How to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste

L

lmao

It Wandered In From the Wastes
http://www.slate.com/id/2235504/

Communicating the dangers of nuclear waste to unfathomably remote descendents may seem like a topic best left to third-drink philosophers in dorm rooms. It's actually been left to the most humdrum of all Cabinet-level departments after commerce, agriculture, and the interior: the Department of Energy, which oversees the disposal of radioactive trash at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. According to government guidelines, DoE must plan for the continuing safety of the site over the next 10 millenniums.
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Even if future trespassers could understand what keep and out mean when placed side by side, there's no reason to assume they'd follow directions. In "Expert Judgment," the panelists observe that "[m]useums and private collections abound with [keep out signs] removed from burial sites." The tomb of the ancient Egyptian vizier Khentika (also known as Ikhekhi), for example, contains the inscription: "As for all men who shall enter this my tomb … impure … there will be judgment … an end shall be made for him. … I shall seize his neck like a bird. … I shall cast the fear of myself into him." It's possible that the vizier's contemporaries took Khentika at his word. But 20th-century archaeologists with wildly different religious beliefs had no reason to take the neck-cracking threat seriously. Likewise, a scavenger on the Carlsbad site in the year 12,000 C.E. may dismiss the menace of radiation poisoning as mere superstition. ("So I'm supposed to think that if I dig here, invisible energy beams will kill me?") Hence the crux of the problem: Not only must intruders understand the message that nuclear waste is near and dangerous; they must also believe it.
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Very interesting article, although I think it's a little unnecessary. It wouldn't take long for a nuclear waste site to become a Glow-like harbinger of doom for all the societies around it. Even if our distant descendants are primitive, they should still be able to grasp the concept of "Everyone who went there died."
 
imagine some 10 000 years more from now. Some other culture finding a nuclear plant. Or some waste depot left with radioctive material not knowing that it might be dangerous thinking that we stored our treasures inside it (why building such a hard to reach place and it has thick concrete walls! MUST! be something valuable).

Its a serious issue today to think about signs that even in 100 or 1000 or 10 000 years one definetly can understand as "warning" or "this will gone kill you".
 
Crni Vuk said:
imagine some 10 000 years more from now. Some other culture finding a nuclear plant. Or some waste depot left with radioctive material not knowing that it might be dangerous thinking that we stored our treasures inside it (why building such a hard to reach place and it has thick concrete walls! MUST! be something valuable).

Its a serious issue today to think about signs that even in 100 or 1000 or 10 000 years one definetly can understand as "warning" or "this will gone kill you".
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Which people then promptly ignore, because as we all know, forbidding something is the most surefire way to make it happen.
 
Unless there's a major apocalyptic event, I don't see why our descendants won't inherit our knowledge, at least in some form.

I am aware that digital data might deteriorate with time, but we probably would know more about ancient History if ancient Egyptians had USB sticks, right?

The assumption that our "descendants", whatever that means, won't know about nuclear waste considering how far our society has evolved is a little dumb. Real life isn't like Planet of the Apes. Why would they be more primitive than us?
 
actually, much of the problem of radioactive waste might even solve itself, with later generations of reactors. current reactors only use 20% of the materials. future reactors are most likely able to run on the previously generated waste (they're called fast breeders).

those generators would create a lot less waste.


still, this is all still theoretical afaik.
 
Sander said:
Which people then promptly ignore, because as we all know, forbidding something is the most surefire way to make it happen.
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then the surefire way to make sure nobody goes there is to put big ole signs saying come in, the waters fine, ignore the green glowing shit, it wont kill you! ( very fast )
 
victor said:
Unless there's a major apocalyptic event, I don't see why our descendants won't inherit our knowledge, at least in some form.

I am aware that digital data might deteriorate with time, but we probably would know more about ancient History if ancient Egyptians had USB sticks, right?

The assumption that our "descendants", whatever that means, won't know about nuclear waste considering how far our society has evolved is a little dumb. Real life isn't like Planet of the Apes. Why would they be more primitive than us?
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Societies decline and fall, or catastrophe occurs. It just happens. We may have reached unprecedented heights, but every civilization that reached its peak before us could have said the same thing, and I'm sure there were dozens of ancient peoples who thought their legacies were vouchsafed by their technologies and their records whose alphabets we can't even read anymore. It's possible (if hubristic to assume) that we've reached a point where our society (or some evolution of it) is going to endure unbroken for the next ten millennia, but it would be pretty irresponsible of us to not take care of the mess we've made by preparing for the worst, especially given the consequences.
 
Considering recent events, you actually dont even have to look that far. Just go to Detroit. Probably one of the biggest ghost towns out there. Or well ... almost. A slowly decaying culture.

There are a lot of, what you could call, industrial grave yards all over the world, which no one really cares about. We already forget about them today. What will those places be in 50 or 150 years?

There are quite a few pretty polluted places on earth, places where the ground is so toxic from the industry that it would be quite a danger to eat anything thats growing in that area. So its not just nuclear waste we have to take care about today.
 
From my understanding, a major issue is cultural context. For example if you show a picture of a bunch of bodies, what about if the next people who find it are cannibals or necromancers or shamanic?

If you have images of radiation, what if the next culture who finds it is built around beliefs in energies? They perhaps would find it intriguing and open it up just to see what this novel energy is.

Most imagery you can think of would be appealing or ignorable to someone, which is why it's a difficult issue to solve. If this hypothetical stubmler-upon can't read the language, they need to be able to understand the symbols, and drastically-different cultural will perceive the symbols in drastically different ways.

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@Crni Vuk re: decaying cities and toxic areas, what's the situation in Japan these days? Are there huge areas around Fukushima that are completely uninhabitable? What has it done to the groundwater and other infrastructure dependent on clean local environmental resources?
 
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Wasn't a story or something about a human from the future finding a motel in a ruin ans started thinking that it was a temple for some forgotten god? The same could happen to nuclear plants, unless it's surrounded with a lot of radiation.The future humans would think it was something of importance from the old times and would start using it till one day little zorg would die from invisible energy beans and everybody would think it was god.
 
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