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Comment by kbart | Hacker News Reader

Any marks would only attract people's attention. I can't come up with a single historical example where some marks would successfully keep people away. Even now we keep digging once forbidden and sacred places like pyramids, graves, temples, plague victims' burial grounds. Furthermore, a "menacing earthworks" example from the article looks like a treasure is buried inside that square. Why not bury it deep enough in an unmarked grave (for example, put it in the tunnels inside a mountain then blow all entrances up) so no primitive civilization could dig it up? If civilization is sophisticated enough to dig deep enough, they must be well aware of radiation as well.

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I wonder if we can develop some kind of system that continually emits foul odors for 10000 years - it's not likely our sense of smell will evolve away in that time.

Putting the technical difficulties of constructing such odor emitting system that works for thousands of years aside, wouldn't you be intrigued to find out what smells so badly down there..? Don't underestimate curiosity of humans.

The primary requirements for waste disposal are geological stability and political expediency. These factors are hard and determine the site. Ability-to-mark doesn't influence the site choice.

Geological and political stability are concerns for both marked and un-marked sites, I don't see how marking would solve any of these.

Sure. I should have been clearer in what I wrote. From your earlier post, "put it in the tunnels inside a mountain then blow all entrances up".

With the geology, you want a place where you can firmly reason about what's going to happen over a long period of time. Maybe there would be sites where you can do the thing of putting it into mountains. But mountain geology is not necessarily stable. Consider how mountains are formed.

Your limited choice of sites is more likely to be flat country. (And it'll be desert, in order for the politics to work.)

I didn't mean to downplay the difficulty. I understand that despite marked/un-marked choice it's still very difficult engineering problem, but from the cultural point of view, I believe, it's safer to keep such things hidden away as possible and un-marked to avoid any attention than to hope that the future civilizations will take our advice to stay away.

I'm not so sure. Primitive mining in e.g. Røros, Norway goes back to 1740. Dynamite were introduced to the mine in 1870. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8ros

Only 40 years before the invention of the Geiger counter. If future primitive people have dynamite, it probably won't be long before the know about radiation too. This whole project seems to be being treated as far more important than it really is. It's only to protect a very small group of people in a very narrow window of technological advancement and only if civilization had somehow already been destroyed yet there were enough of us around that living in the desert seemed like a good idea.

I agree. If you missed it in the article, it's even bigger than that. The last sentence is most telling:

"This panel member therefore recommends that the markers and the structures associated with them be conceived along truly gargantuan lines. To put their size into perspective, a simple berm, say 35-m wide and 15-m high, surrounding the proposed land-withdrawal boundary, would involve excavation, transport, and placement of around 12 million cubic meters of earth. What is proposed, of course, is on a much greater scale than that. By contrast, in the construction of the Panama Canal, 72.6 million cubic meters were excavated, and the Great Pyramid occupies 2.4 million cubic meters. In short, to ensure the probability of success, the WIPP marker undertaking will have to be one of the greatest public works ventures in history."

Plus, as interesting as this project is, I can't imagine coming across a gargantuan spike field in the middle of the desert that I would not want to explore.

> This whole project seems to be being treated as far more important than it really is.

That's an excellent point. It does seem to have been a component of the overall exaggeration of the cost of nuclear power.

...assuming it's still a desert in 10,000 years.

Mining is much, much, much older than 1740. Basic cave mining dates back to prehistory, organized tunnel mining dates back to Ancient Egypt and Greece, and the Romans used sophisticated large-scale hydraulic-mining techniques with the use of pumps to drain water from deeper mines. By the medieval period the Germans were hitting really tremendous depths - by 1700 or so many mines were hitting depths of 300+ meters.

Imho, that's still solvable easier than creating marks readable for 10000 years in the future. Simply choose a mountain that contains no valuable metals/minerals and is made of rock that's too hard for primitive tools.

Mining, dynamite or otherwise, has to be for something. So why would people dig super far down in the desert through sand and worthless rocks?

Prison colony / hard labor punishment

To get at the radioactive materials.

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