I read a different news article along these lines a few years ago, and ran a game based on the premise of a dump like this being cracked open thousands of years in the future by a massive earthquake and contaminating the water supply to a town, which they, in a "standard" medieval-ish technology culture, had to investigate.
Was fun trying to figure out who'd get sick first (shrimp fishermen, I figured, as their catch would concentrate the contaminants the fastest) and the timescale for water to start leaching out of the site and cause an effect (a few months, so I had to put in a bunch of other stuff for them to do between the earthquake happening and the "real" plot beginning), having clues that the players wouldn't immediately recognise on-sight when they got down there (like a non-standard periodic table[0] - I used the Janet Left Step), figuring out which elements they'd be able to translate with "speak any language" spells, and which they couldn't because they didn't have the words to translate into (basically, they got any element known before we started recording discoveries[1], and I threw in bonus partial tranlations for Hydrogen (water-ish), Oxygen (fire-ish), Nitrogen (air-ish) and Silicon (sand-ish)), and a whole bunch of other details too.
It was fun watching the players' "eureka" moments occur, and then even more fun watching them try really hard not to use their player knowledge in-character!
Edit: Just remembered, I also put a Rosetta Disc[2] into the chamber, as I didn't know when I designed the game that they'd have a magic user capable of translating anything. Even though they didn't need it, it was a nice touch to leave in.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_periodic_tables
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoveries_of_the_chemical_ele...
[2] http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/