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Part 2 of 5 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
      ANDRA is the French agency in charge of storing nuclear waste in France. They have begun to use acid-free paper to record their information. This paper will last much longer than regular paper. They have also been experimenting with discs which are made out of sapphire and are coated with platinum on one side. Each sapphire disk can contain as many as forty thousand pages of pictures and texts. It is estimated that they could safely store these pages for up to two million years. This is certainly enough time for radioactive materials to finish emitting radiation and become inert.
       While this could take care of the long-term storage problem, there is another issue that must be dealt with. Languages change over time with new languages being born and old languages being forgotten. Even if you can store a page of text for a million years, it is unlikely that the written form of any of today’s major languages would still be understood at the end of that time and humanity may be gone by then anyway.
       A third concern with the long-term storage of information has to do with location. In order to survive, records must be kept in a safe place. If the place is well known, it may be looted or destroyed by war or vandalism. If the records are well hidden, they may not be accessible when that information is needed in the future.
       The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency has created a working group which is dedicated to developing best practices for Radioactive Waste Repository Metadata Management. The information must be stored safely in a form that will survive for thousands of years. It must be readable over a very long period of time and must be kept safe but be accessible.
        Dr Gloria Kwong is the acting head of the radioactive waste management division at the Nuclear Energy Assembly (NEA). She recently told Euronews that, “What we now have heard from many countries is that at each step when developing a waste facility, you have to listen to people. The social input, the social concern and their exceptions should also be taken into account, even in designing your information management system. Everyone has to think about how they can make sure this knowledge is transferred to the next generation of reviewers, regulators, or even waste managers so that they know where the information is.” Many people with important expertise in nuclear technology and materials will be retiring soon and their knowledge needs to be recorded for storage before that knowledge is lost.
       A group of researchers under Thomas Sebeok at the University of Indiana was appointed by the U.S. Department of Energy in the 1980s to develop a knowledge transmission system as part of the work of constructing the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in near Carlsbad, New Mexico. This facility is the only existing geological nuclear waste repository in the U.S. A geological repository for spent nuclear fuel was under development at Yucca Mountain in Nevada but that project was canceled in 2009. A geological repository for spent nuclear fuel will not be available in the U.S. until 2050 at the soonest. Other countries such as Finland are working on geological repositories.
Please read Part 3