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This is not a place of honor

wipp.energy.gov

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Re: This is not a place of honor

#211

Post by kbart »

turbohedgehog wrote: post #190
kbart wrote: post #101

Any marks would only attract people's attention. I can't come up with a single historical example where some marks would successfully keep people away. Even now we keep digging once forbidden and sacred places like pyramids, graves, temples, plague victims' burial grounds. Furthermore, a "menacing earthworks" example from the article looks like a treasure is buried inside that square. Why not bury it deep enough in a…

I wonder if we can develop some kind of system that continually emits foul odors for 10000 years - it's not likely our sense of smell will evolve away in that time.

Putting the technical difficulties of constructing such odor emitting system that works for thousands of years aside, wouldn't you be intrigued to find out what smells so badly down there..? Don't underestimate curiosity of humans.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#212

Post by brbsix »

valbaca wrote: post #108

I had an internship here during the summer of 2010. For the most part it was incredibly boring as there was SO much emphasis on safety (rightfully so). For example, people would have to be cleared from an area in order for janitors to vacuum an area, so that no one would trip on the power cord. I did get to go down into the salt shaft which was incredibly cool (also literally cool, which was a relief because it was t…

I guess that's not very surprising. If you're used to thinking 10k years out, you recognize the inevitability of catastrophe in a way that others wouldn't.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#213

Post by bronson »

refurb wrote: post #193
apsec112 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think there are any non-toxic forms of mercury or arsenic. There are forms that are less bioavailable, but that's equally true of nuclear waste.

A lot of metals can be converted into insoluble, inert minerals that have low-to-no toxicity. Mercury can be converted to mercury (II) sulfide which is insoluble in water and has no vapor pressure.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_sulfide

Except when you heat it. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755212/

Also, cost must be a factor. Turning materials back into ore is extremely expensive.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#214

Post by vonmoltke »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #202
vonmoltke wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#215

Post by PaulHoule »

People 5000 years from now could very well see WIPP and Yucca Mountain as valuable sources of Plutonium, Uranium as well as other fuels and nuclear explosives.

What if 5000 years from now the Mormons and the Scientologists are fighting over the Yucca Mountain site in search of materials to build nuclear weapons?

Re: This is not a place of honor

#216

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

Hondor wrote: post #115
krkoch wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure. Primitive mining in e.g. Røros, Norway goes back to 1740. Dynamite were introduced to the mine in 1870. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8ros

Only 40 years before the invention of the Geiger counter. If future primitive people have dynamite, it probably won't be long before the know about radiation too. This whole project seems to be being treated as far more important than it really is. It's only to protect a very small group of people in a very narrow window of technological advancement and only if civilization had somehow already been destroyed yet ther…

I agree. If you missed it in the article, it's even bigger than that. The last sentence is most telling:

"This panel member therefore recommends that the markers and the structures associated with them be conceived along truly gargantuan lines. To put their size into perspective, a simple berm, say 35-m wide and 15-m high, surrounding the proposed land-withdrawal boundary, would involve excavation, transport, and placement of around 12 million cubic meters of earth. What is proposed, of course, is on a much greater scale than that. By contrast, in the construction of the Panama Canal, 72.6 million cubic meters were excavated, and the Great Pyramid occupies 2.4 million cubic meters. In short, to ensure the probability of success, the WIPP marker undertaking will have to be one of the greatest public works ventures in history."

Plus, as interesting as this project is, I can't imagine coming across a gargantuan spike field in the middle of the desert that I would not want to explore.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#217

Post by vonmoltke »

jacquesm wrote: post #175
polpo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to high school next to a dioxin superfund site [1]. They incinerated it (I could see the smokestack from the school) and supposedly it's all cleaned up now [2]. We'll see how we all turn out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri [2] https://clu-in.org/download/remed/incpdf/times.pdf

A school within line of sight of a smokestack burning dioxins is something that should not even exist.

An incinerator outgassing smoke toxic to surrounding people is something that should not exist. Proximity to a school is irrelevant, except for irrational fearmongering.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#218

Post by jrockway »

wobbleblob wrote: post #172
michaelt wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comic shows the tree has grown bigger in the final frame of the comic. So they'll have to assume it shrinks trees as well as absorbing disease :)

It would never occur to me to interpret it that way, rather than him moving the block closer to the trees. Wouldn't it take a human life time for a tree to grow that much?

Depends on the type of tree. When I was a kid we got a tree cutting at some arbor day event and planted it in the backyard. By the next summer, the tree was as tall as our two-story house.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#219

Post by aomurphy »

SCAQTony wrote: post #82

What language(s) did the earth speak 10,000 years ago. The concept is electrifying for will English or any other language written or spoken today even exist? The monument would have to be a "Rosetta Stone(s)" quite obtrusive and large like a pyramid. It would have to be written in multiple present and ancient languages. It would would have to feature math formulas and illustrations etched foot deep into Titanium, car…

!0,000 Years ago was ~8000 BC. Nobody knows what languages people spoke back then. Our oldest reconstructed languages like Proto-Uralic and Proto-Afro-Asiatic are hypothesized to have been spoken around then, but they are very rough guesses and certainly are unintelligible to all modern humans.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#220

Post by raisedbyninjas »

agentgt wrote: post #210

It seems like one of the problem is that the place "is not a place of honor" . In modern civilization memorials and/or historically significant places are continuously safeguarded and most importantly remembered. Yes they can be targets of attacks but they get rebuilt. That is their significance is remembered and protected . It seems like a bad idea to make a dangerous place forgettable. So instead of hiding I propos…

Some monuments are safeguarded today, but not all. Fewer monuments were safeguarded in the millenia before we understood radiation. Your design relies on a culture that values the remnants of other cultures to the point that they are sacred. There have been times and places where the people just wanted to re-purpose the nice building materials like the Mayan temple that was destroyed to create road gravel. Wars can break out that destroy delicate structures too, like the archaeological artifacts that were scooped up by the U.S. military to fill sand-bags during the Iraq war.

Choosing huge, ugly, low-value materials for construction avoids those dangers.

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