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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

#171

Post by stared »

yellowapple wrote: post #36
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and as such, any large monumental works are more likely to attract attention than to repel it. May even become a cult place of worship. More effective to bury and obfuscate the site entirely?

If it becomes a "cult place of worship", then that's probably Mission Accomplished; the faithful have a tendency to defend holy places against those seeking to defile them (read: dig into them and expose the world to nuclear waste). If they can be convinced that such sites are "God's Temples" and that defiling them will unleash all sorts of plagues (which they very likely will), then the current generation's job is d…

Religion in the service of natural selection? A nice twist. (E.g. all cultures without worship of holy places eventually perish.)

Re: This is not a place of honor

#172

Post by wobbleblob »

michaelt wrote: post #155
wobbleblob wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine a culture, 10,000 years down the road, that reads from bottom to top. Wow, awesome, let's excavate one of these disease absorbing blocks! Why not stick the waste in an old Uranium mine? Maybe our future descendants will be able to make good use of our radio active waste?

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?

Re: This is not a place of honor

#173

Post by felipeerias »

tinco wrote: post #141
orbitingpluto wrote: post #105

I'm never understood this marker system. Graves have been marked in a threatening manner so that they would not be plundered. It doesn't work. The point is to hide the waste. The system should be designed to progressively unveil warnings if some future man starts digging. Otherwise, you're just asking for them to dig it up. Another thing not mentioned is to design the container so that anyone who plans to excavate wi…

You're not thinking on the 10.000 year timescale. So you hide it, after 1000 years someone starts digging there and finds it anyway, they see the messages and stop, and then the site is left unhidden for the next 9000 years, what should it look like? Also even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years? And how would you prevent people from using the poison as the potent weapon it clearly…

We still haven't opened the tomb of the first emperor of China, which has been closed for more than two millennia. One of the main reasons is the presence of enormous amounts of mercury. Whole rivers of it, according to tradition. There's your poison.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#174

Post by omginternets »

vectorjohn wrote: post #156
proactivesvcs wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society can lose information as time progresses. Modern medicine is only just starting to re-discover how important state of mind is when packaging, describing and using drugs. That's the case despite the fact there haven't been any large-scale catastrophes that caused the information to be lost. In 10,000 years who knows what we might have forgotten?

Not nuclear waste.

Assuming no civilizational collapse happens.

Consider the dark ages: much knowledge from greek and roman antiquity was lost, only to be rediscovered at the renaissance. It's entirely conceivable that knowledge of ionising radiation could be lost for a similar period of time if, say, a solar flare were to destroy all telecom infrastructure and subsequent wars were to destroy printed works.

Unlikely? Maybe, but certainly possible.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#175

Post by jacquesm »

polpo wrote: post #106
jacquesm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Dioxin Has a worst case half life of 50 years. http://www.ejnet.org/dioxin/ Lists very small quantities as still quite dangerous to reproduction or causing cancer in exposed subjects. But on a 10,000 year scale I fail to see how it would still be a problem. A few hundred, definitely still risky.

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.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#176

Post by rmccue »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #87
e12e wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a very good documentary on the subject. For me it really drove home the idea that current nuclear power comes with too expensive externalities in the form of "keep this stuff safe for 100 000 years". We've never come close to doing something like that as a species. I don't think we ever will.

Actually, after a couple of hundred years it's no more dangerous than the ore from which it came. No one worries about putting up signs around natural uranium ore bodies. Saying that "x has a long half-life" is exactly the same thing as saying "x is not very radioactive". By definition.

The full report with the longer message (linked elsewhere in this thread; page 214 or F-125) explicitly notes that the 10,000 year point is when it matches the ore:

> Radioactivity declines exponentially with time. By 10,000 years after the waste was buried here, the waste will be no more hazardous than the ore from which the radioactive material was taken [see 50 FR 38071a].

Re: This is not a place of honor

#178

Post by Bromskloss »

antihero wrote: post #158

Surely written warnings, if some future society discovers them, they might be curious enough to have decrypted at least one of our present day languages/methods of communication. Just have the same concepts relayed in as many languages/ways as possible, and then make the site sufficiently difficult to infiltrate that it would take a sufficiently advanced civilisation to break into it. You could even tier the messages…

> THE THINGS HERE MAKE DEATH.

I wouldn't be sure what that meant. They make death what? Great again?

Re: This is not a place of honor

#179

Post by kaishiro »

dang wrote: post #107
kaishiro wrote: post #27

Just wanted to say I accidentally fat fingered a downvote while trying to do the opposite. Sorry!

Unvote is coming. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852316 and marked it off-topic.

Thanks dang. Just felt like I needed to let him/her know : )

Re: This is not a place of honor

#180

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

felipeerias wrote: post #173
tinco wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not thinking on the 10.000 year timescale. So you hide it, after 1000 years someone starts digging there and finds it anyway, they see the messages and stop, and then the site is left unhidden for the next 9000 years, what should it look like? Also even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years? And how would you prevent people from using the poison as the potent weapon it clearly…

We still haven't opened the tomb of the first emperor of China, which has been closed for more than two millennia. One of the main reasons is the presence of enormous amounts of mercury. Whole rivers of it, according to tradition. There's your poison.

I don't think mercury's fast acting enough to be effective here.
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