Long-term nuclear waste warning messages

The content describes efforts to create messages and markers that will deter humans from disturbing deep nuclear waste repositories over timescales of 10,000 years or more. An interdisciplinary field called nuclear semiotics emerged from a 1981 task force and was developed further in a 1993 Sandia report that recommended multilayered warnings: immediate, foreboding landscape features; pictograms conveying danger; readable texts that explain what, where, when, who and how; and detailed archival records. The Sandia team proposed a sample tone for text warnings (emphasizing that the place is man-made, dangerous, centered belowground, lethal by energy emission, and should be left undisturbed) and concrete design ideas for surface and subsurface markers used at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, from concentric multilingual signage and buried tablets to an information center (40 × 32 × 10 ft) that would emit mournful whistles in the wind.

Cultural-research proposals explored nonlinguistic and social-carrier strategies: an “atomic priesthood” to ritualize and transmit taboo knowledge; satellites or DNA-coded “information plants”; domesticated “ray cats” that change color near radiation; and forbidding earthworks and spike fields (including 70-ft leaning stone spikes, black slabs, rubble landscapes and forbidding blocks) to make land appear uninhabitable. Practical steps taken include translating messages into major world languages (English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Navajo) and debating symbols such as the skull-and-crossbones, while acknowledging tradeoffs - power concentration, language loss, and uncertainty about what future humans will understand.