America has currently no plan for its atomic waste . It did , however , at one point in time , have a supremely challenging design to entomb it in a mountain for 10,000 years . From gloss - changing radioactive cats to rotting kitty litter , this essay fromMethod Quarterlyexplores the mythologic and the mundane problem of atomic waste .
To tell the mythology of Yucca Mountain , we might as well bug out with the fees . In 1983 , a small fee of just a tenth of a penny per kW - hour began appearing on electrical energy bills in America . The money was meant for Yucca Mountain , a wrinkle of land on the sharpness of the Nevada Test Site that was being ferment into a massive tomb for the nuclear long time . Here , waste from nuclear power works and weapons would be stored for at least 10,000 years until radioactivity evanesce to secure level . political science could give way and refinement could accrue , but Yucca Mountain was supposed to remain .
In 2014 , after the Department of Energy had amassed $ 30 billion for the atomic waste disposal fund , it softly discontinue collect the fee . It stopped because a lawcourt told it to , because the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository did not subsist . Five miles of tunnels — out of the stand for 40 — had already been carved into the rock , but there was no radioactive waste stored there . After blow past its planned gap date of January 31 , 1998 by an embarrassing leeway , the Obama governing in 2010 abandoned the languishing architectural plan to construct Yucca Mountain . Three - and - a - half years later , a motor inn ruled the Union authorities could n’t keep collecting fees for a site it had no intention of building .
That ’s one manner to see Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository ’s continued nonentity , as yet another political boondoggle : 30 billion dollars of taxpayer money collected to build a mythical mountain .
But Yucca Mountain is more than that . The ambition behind it far outperform the two- or four- or even six - class term of any political leader . Here we were prove to construct a social organisation that would last longer than the Great Pyramids of Egypt , longer than any man - made structure , longsighted than any language . When forced to espouse a foresightful opinion of human existence — when looking back on today from 10,000 days into the future tense — it ’s intemperately not to view Yucca Mountain in almost - mythologic terms . We can guess succeeding earthlings pondering it the way we ponder the Parthenon or Stonehenge today — massive structure permeate with an alien spirituality .
Ten thousand years may be the time musical scale of legends , but nuclear waste repositing is a very substantial and practical problem for humanity . It is a trouble where incomprehensibly recollective meter scale clash with human one , where howling vision run up against military force utterly mundane and niggling .
Inside Yucca Mountain . look-alike : U.S. Department of Energy .
actinotherapy stay on an almost spooky threat : an invisible , silent , and odorless risk . In contaminated sites , you see man drape in full - torso suits divining for actinotherapy with Geiger counters . To someone who did not eff the purpose of this , they might resemble robed phallus of an atomic priesthood appeal to some inconspicuous power .
At high enough levels , radiation sears through the eubstance , damaging tissue paper in ways that are directly obvious . At lowly but still severe levels , you ca n’t palpate , hear , or see radiation sickness come about through you , but it may knock loose a fibril of DNA , creating a mutation that gets copied over and over in divide cells until the day one of those prison cell becomes cancerous . It bides its meter like a curse that can take years or tenner to manifest .
In 1981 , the Department of Energy convene a labor force on how to communicate with the hereafter .
The dialog box of consulted expert included engine driver , but also an archeologist , a polyglot , and an expert in nonverbal communication . dub the Human Interference Task Force , they were tasked with figuring out how to keep succeeding human beings away from a deep geologic repository of nuclear waste material — like Yucca Mountain .
The monument would want some variety of physical marker that , first of all , could last 10,000 geezerhood , so the task force ’s report considers the relative virtue of dissimilar material like metal , concrete , and plastic . Yet the marker would also need to repel rather than pull in humans — setting it asunder from Stonehenge , the Great Pyramids , or any other repository that has remained abide for thousands of years . To do that , the marking would need warnings . But how do you admonish future mankind whose cultures and languages will have evolved in nameless ways ?
In accession to the forcible marker , the chore force recommends “ oral transmission ” to preserve their monition for future generations . Even as nomenclature itself mutates , the line of reasoning goes , the taradiddle we say endure . Imagine Homer ’s epic or Beowulf , but on an even longer time scale leaf . The report , in characteristically wry language , imagines that the future universe around Yucca Mountain might tell stories that “ include perpetuation of knowledge about a ‘ limited ’ place . ”
Thomas Sebeok , the linguistic scientist consulted by the Human Interference Task Force , goes into further point in a freestanding report . He proposes seeding and nurturing a body of folklore around Yucca Mountain , and even inventing annual rituals where these account could be retold . These folktales need not explicate the science of radiotherapy ; they just demand to hint at a great danger .
“ The existent ‘ truth ’ would be confide exclusively to — what we might call for dramatic emphasis — an ‘ atomic priesthood , ' ” Sebeok writes . This group , he say , would take to include “ a commission of learned physicists , experts in radiation sickness , anthropologists , linguists , psychologist , semioticians , and whatever additional expertness may be holler for now and in the future . ”
In the decade when Yucca Mountain was still under development , some of the most intense interest in the repository come from 800 miles up the West Coast in Hanford , Washington . The Hanford Nuclear Reservation produced nearly all of the plutonium that snuff it into the U.S. ’s atomic armoury during the Cold War . Then , it was decommissioned . Now , it is the site of the expectant environmental cleanup task in the country .
Fifty - six million gallons of radioactive wasteland sit in 177 blade army tank forget underground . The permissive waste cast from soupy to sludgy , and it has the unfortunate habit of leaking out of the aging tank into the groundwater .
This was n’t the plan , of course . The idea was to build a vitrification plant on site , where radioactive waste could be mixed with molten looking glass and poured into steel column — making the impermeable atomic coffins that would then be inter in Yucca Mountain . But the killing at Hanford has been horribly mismanaged . The vitrification works , due to open in 2011 , is still half complete . Of course , even if we bring off to safely solidify and seal the radioactive waste at Hanford , we still do n’t have anywhere to put it .
Meanwhile , the radioactive wastefulness keeps leaking .
Go back down the West Coast from Hanford , lead inland for 200 miles , and you ’ll slay Carlsbad , New Mexico , home to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant ( WIPP ) , a atomic waste deposit in the desert of the Southwest that was in reality built .
Unlike Yucca Mountain , though , WIPP is only contrive to address low - level waste . While it can lock away the stuff that has come in contact with radioactive material , it ca n’t safely lay in the by-product of nuclear reactors themselves . Gloves , tool , and other equipment used to handle plutonium and U are jam in drums , which are then stored in suite tunneled into the rude salt deposit . Over time , the salt will exude around the barrels , incase the waste in a mineral tomb .
The problem of farsighted - term waste entrepot at WIPP is actual but still theoretical . It ’s only when WIPP is close down and sealed off that the design to warn away succeeding humans will be define in motion . For now , the tentative design is a series of 25 foot - tall granite monuments engraved with warnings in seven language .
But , like Yucca Mountain , WIPP has been the subject of many more fantastic and remindful proposals . In 1991 , it too convene a multidisciplinary control panel to contemplate the problem of communicating with the hereafter . The result composition laid out proposal that stray from an designer ’s “ landscape of spikelet ” to a warning message that begins like this :
This place is a subject matter … and part of a system of messages … pay tending to it !
Sending this message was important to us . We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture .
This shoes is not a place of purity … no extremely prestigious deed is commemorated here … nothing valued is here .
What is here is grievous and repulsive to us . This message is a monition about danger .
In February , a barrel of radioactive wastefulness at WIPP ruptured underground causing radioactive material to snake its way of life up a breathing shaft and expose 21 workers on the surface 2,000 feet above the drum . WIPP has since shut down and may not reopen for age .
With Yucca Mountain go , the Department of Energy had in reality considered send Hanford ’s to - be - vitrified mellow - level wastefulness down to WIPP . This plan clear was n’t going to happen either .
How can a cram just tear ? The prescribed investigating points to a chemic reaction between nitric superman and hunt alloy in the barrel . But this reaction only happens at high temperatures , which has cast hunch on one other component part in the drums : kitty bedding material .
Kitty litter is routinely used to help brace radioactive barren , but a contractile organ had of late alternate from using a charge plate - based litter to a straw - base one . The rot wheat may have created just enough heat to set off the chemical response that ruptured the barrel .
In 1984 , the German diary Zeitschrift für Semiotik ( Journal of Semiotics ) print a dozen response from faculty member contemplate on how to intercommunicate across 10,000 year . The proposals grade from the mundane to the outre and fantastical . One respondent proposes making the storage barrels impossible to open without bully technical attainment . Another take creating a serial publication of monition in concentrical dress circle that would boom as terminology evolve . Thomas Sebeok is in there , expound on his system of rite around an atomic priesthood and their rituals . But a pair of semioticians , Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri , take the germ of Sebeok ’s idea for a nuclear folklore to a singularly strange conclusion .
Their solution is “ re cats , ” creatures bred to vary vividness in the mien of radiation — like walking , make vibrant sounds , yarn - chasing Geiger counters . But this is just the first part of the marriage offer . Alongside the cats , Bastide and Fabbri propose that we formulate a eubstance of folklore , passed on through proverbs and myths to excuse that when a cat changes color , you advantageously run .
Still more wonderful and unexpected is that someone has claim Bastide and Fabbri at their word and actually written a birdcall about ray bozo . The podcast 99 % Invisible commissioned Berlin - based artist Chad Matheny , aka Emperor X , to compose a “ 10,000 - yr Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories ” for anepisode on nuclear wasteland . The call , write Matheny , had to be “ so tricky and pesky that it might be turn over down from propagation to generation over a span of 10,000 age . ”
Ray cats may not exist . A ten thousand year nuclear waste secretary at Yucca Mountain may not exist . But a song about them does .
There are no fantastical animal at Hanford , but there are hare and pigeons and deglutition and Russian cactus . The security department soften around the operating Hanford Nuclear Reservation has since been convert into a national memorial untouched by agriculture and development . It ’s a lovely stead to go hike up .
But to Hanford ’s Biological Control Program , the wildlife are potential “ biological radiological vectors , ” and therefore represent a huge pain in the neck . Rabbits , badgers , and gophers that somehow ingest leaked radioactive stuff can disperse their radioactive shit across thousands of acres . The radioactive animal have to be hunted down , and their poop safely clean up by people in suit . Even tiny white ant and ants can unearth radioactive material .
And then there are tumbleweed , whose taproots can reach 20 foot down to wet-nurse up buried radioactive waste material . In the wintertime , those taproot shrivel up , and it ’s off the tumbleweed go , catch on miles away with the wind . In 2010 , Hanford had to go after down 30 radioactive smoke .
Someday , our atomic waste matter might really be seal off in a mint capped with a giant repository warn succeeding man 10,000 days into the future . But for now , Russian cactus — that casual symbol of ennui — keep tumbling out with our intractable atomic waste .
This piece wasoriginally publishedinMethod Quarterly , a fresh publication that features stories about science in the making . you’re able to learn the first issue , Boundaries , onlineor inprint .
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