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It almost sucks that we found a better way of getting rid of nuclear waste (shoving it into a deep borehole past bedrock and filling the hole with concrete), because those extremely long-term nuclear waste storage facilities designed to outlast society would have gone insanely hard.
I mean we're still building those facilities for a reason, like the WIPP, or that one in Finland. Even if boreholes overcome their capacity limits there'd still probably need to be some way to warn any potential future people not to drill there, especially with horizontal drill holes
Well, the idea is that it takes more technology to dig that deep than it does to understand what radiation is. And even a society as advanced as ours rarely digs that deep anyway. We’re better off leaving these sites unmarked to not give future people any reason to dig there.
Yeah, Tom Scott mentioned that in a video. Marking in any way a site just draws attention to it and doing stuff to try to keep people out might make them think you are hiding something valuable.
That is another good point. Any “keep out or you will die” sign, no matter how well-communicated, can always be interpreted as a lie to keep valuable treasure safe. OP’s meme but unironically.
No need, multiple kilometers of solid rock does that job quite well. You need to be pretty technologically advanced to even dig that deep (probably advanced enough to know what radiation is), and even if you are that advanced people don’t tend to dig random boreholes in random places for no reason. Marking it with big sign that says “there is something dangerous many kilometers below here” would if anything only increase the odds that someone would dig a massive borehole there. Leaving it unmarked makes it vanishingly unlikely that someone would dig a massive borehole there.
IMHO we should just leave it in a secure building for 100 years and let people in the future figure it out. Their technology is going to be inconceivably beyond ours so they will probably have a better long term solution.
If we ever overcome energy scarcity then I would imagine something like a fully automated chemical processing plant that can separate out the really nasty isotopes and concentrate them since I believe most of the mass of this nuclear waste is not the radioisotopes themselves. Then they could be disposed of with only a fraction of the original volume. Or perhaps those future people will even have a good use for these radioisotopes.
i think the idea was that in the event that civilisation recesses/something else unfamiliar with the concept of nuclear waste was to explore. Banking on them being smarter than us is just setting it up for failure
That’s all well and good if you assume that the people whose problem it is will be more advanced. But for all we know, humanity might technologically regress. Or we might abandon Earth or go extinct entirely, leaving room for some other species to grow into a technological civilization.
Nuclear waste stays dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. There really is no telling what will happen in that time, we could have human footprints on the far side of the galaxy by then.
The issue with nuclear waste is really not the amount/volume of it. Extracting the actually dangerous material wouldn't make it much easier to store, and potentially much dangerous if there's a leak.
That's why you hedge your bets and don't just use one method of conveying danger. A big part of it is just making the land uninhabitable just in case none of the warnings work, as unlikely as that is (though people forgetting about nuclear waste is also pretty unlikely)
I think most species of animal (as long as mammal) would probably take it at it's face value. We could add on other animals loosing their pemis too so they'd really get the point
The majority of radioactive waste reaches safe levels in less than 100,000 years, which is less time than it would take for a new species to evolve sapience
But over time it would start to resemble what a regular statue of dicks and balls would look like when broken by time and the elements and if you found a place where people apparently decided to erect multiple phallic statues, wouldn't you want to check it out?
the fundamental problem is you need to communicate that it's somethings there so so people don't randomly dig there and accidentally stumble upon it.
you also need to communicate that it's dangerous otherwise people will want to dig up this archeological site. we are doing that right now after all.
but there's really no way to do that without attracting people who will hear "dangerous" and get interested. Regardless of how much you warn them that it's not worth it.
only somewhat related, but I remember when the splatoon 3 side order DLC was announced, they showed some concept art of an octoling looking at spikes like those and then they weren't in the final game whatsoever. also I can thank splatoon theory videos from the time for me understanding this meme
These spikes are a proposed method of marking nuclear waste. Since the stuff stays dangerously radioactive for millennia, a method for warning future civilizations of it without using any form of language (as it would inevitably drift and become unrecognizable) or referencing the concept of radiation (in case science regreses to the point radiation is no longer understood) had to be made, hence the spikes. The message that is to be communicated was very clearly defined.
"This 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."
I fuckimg hate the excessive fearmongering about nuclear waste. We have so many things so much more dangerous than it, for example that one gold mine that has to artificially be kept frozen forever or it will kill all life on the planet. Or climate change. Or just direct pollution from fossil fuels
It's not really "true" with the way they worded it. There's enough arsenic in the mine to kill everyone on earth 11 times over if evenly divided but there's no way it would naturally distribute enough to actually do that
That’s why Lange estimates GMOB will need at least five years before recommending a permanent method. As for when that solution could be put in place? That might take 25 years.
“And that’s a best-case scenario,” he said. “So we’re not around the corner. But the lens for this project is perpetuity. This is a forever problem, so 25 years from today is pretty good.”
Well that's not good.
Of course they also screwed over the indigenous Yellowknife Dene people in the process. Typical.
I learned about these sites from a sort of local college TED Talk-type show, but the main point was about how those messages showed up on booty shorts. And the presentation was given by a gal I was crushing on hard at the time.
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