[grues-dinner]

It's a fun exercise to think about every time this comes up, but it always strikes me as very much perfect being the enemy of the good.

It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years, and is inpenetrable to an hypothetical worst case society: one that forgot literally everything about the concept of radiation and all current languages and semiotics but does have the ability and motivation to find and excavate though deep rock and concrete, for no practical reason like mining some ore, and then get into the armoured casks and spread the material around their society before realising something is wrong. The more defences you add, the more someone can say "yes, but it's insecure against a hunter gatherer society that somehow has dynamite and plasma lances, and a religion that requires them to seek out, excavate, cut open, grind and feed to babies anything in gigantic, obviously artificial steel containers deep in solid rock and they also think that any warning or sickness is a test from God."

Sure, you saved an extremely hypothetical group of future humans from death. But to be honest, any human society that hasn't figured out radiation will lose more people to cutting down thousands of meters into the rock then they would to the radiation.

In fact, if we take it to the extreme, should we proactively mine out all natural radioactive material on Earth and rebury in proper containment? Just in case someone starts mining uranium in the year 15000 and doesn't know what it is, they could be hurt by that.

[wat10000]

It seems like bad ROI unless you assume that it’s inevitable that society will collapse so hard that there’s not even a memory of “nuclear waste dangerous” even though we’re still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants thousands of years later.

If it’s merely possible but not inevitable, then some basic precautions make sense, but after that your effort is probably better expended in trying to avoid the collapse rather than trying to save some lives after it happens.

[thaumasiotes]

> unless you assume that it’s inevitable that society will collapse so hard that there’s not even a memory of “nuclear waste dangerous” even though we’re still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants thousands of years later.

There is zero cultural continuity from Sumerian merchants to us. We can read Sumerian texts because we excavated a library that included various texts meant to instruct Akkadian-speaking students in Sumerian.* We didn't know it was there before we found it.

We didn't know how to read Akkadian either - that would count as cultural continuity from Sumer, since those two cultures were deeply enmeshed. We had to figure it out based on our knowledge of Old Persian, which used a writing system adapted from Akkadian cuneiform and which was also completely lost. We figured that out by comparing an undeciphered inscription to a list of Persian kings given in another language (Greek). Akkadian is not related to Persian, except in the adaptation of the writing system, but we got lucky in that it is a Semitic language and Semitic languages still exist today. Sumerian is related to no other language we know of and required the instructional curriculum to decipher.

There has been cultural continuity from classical Greece to us, but there's a long gap between them and Sumer. We're not still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants; we're making fun of them again.

* The same texts have been found elsewhere since then - Mesopotamian documents are not in short supply - but it's always nice to have a full curriculum outlined in one place.

[kelseyfrog]

> There is zero cultural continuity from Sumerian merchants to us.

Our sexagesimal division of angles and time are products of Sumerian culture. So strictly speaking greater than zero.

[thaumasiotes]

That's fair, but it's kind of on the same level as the "cultural continuity" represented by the Japanese using the Greek week. It's a real transmission, but it goes through multiple intermediaries, the source is generally not recognized, no contact ever occurred between source and destination, and, being adopted only indirectly, it's part of a cultural suite related to the intermediate culture that had contact with the destination, not one related to the source culture.

[psychoslave]

Well the obvious way to unsure that these waste are not going to threat human lives in whatever long period of time is to not create them in the first place.

And not doing it is even easier than saying we could not produce them.

Note that I'm not antinuclear or collapsist. Maybe in 10000 years there will be so much progresses in ways we don't expect that this material could be turned easily into safe or even useful material for human beings.

[foxglacier]

In addition, this society has to fail to identify what the resulting health problems were caused by. If only the people who ate the excavated material or live in its vicinity get sick, that should eventually be obvious before they spread it to the whole human population through their weird global religion.

[bumby]

The tough part about radiation itself isn't painful so causality can be hard to ascertain.

[foxglacier]

Yea it might take many years but if it's a big enough problem, it would surely be obvious that only the cask-contents-munchers are having deformed babies or whatever.

[nine_k]

Why not just put more information there, not just a short warning sign?

Well above the nuclear waste, bury a tablet that teaches a language in a few different ways, like the Rosetta stone but designed for teaching from scratch. Add some easy texts for study. Add more complex texts to study after the easy texts. Add an elementary, qualitative intro into the ideas of nuclear physics. Now explain the danger of the buried substances in a sensible way!

(Better yet, build a breeder reactor, burn the "waste" as the nuclear fuel it is. Stop being deathly afraid of reprocessing plutonium, at least in the nations that already handle it and have nuclear weapons for last 60-70 years anyway.)

[ooterness]

The "multiple messages of increasing complexity" concept was one of the proposals. The simpler stages are usually written out in as many languages as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...

Another proposal was to leave no marker at all. (Or to bury the first marker.) There's an argument that anything special on the surface will only make people curious about the site.

[notahacker]

We know what modern humans do when they find something really interesting buried under the ground like massive tablets which appear to be an attempt to explain a civilization to posterity.

They dig deeper.

Digging is easier than translating texts in an unknown language, especially if that unknown language is about nuclear physics.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I just don’t feel like it would be hard to put a picture on the thing of a guy like getting close to it then dying. The basic idea that it’s hazardous wouldn’t be too hard to communicate.

[notahacker]

That would certainly stand a higher chance of conveying the right message than overengineered solutions like monumental spikes or attempts to impart taboos against certain colours of cats or tablets that combine an English dictionary and a nuclear physics lecture

But still, I think the natural response to a picture of a person grabbing an ancient container and dying is the stuff inside must have been valuable for them to have attached all these threats to it. At least that's the conclusion drawn by Egyptologists translating inscriptions like "the great lords of the west will reproach him [who breaks the seal] very very very very very very very very much". (I'm not joking about the number of instances of the word translated as "very"...)

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I think at the end of the day, the best we can hopefully for is that only one or two people grab the valuables inside, then everyone else realizes the curse is no joke and tosses the crate back into the ground.

[int_19h]

So, the solution is to bury a small piece of unshielded highly radioactive material at the entrance, just enough to lethally irradiate the first party that breaks in? ~

[jellicle]

Yeah. The only lesson that would be learned from a bunch of tablets depicting agonizing death to those who approach would be "I'll make sure to send the low-paid workers in first before I go in".

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Yeah, that’s true unfortunately, but it would also give people a very quick answer if they asked why x person was growing sick: because they brought the curse upon themselves etc. My hope would be that very few people would have to “demonstrate” the curse’s veracity before the culture tossed it back where they found it. It would especially help if the pictures depicted how to deal with the waste once it was realized, eg show some people putting all the material back into the crate then burying it deep in the ground, or in its original location.

[rdtsc]

“An awesome great weapon is buried there. We must dig it out and use it on our enemies”.

I feel like if at the point we lost knowledge or technology and the ability to understand what is buried there, does the effort matter that much? Or to put it another way, if we are back in the stone age, some nuclear waste that is buried is the not biggest problem.

[jrowen]

It's not even the perfect, it's the pointless. A new society that completely lost touch with ours is about as knowable as what's on the outside of the universe.

How does that even happen, by the way? Humans survived but somehow lost all knowledge/language and all artifacts they could have used to bootstrap? I've never really understood a realistic sequence of events that leads to that.

[threetonesun]

Plenty of hypothetical scenarios in our modern age which could certainly send us to a new "dark age": global pandemic with high mortality rate, nuclear war, space phenomena that wipes out electronics on Earth. Once you break the chain of knowledge from generation to generation and place to place each remaining group has to get back with what's left.

I do agree though, that if they could do this in the Dark Ages, we've left considerably more artifacts around to do it with today. Any moderately large town has a library with enough information to get things going.

[int_19h]

It's also worth keeping in mind just how many humans there are today compared to historical figures. If 90% of the population were to drop dead tomorrow for one reason or another - say, a combination of pandemic and side effects from the economic disruption that it would cause, like starvation - Earth would still have 800 million people alive. Last time there were that many was less than 300 years ago.

Now consider how fast it would rebound given that those remaining 800 million would rebound, given that they'd have vastly more knowledge and resources (even just having access to pre-mined materials alone is a massive boost!).

[rbanffy]

> global pandemic with high mortality rate, nuclear war,

As we have seen in the last couple years, just a couple poorly timed pandemics can set us back 50 years or so. Add a meteor impact or a nuclear war and we are in for major chaotic transformation whose results can't be easily predicted.

[potato3732842]

> just a couple poorly timed pandemics can set us back 50 years or so

On what metric? I can't think of anything. Medical outcomes, crime, wealth, none of that stuff has regressed nearly that far. Some social issues might have regressed to the early 90s if you take a pessimistic view of the situation.

[jrowen]

Agreed, and even "setting us back" any amount of time is still insanely far from the complete collapse and loss of society and language and it's all totally unrecoverable and we have to start over .... are people really this pessimistic that this just seems like a thing that could happen anytime?

[lisper]

> Add a meteor impact or a nuclear war

If either of those happens, radioactive waste will be the least of anyone's worries.

[rbanffy]

Immediately, yes. 10 thousand years later, probably not.

[nonameiguess]

It's extremely unlikely but at least conceivable that some kind of heretofore unseen global war kills off literally everyone except a few extremely remote uncontacted tribes and humanity eventually spreads back to the rest of the world from them.

It doesn't need to be humanity, I guess. It took humans what? 4 million years roughly to diverge from something like the great apes of today to anatomically modern humanity. Does nuclear waste stay dangerous for that long?

[jrowen]

For certain definitions of "conceivable" that all involve massive amounts of handwaving to get from big disaster to literally every human that speaks language died somehow and the handful left just can't put any of the pieces together from the bazillions of artifacts left over.

Sorry, I don't think there's any point in spending any time designing anything for that scenario (except as art or philosophy, but nothing practical). I feel like people are underestimating how resilient and embedded and redundant our society is at this point, and how very specific the scenario would have to be to lose everything yet humanity survives.

[kryogen1c]

Earth's path through the universe slaloms through asteroids. It is not a question of if humanity gets reset, it is a question of when.

[Retric]

A reset requires enough people to survive the event for humanity to bounce back, while also forgetting everything they know about science and technology.

Huge asteroid impact could kill us all, but it doesn’t seem obvious how it could cause a reset to zero.

[dustingetz]

broadly Jupiter is sheltering Earth from asteroids, to such great extent that it may be a prerequisite to life that habitable water planets share the system with a gas giant. Certainly you’re right that this solution is not perfect.

[vikingerik]

Bit of a nitpick - Jupiter tends to shield the inner solar system from comets that originate far out, but not necessarily asteroids. For bodies in the asteroid belt, there's some thought that Jupiter perturbs as many to a perihelion near Earth's orbit as it diverts away. And without Jupiter, the asteroid belt itself would have accreted into a terrestrial planet instead of remaining loose. Jupiter's overall effect on shielding Earth is uncertain.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

This whole thing brings to mind stuff like Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, where people dig into a Cretaceous-era ruin that should best be left alone.

There's lots of stories about buried evil. In Glen Cook's The Chronicles of the Black Company, we have The Barrowland, which is basically undone by assisted climate change.

There's also a bunch of brownfields in Western Europe, where buried WWI gas munitions are still causing havoc.

[ben_w]

> There's also a bunch of brownfields in Western Europe, where buried WWI gas munitions are still causing havoc.

When I was considering land for a new-build near Berlin, some of the advice was specifically "don't bother with Oranienburg, there's a high chance the builder will find an unexploded WW2 bomb in the ground". It wasn't this specific article, but close enough: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/unexploded-wwii...

[BytesAndGears]

Plus add the fact that — if society collapses so dramatically that we forget about radiation and where we stored it, then humans wouldn’t be capable of finding the waste anyways.

We’ve already extracted just about all of the “easy” energy reserves, in terms of oil and coal. Now, you need major machinery to access it. That means, a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter.

Based on our current extractions of resources, we’re in too deep and no future society will be able to have an Industrial Revolution again for millions of years, if we fail completely. And by then, the radioactive waste doesn’t matter.

[trhway]

>a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter.

even Ancient Greeks could have put some copper windings and iron together to produce electricity from wind. Add mirrors concentrated on a boiler and you can generate from solar. Availability of fossil fuels may as well be a damnation of our current civilization.

[kibwen]

Wind power, yes. But anything that requires boiling water is tough without high-quality metalworking, which is tough without easy availability to energy. The ancient Greeks has toy machines driven by boilers, but there's a reason the steam engine didn't arise until the industrial revolution.

[Anotheroneagain]

I think the best solution would be to keep samples around in somewhat reachable parts. Occassionally, people will get sick, and learn that the signs mean danger, without causing an accident of catastrophic proportions, and recognize the huge radiation signs that label the actual storage as ominous signs.

[stevenwoo]

It's not just an exercise, there is a 10,000 year plus nuclear waste storage facility being built in Finland set to be operational in a couple of years, there's the book written about it, Deep Time Reckoning and if one doesn't want to read a book, here's a short podcast episode about it. https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=21-P13-00030&s...

[i_love_retros]

Also a very good documentary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

[thaumasiotes]

Just to note, dumping the waste in the ocean makes it considerably more inaccessible than burying it deep in solid rock, and it's easier to do.

> should we proactively mine out all natural radioactive material on Earth and rebury in proper containment? Just in case someone starts mining uranium in the year 15000 and doesn't know what it is, they could be hurt by that.

This isn't even something to be concerned about. It already happened, to us. We got over it.

[quickthrowman]

> It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years

I beg to differ, there’s already one that will last 10,000 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

> and is inpenetrable to an hypothetical worst case society: one that forgot literally everything about the concept of radiation and all current languages and semiotics but does have the ability and motivation to find and excavate though deep rock and concrete, for no practical reason like mining some ore, and then get into the armoured casks and spread the material around their society before realising something is wrong.

Where is this hypothetical future society going to get their energy from? We have extracted the coal and oil fields that are easy to access already.

[snakeyjake]

> It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years

Please help me understand. Society isn't going to "forget" nuclear chemistry.

It is perfectly possible to design a container that will remain intact for ten thousand years.

It is also perfectly possible to find a location that will be geologically stable for ten thousand years. We've already done it.

Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

Hell, write the warning in Sumerian. Or Esperanto. Or Toki Pona.

There is a strain of misanthropic doomsday fetishists who for the last two millennia have been constantly predicting the collapse of mankind.

I assume that they believe that humankind is stupid and destined to fail and that only they are smart enough to realize that in 12,000CE a neocaveman will try to dig up radioactive barrels like a moron.

I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on.

I do not understand why they have let the dystopian young adult fiction they read in their formative years infect their brain like a disease.

We are not going back to a hunter-gatherer society you (edit: deleted for "civility").

edit: And the entire "how do we craft a warning for the dumb future of idiotic humanity" makes even less sense when you spend even forty femtoseconds thinking about it. IF humanity has forgotten nuclear chemistry AND IF humanity has lost the ability to read warnings THEN it doesn't matter. They don't have the infrastructure needed to transport the waste long distances. Any pollution/harm will be localized to a deep-ass cave and the three people unfortunate enough to have opened the barrel. Fuck them. Who cares? It makes no difference.

Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.

[wanderingstan]

> Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

It’s worth noting, however, that Sumerian was forgotten for nearly 2000 years: from ~200CE until the 1900s.

I agree it seems unlikely for a language to be completely forgotten again, we can’t be sure.

[rbanffy]

> Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

The rate of change of our technologies is accelerating wildly. I assume they were thinking that losing written language and replacing it with something we haven't invented yet would be a perfectly plausible evolutionary path. Whoever lives there 10,000 years from now might be a distant descendant of our civilization and, if we are optimistic, will be to us what we are to cavemen. A couple revolutions and they might even not remember we existed. Or have misconceptions about us that can hurt them - let's say they think the radioactive site is one of the cities we lived during an ice age. They might also be completely alien to the idea of industrial scale nuclear fission - because they have been using fusion for so long, and because fission existed only for a short hundred years or so - radioactive waste might be not on their top 50 guesses as for why did we build that place.

> I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on.

Looks like a worst case scenario - civilizational collapse, loss of technology and historical records... If we assume the happy path, we don't need to do anything - we can even assume they'll be able to burn all the high-grade waste in MSRs in the next 100 years and be done with that.

> Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.

Because caring for others is a hallmark of our civilization, and because we know the damage those materials can cause to our descendants and because we assume they'll be like us, we empathize with them.

[troyvit]

Why are we making fun of the Sumerian copper merchant though? Because his customer wrote his complaint in clay in a climate that -- even 5,000 years ago -- was pretty dry.

We don't do that anymore. We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years. That isn't misanthropic doomsday fetishism, that's happening right now.

So there goes a lot of information. Nobody is going to see that negative Yelp I left of Knott's Berry Farm, and everybody is going to have to relearn how to build anything like we have today.

What about energy? Most of it still relies on non-renewable resources that are getting harder and harder to extract. If we ever did have a global collapse, say due to nuclear war, conventional war, a lucky solar flare or gamma ray burst, covid done right, an ice age, asteroid collision, what have you, we won't have many pitch springs just leaking fuel all over for us to burn like we did last time. Instead we'd have to find another way to bootstrap ourselves back to the level where powerful energy output is possible. There will still be plenty of petroleum under ground, we just won't know it's there.

So yeah I see lots of reasons why we'll lose the knowledge and ability to bring ourselves back to this level if there's a big enough catastrophe, and ten thousand years is a long time for something (or some things) to go down. One could even argue that the decline has already started, and we're going to go out with a long, drawn out whimper.

But in your favor I think we're forgetting that humans have been and always will be tough, curious assholes, so honestly centralizing our nuclear waste, sealing it up, and leaving it in a mountain is way above the bar we normally set for ourselves. It might kill a few of our future cave-people, but eventually they'll put up their own signs and eventually figure out how to weaponize it.

[542354234235]

>We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years.

There are over 3,000 towns with a population over 10,000 people in the US. Any random Middle school or Highschool library in those towns would be more than enough to give a future society an excellent grasp of modern science and engineering. There are also over 3,000 colleges in the US, whose libraries would expect to give advanced understanding.

Just because we now have unfathomably more information digitally than Sumerians ever had doesn’t mean we also don’t have unfathomably more information printed as well. If one set of encyclopedias in one grandma’s basement is found, that is more condensed knowledge than was produced by thousands of years of early societies.

[troyvit]

Cool. Now they just have to last 10k years. I'll add that the last person I know to be in Colorado State University's library observed almost no books, Just computer stations.

[_dain_]

You hit the nail on the head. It's from that era of anti-nuclear hysteria and overpopulation doomers. Collapse stories are an expression of vanity. "Après moi, le déluge."

[snakeyjake]

They just don't understand the arrogance they exude.

"We are on the path to ruin. I have foreseen it. You are all blind sheep."

Bitch, humanity is fine. Get over yourself.

[turnsout]

Yeah, too much overthinking. The comic panels are great actually. The problem with specifying order can be solved pretty simply by adding one panel with the person as a baby. Or show a seed, then a small tree, then the tree fully grown, then the person enters.

You can also add arrows. I think arrows are probably understandable across cultures.

[amenhotep]

They did add a growing tree! Presumably the future autoobscurantist civilisation might simply interpret that to mean that the fountain of youth is so powerful that it has an effect on its surroundings, reversing time for plant life as well as people.

[Neikius]

Yeah, good point :) Fully agree with this. The site will be very hard to reach anyway.

But for the case of industrial society at the tech level of 1800s and no knowledge there are things you can do too. Like make some of the bad stuff reachable with a bit less of an effort and allow people to figure it out by themselves. Our ancestors didn't all die due to bad mushrooms did they? So smart people will still be able to figure it out. Just give em a little help.

[grues-dinner]

If we wanted to help the hypothetical future humans not die, we should make sure there is no lead available, so they can't use it for pipes, sweetener or fuel additives.

Mine all the galena and store it safely with the nuclear waste. Would save millions and millions of hypothetical lives.

[actionfromafar]

Mm, radium water. They'll figure it out alright. After they explored the commercial opportunities. :)