If you like to read weird science-and-engineering-adjacent stuff on the internet then you've likely already come across some of the proposals for keeping future humans away from long-term nuclear waste storage. Since nuclear waste can remain dangerously radioactive for over 10,000 years - potentially outlasting all currently existing languages and institutions - a lot of interesting ideas have been put forward for minimizing the risk of human intrusion into storage sites for the lifetime of the radioactive hazard.
Proposals have included a Landscape of Thorns, Menacing Earthworks, and other imposing architecture that seems almost purposefully designed to attract future adventurers. And who could forget the following iconic warning text2?
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We consider ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Most of the content discussed in the Wikipedia article on the subject comes from the "Sandia Report"3, prepared in the 90s during planning for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. And most of the online articles on the subject that I've seen don't go much beyond the Wikipedia article and this particular report.
But there's an earlier Sandia Report with the nearly-identical title Expert Judgement on Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant4, and it's here that we find Appendix C (the "Boston Team Report"), which contains some fun stuff that I think is sadly overlooked elsewhere online.
The Boston Team Report and "Point Scenarios"
The Boston Team considers future scenarios in which the WIPP could conceivably be breached. In addition to plausible "generic scenarios" (e.g. construction, subsurface research, resource extraction), they include some highly-specific (and somewhat silly) "point scenarios" that read like little speculative fiction stories. In the words of the report,
Even though we have written the scenarios with an occasional attempt at humor, they have a serious purpose. They contain seemingly improbable things, but, we argue, they are real possibilities that, if they did occur, would have important social consequences.
Like all futurism, some of these predictions have aged better than others, and at least one weirdly-specific possibility has actually come true much sooner than anticipated. Let's take a look.
"A Feminist World, 2091"
The first point scenario is summarized as follows:
Women dominated in society, numerically through the choice of having girl babies and socially. Extreme feminist values and perspectives also dominated. Twentieth-century science was discredited as misguided male agressive epistemological arrogance. The Feminist Alternative Potash Corporation began mining in the WIPP site. Although the miners saw the markers, they dismissed the warnings of another example of inferior, inadequaate, and muddled masculine thinking. They penetrated a storage area, releasing radionuclides.
The authors also provide probability estimates for each component of the scenario5:
Probabilities:
- Low of women having 80 percent of top positions in political, economic, and social institutions, but probability high of women having half of them and totally dominating some institutional sectors.
- Very high of significant numbers of women and some men having "feminist views" that define 20th-century science as inferior, inadequate, and muddled masculine thinking.
- Low of dismissing [warning markers] as false male thinking. [But why not survey a sample of women (and members of ethnic minorities) about plans for WIPP and let the record show that such a survey was done?]
I leave it to you to interpret what this says about the authors' beliefs regarding the basis & validity of feminist critiques of science.
I do want to point out that the wording regarding the proposed survey suggests that the authors don't really care about the results, just the ability to advertise that a survey was conducted. This is essentially virtue signalling as a nuclear waste protection strategy, which is a sentence that you are unlikely to encounter again in the future.
"Human Warriors Return from Space, 11991"
This scenario is summarized as follows:
Spacebattleship V was returning to Mesa Spaceport when the ship malfunctioned. With only partial control, the commander headed for the only nearby area clear of buildings and human habitation, the WIPP site. Although he saw a pattern of earth on the open area, he did not know what i meant. He saw no warning lights. His sensors received no electronic warning. Before he crashed, he fired his forward lasers to reduce the speed of impact. The laser blasting plus the exploding fuel and weapons during the crash penetrated the repository, releasing radionuclides.
I find this scenario funny mainly because the authors estimate a "low" probability that "a spaceport will be built somewhere within 500 miles or so of WIPP." But I've actually visited a spaceport just 165 miles from the WIPP site. Spaceport America (describing itself as "the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport") was opened in 2011, just 20 years after this scenario was written.
"Nickey Nuke and WIPP Worlds, 11991"
In his Odes (3.30), the poet Horace famously wrote7:
I have completed a monument more enduring than bronze
and higher than the regal structure of the pyramids
which neither corroding rain nor the powerless north wind can destroy,
nor the uncountable succession of years and the fleeing of time.
The "monument," of course, is Horace's own poetry, which has indeed lasted over 2000 years. Shakespeare expresses a similar idea in his Sonnet 65:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
Along the same lines, the authors of the Boston Report describe a scenario in which a Smokey the Bear-like mascott named "Nickey Nuke" becomes the protagonist of a series of legends that live on for thousands of years. The scenario ends as follows:
Long after metal had disintegrated and granite worn smooth of markings, the legends of Nickey Nuke remained in people's minds everywhere on Earth...
Something as seemingly frail and unsubstantial as a story or poem, it turned out, was more durable than the most established social institution or the toughest metal, plastic, or stone.
While no such "Nickey Nuke" yet exists, it's worth noting that ideas from the 1993 Sandia report have occasionally found their way into pop culture media; the proposed "spike field" or "landscape of thorns" appears in Fallout 76, and I've definitely come across "this is not a place of honour" memes online. Whether the Bethesda will maintain the Fallout 76 servers for 10,000 years remains to be seen.
Conclusion
There's a lot of other fun stuff in the report, which you can find here. The point scenarios begin on page 168 of the linked PDF.
And remember, the WIPP site is not a place of honour and is best shunned and left uninhabited!
- I'm not sure what the copyright status of this image is. A low quality black-and-white version can be found in scans of the Sandia report, so presumably the original report included the colour image? Anyways, I downloaded the image from [here](https://hyperallergic.com/312318/a-nuclear-warning-designed-to-last-10000-years/) and I think my use of it is fair use. ↩
- Strictly speaking, this is just a list of ideas that the system of warnings is supposed to convey; no one is proposing actually writing this verbatim on a sign. ↩
- Trauth, K.M., Hora, S. C., & Guzowski, R.v. (1993). Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM. ↩
- Hora, S. C., Von Winterfeldt, D., & Trauth, K. M. (1991). Expert Judgement on Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM. ↩
- Uninteresting estimates omitted to save space. ↩
- Actually just a full-size replica. ↩
- My translation. ↩