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Part 4 of 5 Parts (Please read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 first)
       Another idea for a warning system is to create a series of cartoon panels that show someone getting near the nuclear waste and then dying. However, it has the same problem as the pictogram with the possibility of being misunderstood. In addition, there is a problem with reading the panels in the proper order. There are four possible ways to read a set of panels; Left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top. Blanquer still believes that pictograms or icons have the best chance of survival.
      Blanquer’s doctoral thesis involved the creation of a system based on icons which indicated a physical action. His purpose is to develop a “a system that I can then make more complex in order to have people understand what I want them to understand; simply put, that there is radioactive waste under them.”
        French artist Bruno Grasser is second laureate of a prize on memory launched in 2016 by ANDR. His idea was to transmit knowledge of nuclear waste to the future by using etching. He would have a container filled with twenty-five hundred tiny cubes. Each forty years, the container would be passed to a new custodian and a mark would be scratched on the outside of the container. If each mark represents forty years, then when there are twenty-five hundred marks of the outside of the container, it would mean that a hundred thousand years had passed and the waste was safe. There are serious problems with this process. What if the custodian was killed or the container was lost or destroy? What if the meaning of the container vanished with time and became unconnected to a nuclear waste cache?
       So how could the human race pass some sort of indication of danger if the knowledge of nuclear materials and their dangers were lost. The research group created by the U.S. DoE described a number of different kinds of monuments that could serve as a signal of danger while surviving the centuries and millennia. Some of their ideas included a field of sharp spikes, threatening statues of things like lightning bolts or huge blocks of granite in a grid.
       Thirty years later and without any acknowledgment of the previous work, the Les Nouveaux Voisins, a pair of French architects, received the ANDRA 2016 first prize for their suggestions for something like Stonehenge, the ancient monument in southern England. They called for the placement of eighty one-hundred foot tall concrete columns above a nuclear waste storage repository. Oak trees would be planted on the top of these pillars which would sink into the ground over time. When the oak trees reached the ground, the nuclear waste would be safe. I would be worried that the mechanism that lowered the trees would not last long enough to lower the columns to ground level. The oak trees might be cut down. The meaning of the whole installation could fade with time.

Please read Part 5