Another thing not mentioned is to design the container so that anyone who plans to excavate will think they have hit rock bottom... like Pharoahs' tombs or a multi-level pirate cache.

Or even better, put something horrible and poisonous twenty feet down. It might be better to obviously poison a couple people if they start digging this up. That would be easily understood and eventually avoided.

Remember the radioactive sign in the Star Trek episode where Data gets shishkabobed? They made jewelery...

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I thought it was pretty interesting that they weren't really talking about making the site "threatening", but making it "repulsive". Poor craftsmanship, ugly terrain, uncomfortable heat, low value materials, etc. Some of their design photos were very different from what I'd assumed, and pretty much immediately triggered my "eww" response. Not intimidating exactly, just uncomfortable.

They attempted to go with "repulsive" for a nuclear waste disposal site in Finland, there's a really cool documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWadizC8AQ

Another recommendation, it's quite a lovely film.

Thank you for this. I've only watched a little so far but it's a great documentary.

Outstanding documentary. Thanks.

This is used today in the high security vault industry.

Safes often include rubber pellets in the concrete pour between steel casing layers. Cutting into the safe with a torch or plasma cutter will cause these rubber pellets to burn and fill the room with noxious odors and thick smoke.

It doesn't necessarily increase the physical resistance to entry, but it makes the environment extraordinarily unpleasant.

I really like going the repulsive route. Disgust is a primal instinct, and the reaction is ubiquitous for all humans- leave the disgusting thing alone.

I also like the breakdown they have of the different levels of communication. I can easily see it being mapped to product design- easy to digest information at the top of the funnel, more detailed/important information as you approach the bottom of the funnel.

You're not thinking on the 10.000 year timescale. So you hide it, after 1000 years someone starts digging there and finds it anyway, they see the messages and stop, and then the site is left unhidden for the next 9000 years, what should it look like?

Also even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years? And how would you prevent people from using the poison as the potent weapon it clearly is? And what would the message be for those who defeat the poison to find the treasure that's obviously hidden by such a potent weapon?

We still haven't opened the tomb of the first emperor of China, which has been closed for more than two millennia. One of the main reasons is the presence of enormous amounts of mercury. Whole rivers of it, according to tradition. There's your poison.

Throughout the 10K years from now on, hazardous atmospheres probably won't be an issue, because of robotics - which wasn't even an imaginable option for the most part of the last two millenia (and now we're rapidly getting good at this stuff, so I somehow doubt Qin Shi Huang's tomb would remain unexplored for long).

If you assume we'll have robotics, then this whole question is simplified - they'll probably have some easy way to lookup standard iconography of this era.

This question is hard because you can't assume we'll be a technologically advanced society; for all we know, we'll be living with stone age technology.

Even if we could enter the Qin emperor's tomb unharmed, we should leave it untouched out of respect for the dead.

I don't agree with this. My respect for the dead says we should unearth the remains with care and treat the body with respect, but I certainly have no allegiance to having my body remain in the ground indefinitely if future scientists could gain value from it.

I would enter it.

I would enter it. (And he wasn't the first emperor. He was the first emperor of the Qin dynasty)

From my understanding, the reason it hasn't been opened yet is to preserve whatever's inside, not so much out of fear for mercury poisoning. For instance, the terracotta army was actually painted before it was excavated [1], but the paint curled and flaked off within minutes of opening the mausoleum, leaving us with a sea of drab stone statues. I think they're just waiting until they have the tech to properly preserve the interior.

[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-09/09/content_112783...

> even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years?

Leave a fraction of the radioactive unshielded and buried less deeply, to ensure that wannabe grave-robbers die of radiation poisoning before they uncover much of the cache?

Nobody is going to die from radiation poisoning off the 10,000-year water unless they ingest it, and the hot stuff will be too cool in a couple hundred years at most.

The entire premise is that this waste is going to be toxic for 10,000 years. So we're not allowed to posit 'cool in a couple hundred years'.

"Toxic for 10,000 years" does not mean "get radiation exposure for standing next to unshielded waste", not does "cool" mean "non-toxic". The ionizing radiation danger of materials is inversely proportional to their half-life. Stuff that requires inches of lead generally has half-lives in the years or tens of years. Stuff with half-lives in the thousands of years can generally be "shielded" by a thick glass jar.

This, if something's emitting a lot of energy it won't be doing so for long.

Interesting discussion at the tail end of the document:

(a) We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn't we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective "marker" for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste? In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters. An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system.

> The point is to hide the waste.

The problem is that this was during the Cold War, and the site needed to operate on an ongoing basis, not just be used once and then hidden. They had to prepare for the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack killing everyone responsible for the site, thus had to design a site which would still serve even if its operators disappeared.

>>a multi-level pirate cache.

I immediately think of Oak Island, Nova Scotia, where a pirate's stash has resisted recovery for an incredible 221 years but has yielded taunting clues:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island

It would appear that it has resisted recovery because there's probably nothing there.

A most clever ruse, to be sure.

To what end? Tremendous effort for no purpose but to intrigue? Kinda like building an enormous underground labyrinth then filling it with sand, just to get a giggle at how much people will do (long after you're dead) to find the presumed hidden treasure that isn't there.

Probably just a lie. No effort.

There are layers of wood, etc, but they're probably just laid down by natural causes over the millennia instead of being a constructed building.

"layers of wood, etc" doesn't do justice to what is in place there: http://www.activemind.com/Mysterious/topics/oakisland/story....

Flagstones, layers of heavy timbers every 10 feet, a stone with carved glyphs at 90 feet, oak chests with coins, a sideways booby-trap well, Layers of blue clay at 130 and 160 feet, a cofferdam, and artifacts dating back 200+ years.

This strikes me as far, far more than an elaborate prank; it is a significant defense system meant to protect _something_

Or, the layers of timbers are trees felled in the same 100y storms, etc.

The flooding tunnel is likely just a normal geological feature, not some super-clever drift tunneling technique.

The stone is likely a fraud. Who would place a cryptic sign 90 feet down, telling themselves (in secret writing) to keep digging? Wouldn't they presumably know that they hadn't reached their treasure yet? Wouldn't they be more likely to place an innocuous sign on the surface, such as a gravestone? It's more likely a way to con investors out of further funds.

It's probably nothing but a rumor.

It seems far more logical at this point that the Oak Island sinkhole is a result of natural phenomena and rumors / myths. I'm highly skeptical that there is anything at the bottom of the pit.

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