Experts are trying to come up with the best way to warn Earth's future inhabitants — whether 10,000 or 100,000 years from now — what precisely lies under their feet.
I did mention that I was talking about a practical solution, not a political one.
Practically, this is a fairly simple solution, poltically, it is a mess, a mess driven by unfounded fears and demands for unrealistic threat mitigation.
The fact that we are looking into how to warn a civilization 100 000 years in the future might be admirable, but it is a ridiculous stopping point.
Current plan is to build a storage site 500m in the bedrock, fill the site with waste, and backfill the site, then seal it and leave it.
This is fine.
Any society capable of drilling 500m into the bedrock can be assumed to have knowledge of radiation, so they would detect the material as being dangerous and act accordingly.
In the case I am wrong, and a society has zero idea of radiation yet manage to get to the site, it would quickly be abandoned as the society figure out that going down there makes people sick, if they have religion it would probably classify the site as cursed and forbid their members from going down there.
It is fine.
Let’s focus on our current problems first, with the current storage system, that being pepetual temporary storage, it is certain that shit will leak into an active environment sooner or later without maintenance, a far worse problem than if we set up an underground permanent storage site.
My response:
I did mention that I was talking about a practical solution, not a political one.
Practically, this is a fairly simple solution, poltically, it is a mess, a mess driven by unfounded fears and demands for unrealistic threat mitigation.
The fact that we are looking into how to warn a civilization 100 000 years in the future might be admirable, but it is a ridiculous stopping point.
Current plan is to build a storage site 500m in the bedrock, fill the site with waste, and backfill the site, then seal it and leave it.
This is fine.
Any society capable of drilling 500m into the bedrock can be assumed to have knowledge of radiation, so they would detect the material as being dangerous and act accordingly.
In the case I am wrong, and a society has zero idea of radiation yet manage to get to the site, it would quickly be abandoned as the society figure out that going down there makes people sick, if they have religion it would probably classify the site as cursed and forbid their members from going down there.
It is fine.
Let’s focus on our current problems first, with the current storage system, that being pepetual temporary storage, it is certain that shit will leak into an active environment sooner or later without maintenance, a far worse problem than if we set up an underground permanent storage site.