How can we stop future civilizations from digging up our nuclear waste? It is almost impossible to imagine that we might be able to stop future civilizations from digging up our nuclear waste, but there are some ideas that people have come up with.
Nuclear power is an incredible way of producing electricity. There are virtually no emissions, and as we can create nuclear fuel, it is technically a resource that will not run out. The only downside is that the spent nuclear fuel is still highly radioactive and will remain that way for between 10,000 and a million years. That is a long time. We cannot just leave that spent fuel lying around, so there are several proposals about what to do with it. The most common method is to bury it. A number of countries have begun work on underground nuclear waste storage facilities. Finland is a good example. They have built a series of tunnels in granite bedrock 450 meters under the ground. The nuclear waste is enclosed in copper canisters, which can resist erosion for hundreds of thousands of years. Once the canisters are in place, the mine is filled in and the nuclear waste is left to become safe. The reasoning is that granite is less affected by earthquakes or ice ages and probably shifts less than softer rocks. It will most likely stay in almost the same shape and position for the next million years.
The nuclear waste will be safe from geological forces for the foreseeable future. The problem is how to stop future civilizations from digging it up. One thing we can know by looking at our civilization is that if we find signs of something buried in a mountain, we will probably want to see what it is. If that turns out to be spent nuclear fuel, it will not be so great for the future archaeologists.
The organizations looking at burying nuclear waste want to think of some ways to stop future civilizations from digging it up, but there are some problems with that. Nuclear waste can take anywhere from a few hundred to a million years to decay to safe levels, depending on how concentrated it was. The long-term storage facility that Finland has built is intended to hold the waste securely for at least 100,000 years. That is staggering. That is over twenty times longer than the Great Pyramid has been standing so far. The problem with thinking of 100,000 years is this: how do we communicate with people to warn them? In English? It is estimated that early Homo sapiens developed language about 150,000 years ago, with some experts saying it could be as recent as 50,000 years ago. The English that I am writing in has only really existed for about 400 years. We cannot even begin to imagine what language people will be using in 100,000 years, or even if they will be using language at all. What about a warning with pictures? That only makes sense if that civilization is human. What if humans have died out and a different creature is the dominant species on the planet?
So, here are a few of the methods experts are thinking of. The first idea is a system of warning signs in major global languages. The problem with this, as we have said, is that none of the global languages that existed ten thousand years ago still exist, let alone 100,000 years ago. Another idea, and another form of warning, is physical markers. These would have to mark the area and give an impression of danger somehow. Things like rings of giant spikes, or constructions made of rubble, have been suggested. If any future civilizations are like us, these kinds of monuments and warnings will not work because they would just arouse our curiosity. We would want to know what was buried there even more.
Another interesting idea is to breed cats that change color when they are exposed to radiation. If people owned cats and they were near the site of the buried nuclear waste, the cats would change color. Current civilization would attempt to build myths and legends based on the idea that there was great danger when the cats changed color. This idea also depends a lot on people not changing. Will we still have cats? Will there still be cats? Will we associate the changing colors with danger?
A more conventional idea is to create a library of information near the site. There would be markers around the site with information on them. This could be written or pictorial. The same problem arises, though, and shows that we can only think about this problem from our own perspective. Future civilizations might not be able to read or understand the symbols, and the markers they are written on might not survive that long.
The most interesting idea I could find is the atomic priesthood. Religions tend to last for a long time because they pass on their stories. They have sacred places and they have places to avoid. The idea would be to create an atomic priesthood with rituals and stories that preserve the knowledge of what is buried and that people should not go looking for it. However, as with all of the other ideas, we do not have any religions now that existed ten thousand years ago, and even if we did, they would have changed enormously and become something completely different.
It is probably impossible for us to find a way to warn a civilization that we cannot even imagine, in a time that is further away than the length of time humans have even existed. We would do better to hope that this future civilization knows how to deal with our nuclear waste. And this is what I learned today.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/nuclear-waste-repository-ray-cat-wipp-hitf-fabbri
Photo by NGSOFT IT: https://www.pexels.com/photo/boxberg-power-station-under-blue-sky-5793277/