Nuclear Dump of the Future - Worlds largest "NO TRESPASSING" sign

Ten thousand years from now, the last remaining momument of the U.S. military-industrial complex could well be the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. And it will be marked by an elaborate keep-out sign. Planners building underground storage for radioactive military waste hope to develop a universal warning system that will communicate its message to future societies, regardless of language, custom or even species.


The U.S. Department of Energy has been grappling with that problem recently, as they designed the warning markers to use at Yucca Mountain and at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) nuclear waste storage facilities. There's no telling who might be around to exhume our radioactive sins in future centuries, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates that warnings be erected which will warn away potential intruders for the next 10,000 years, whomever those intruders may be.

The offending nuclear waste will be stored far underground at each of these facilities, but there is still a danger that future generations might stumble across it. WIPP is located in the desert outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, and its storage areas are located 2,150 feet underground. Yucca Mountain's facilities in the Nevada desert are intended to house waste at 1,000 feet deep. Between the two, they are meant to entomb tens of thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste, most of which will remain dangerous for centuries. Each of these locations was selected due to its relative geologic stability, theoretically allowing facilities there to contain the waste for the required 10,000 years.

Ten thousand years from now, the last remaining momument of the U.S. military-industrial complex could well be the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. And it will be marked by an elaborate keep-out sign. Planners building underground storage for radioactive military waste hope to develop a universal warning system that will communicate its message to future societies, regardless of language, custom or even species.

Source :

Wired News: Nuclear Dump of the Future
Damn Interesting » This Place is Not a Place of Honor
Going Beyond 10,000 Years at Yucca Mountain
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/fctshts/warned.pdf
Excerpts from "Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant"
The Monumental Task of Warning Future Generations

Bah!! first they dont do anything to treat that waste, they dont sign the basel convention and still export hazardous ewaste, they keep others from developing nuclear energy for civilian purposes, and they are talking abt keeping away intruders from getting harmed cause of stored radioactive waste?? what a frigging irony!

_______________________________________
chic_magnet's Signature: