Can we warn humans about nuclear waste in a million years’ time?

The dangerous fission products have half lives of around 30 years. If we consider them useless (they aren't), we can easily bury them. People will be able to read warning signs in 300 years, and rock formations stable for a few hundred years are easy to find. Or drop glass logs to the ocean floor; glass doesn't dissolve in a mere 300 years.

What causes long term problems are the transuranics. These have half lives of a few thousand years, and produce heat. Over the long time scale, the rock won't conduct away enough of that heat, so the repository heats up, corrosion is accelerated, solubility enhanced, etc. But they don't belong into the the trash. Transuranics can be separated and burned in a reactor.

After that, only weak beta emitters remain. I-129 is so weak, it probably wouldn't even cause problems if we used it to fortify table salt. (What to do about Tc-99 is a topic for another rant.)

So why don't we recycle the waste? Because politicians, not engineers, decided that if some nations recycle, terrorists will use the extracted Pu to make an atomic bomb or something. It's illogical, but for the sake of argument: No, they won't. Reactor grade plutonium contains ~40% of Pu-240, which makes it useless for bombs. But while Pu-239 has a half life of 24000 years, that of Pu-240 is only 6500 years. If we left the Pu in the ground for, say, 15000 years, half of it will decay. But what remains is actually weapons grade, and no longer protected by the highly radioactive fission products. What if somebody dug that up and made a bomb from it?

And now I'm looking at an article that lists ways to tell future generations how to find the plutonium mine.

1. Will our society live to warn the future humans?

2. What the hell we are doing to earth