DOE to The Future: Don't mess with this stuff!

Regardless of your stance on entombing nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain — an increasingly dim prospect — there’s an exhaustive if somewhat credulous interview over at BLDGBLOG with a top Department of Energy wonk who waxes scientific on the art of storing deadly, high-level nuclear waste.

Geoscientist Abraham Van Luik covers everything from the waste-friendly geology of Yucca Mountain (”the block in the middle — where Yucca Mountain sits — is like a boat, riding very steadily. It’s been like that for the past twelve million years, so we don’t see that it’s going to change in the future”) to the old dormant-volcano problem (”Although volcanic events are highly unlikely — as are very large ground-motion events — they must be factored into our analyses, based on the likelihood of their occurring over a one-million year time span).

But most interestingly, Van Luik addresses the problem of how to tell earthlings a million years from now more or less that PLEASE GO AWAY THIS IS A NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP DON’T TOUCH WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T TOUCH:

We have looked very closely at what WIPP is doing — the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. They did a study with futurists and other people-sociologists and language specialists. They decided to come up with markers in seven languages, basically like a Rosetta Stone, with the idea that there will always be someone in the world who studies ancient languages, even 10,000 years from now, someone who will be able to resurrect what the meanings of these stelae are. They will basically say, “This is not a place of honor, don’t dig here, this is not good material,” etc.

What we have done is adapt that scheme to Yucca Mountain — but we have a different configuration. WIPP is on a flat surface, and their repository is very deep underground; we’re basically inside a mountain with no resources that anybody would want to go after. We will build large marker monuments, and also engrave these same types of warnings onto smaller pieces of rock and metal, and spread them around the area. When people pick them up, they will think, “Oh — let’s not go underground here.”

Fascinating. But forgive a cynic for imagining some future beings with a highly refined sense of irony upon whom such a warning — whatever you do, don’t dig here! — might actually have the opposite, don’t-throw-me-in-the-briar-patch, effect, as in, “Don’t dig here? Why, clearly they must have buried something really awesome they don’t want us to know about!”

Cue fateful robotic nano-shovels.