[wordup] A curse to last 10,000 years

[Adam Shand]

Via: http://csof.net/node.php?id=197
From: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/usnews/20020727/ts_usnews/a_curse_to_last_10_000_years&e=3

A curse to last 10,000 years
Sat Jul 27,12:14 PM ET

BY JAMES M. PETHOKOUKIS

Sure, right now Nevada's Yucca Mountain--which President Bush ( news -
web sites) last week designated America's official dump for the
deadliest nuclear waste--sits in a desert sparsely populated by
English-speaking homo sapiens. But care to make a wager about the year
12,002? Then, Yucca might rise from the suburbs of some post-human
society straight from Stargate SG-1. So how can we warn Yucca's future
neighbors against poking around this nuclear tomb, which will still be
radioactive 10,000 years hence? 

 Not a single spent nuclear-fuel rod will be shipped to the mountain
until construction of the repository is finished--perhaps by 2010--and
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Environmental Protection Agency ( 
news -  web sites) approve a plan for storing the waste.
Environmentalists and Nevada officials are vowing to fight the project
in court. But the Department of Energy (  news -  web sites) is already
starting to ponder how to comply with a federal requirement to mark the
site for the next 100 centuries. It has plenty of ideas to choose from.

Earlier this year, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas hosted an exhibit
( www.desertspace.org) of potential Yucca warning concepts--some
sarcastic, some whimsical, such as seeding the mountain with genetically
modified, blue-colored yucca shrubs or transforming it into a simulated
volcano. But more likely, says DOE spokesman Joe Davis, "We'll take a
look at what they're doing at WIPP."

That would be the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., which
since 1999 has been storing waste from nuclear weapons production in an
old salt mine. WIPP consulted panels of academics--including
archaeologists, astrobiologists, and materials experts--about the
warning-marker conundrum.

Scare tactics. They noted that although it might seem sensible to
fashion markers from a durable material like titanium, ancient Egypt
teaches a different lesson. The fine limestone that originally cloaked
the Great Pyramid of Cheops, for instance, was pried off and reused. And
scare tactics like the curses on Egyptian tombs can backfire. "Nothing
that says, 'Touch this rock and die,' " says archaeologist Maureen
Kaplan of environmental consultants ERG. Inevitably, someone would touch
a rock and survive, undermining the warning.

Of course, writing may not get the message across in the distant future.
So the teams also considered ways to embed a warning in the marker
structure itself. One proposal: "menacing earthworks" resembling the
jagged lightning-bolt insignia of Hitler's SS. "That one would scare the
bejesus out of you," says Roger Nelson, WIPP's chief technology officer.
But costly, elaborate structures can draw the wrong kind of attention.
"The more grandiose you make it, the more likely people will wonder what
you're hiding," says Jon Lomberg, artist for the PBS series Cosmos.

WIPP eventually chose a plan to surround the site with a plain,
33-foot-high, 100-foot-wide berm of rock, soil, and salt. Inside the
berm, to be built sometime after the site closes in 2035, will be 16
granite monuments (shades of Stonehenge) and many buried markers. Some
will carry warnings in the six official languages of the United Nations
( news - web sites), as well as Navajo; others will feature Edvard
Munch-esque distorted faces to represent horror, and changing star
positions to illustrate when the waste was buried.

At Yucca, where the buried radioactivity will be fiercer, project
managers are leaning toward edgier concepts, according to those familiar
with their thinking. Two favorites are the menacing earthworks and a
field of giant concrete thorns bursting from the ground near the
mountain.

But University of California-Irvine physicist and sci-fi author Gregory
Benford favors the opposite extreme: doing nothing. Well, almost
nothing. "Build some kind of monument out of government concrete which
will be gone in two centuries and forgotten," he says. He notes that the
only major unlooted Egyptian tomb was King Tut's, which was unmarked.