The challenge of designing nuclear waste warning markers to last 10k years | Hacker News Reader

The challenge of designing nuclear waste warning markers to last 10k years

nightingaledvs.com

24 pointslsllc34 comments

> But once the plant decides to close its doors, with the nuclear waste still remaining, proper signage will be critical.

This, right here, screams the whole premise is nonsense. You don't label something very dangerous if you want to prevent primitive people from accessing it.

This project is not really about storing radioactive materials, but about the question "how do we spook stranger future people 10000 years from now so they won't dig here". Utter pseudo problem.

A high-level radioactive material ("waste" in the language of the current primitive nuclear technology prism) that you don't want to use anymore does not need "proper signage". Proper signage is needed only if you plan for people to access it.

If you really care that nobody can access it anymore, you dump it in inaccessible way, e.g. at big depth of Earth's crust at a not exactly known location, and then completely collapse the access holes. Most likely nobody will ever find it and get there.

If you do not really care about that (present governments), just dump it in a water pool near the power plant, or store it in a protected, easily accessible underground dry deposit. Much of "nuclear waste" is still a precious unburned nuclear fuel that people will want to use, after all.

> Most likely nobody will ever find it and get there.

And even if knowledge of the location does get passed on somehow, it'll be too costly to ever dig up. It's not exactly trivial to excavate to these depths.

If someone wanted to use spent fuel for nefarious purposes, there are much cheaper ways to do bad things.

I think, the problem ist far beyond basic semiological implications. It's really about the pragmatics of the interpretation, especially, if the basic message is understood.

E.g., compare curses on rune stones or Egyptian tombs. Is our message guaranteed to be read according to its intention and at face value? (While I do not have a citation, I remember the story of a rune stone emphasiszing that this was never to be moved or lifted, because something tremendously evil was trapped by it. Consequently, some years ago, it was lifted to see what might be below.) Even in those cases, where the reading still aligns, it may provide incentives contrary to our intention. E.g., I personally have few doubts that, if we were to encounter such a site and understood the meaning of any markers, we'd eagerly mine this in order to weaponize its deadly payload.

If we can't control the pragmatics, as well, or see few chance to do so, it may be better to be not understood

(So, yes, radical inaccessibility is probably the better option, hoping that any civilization, which has the technology to access it, will also have a technological understanding of what it may find.)

Having said that, conveying such a message across the millennia and the disruptions that may and will come is still an interesting thought experiment.

These are all interesting thoughts but I think that if society lasts another 10k years AND it has somehow lost knowledge about nuclear waste sites it seems pretty unlikely that it will then have the ability to dig up those sites.

We still have roman government records over 2000 years old. It's hard for me to believe that the current digital archiving of records wouldn't survive with society (barring catastrophic problems spelling the end of civilization).

If society doesn't last that long, I really doubt we'll get to a level of sophistication that allows us to dig up nuclear waste while somehow also losing access to old records.

If you're interested in a fantasy book series like this, the Broken Empire series (first book is called Prince of Thorns) is quite good.

Being able to dig a big hole does not equal knowledge about where things are buried. We are still finding ruins to this day. And digital records on things like ssds will decay faster than parchment for the most part.

We’ve merrily dug into Egyptian pyramids with even more dire warnings on them. How would we know if future people would consider our warnings just as silly?

Is it likely there be a society that can dig a mile into rock but also not be able be sophisticated enough to detect radiation?

We were able to dig a mile into rock before we could deal with radiation well.

All future discoveries will be relative to the world’s knowledge of the time.

I’d imagine future civilizations will have access to enough knowledge to take the threat of nuclear waste seriously.

We take the Egyptian warnings as seriously as we take the Egyptian’s understanding of the workings of the world at the time.

That's what a logically thinking person thinks. Covid has shown that most people are not logically thinking, and the logically thinking majority cannot prevent them from not doing stuff that's bad ideas.

There's a much better article on this here [1] and 7 year old HN discussion on a now deleted but similar article here [2].

This is where the "this is not a place of honor …" meme comes from if you've heard that before [4]

99 Percent Invisible also has a good podcast / article on this [3].

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851871

[3] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

[4] The panel decided the message the structure or markings should attempt to communicate should be:

   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 honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.

   What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

   The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center 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.

Weird to not mention the HIT Force. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Forc...

Recent and related:

A place where no humans will tread for 100k years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37258178 - Aug 2023 (205 comments)

There are what, 7? 8? 9? Entire nuclear reactors and their fuel at the bottom of the ocean, plus 1 or 2 unrecovered nuclear warheads. These cause no problems whatsoever. Why not vitrify the waste in huge spheres and sink them in the bottom of the challenger-deep?

Edited for typo.

Lacked a good selection of designs of the warnings.

Yeah. Looks like they went with a big fan and a swarm of buried killer bees or something.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...

Just put it in a breeder reactor then you don’t need labels

Shoulda just put the symbol of ligma

This is anti-Nuclear FUD.

By a few thousand years, the most dangerous isotopes will be decayed. I doubt that the danger of a few people being exposed to these isotopes would actually be anything compared to the dangers of a civilization collapse.

In addition, knowing humans, I think it is futile. I think no matter what you put, some curious human will want to find out.

Think about it. Suppose we come across some alien UFO crash. Inside the crash site was a box with all sorts of scary looking markings. Do you really think no one would open the box because of those markings?

There's also the problem that what's scary depends a lot on culture. Really hard to believe that somehow cultural traditions making a marking scary would somehow survive but the actual knowledge to know this site has nuclear waste wouldn't.

I think it's safe to say that pictures of human skulls would still convey danger, unless our post-collapse descendants got really mutated.

Would it? What if future human society collects and/or reveres the skulls of ancestors?

IANAAnthropologist, but I'd still wager that:

1. It's still most-associated with death, dying, and danger versus almost any other symbol one could pick.

2. Reverence or trust comes from it being their own ancestors rather than unidentified skulls of strangers involving unfamiliar ceremonies or no ceremonies at all. Taboo criminals leave skeletons too.

Plenty of cultures throughout history have bone collections.

Consider, for example, the Sedlec Ossuary [1]. Where human remains are used for ornate decorations. And, even today, is a common tourist attraction. Those skulls aren't there to warn people away.

Even if there's a death association, it's not one of "stay away", rather, it's one of "come see".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary

> I think no matter what you put, some curious human will want to find out.

Yeah. Don't the pyramids have warnings on them about getting cursed and such? I'd imagine these would be taken about as seriously.

That depends on the belief system. Curses did prevent people from doing things —it’s just that most of today’s peoples don’t believe in curses. Less educated societies did believe in curses.

The pyramids were robbed in ancient times.

So, yes some thieves were intrepid and did rob. However, with radiation, the curse will reinforce itself. Those who ignore it will perish and the legend of the curse will increase. This curse will not be an empty one.

Reminds me of Shi Huang Di's Forbidden Tomb's "curse" is... Mercury. We today preserve it for scientific reasons but before, ain't no thief will try to do anything about it.

Maybe there's loopholes in curses.

Like you just send your unwitting child in. Or a slave or prisoner.

I don't know, I never read one myself.

> By a few thousand years, the most dangerous isotopes will be decayed.

I wondered about this claim because it could easily be (dis-)proven by a curve. And no, it seems that the waste remains dangerous for quite a while due to actinides. See this curve:

https://whatisnuclear.com/img/ingestion-radiotoxicity-nuclea...

Now, people say that these actinides can be turned into non-dangerous things, which is great, but the P&T process has not been developed yet. It might turn out to be vaporware. See also:

https://www.base.bund.de/EN/ns/ni-germany/transmutation/tran...

The real problem is that we need nuclear waste warning markers that last at least two orders of magnitute longer.

Can someone who downvoted this give a reason for it, please. An expert report regarding a final repository for highly radioactive materials published by the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection assumes a necessary isolation period in the order of 1 million years.[1] This is a period two orders of magnitute longer than the 10,000 years considered in the article.

[1] Quoted at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik)#Schutzz... (in German).

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