Part 5 of 5 Parts (Please read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4
       And, finally, there is the possibility of just burying the waste deep enough that future generations would not even be aware of it and would not be threatened. The Posiva project in Finland calls for a repository that is sixteen hundred feet underground. After the repository chambers are filled, the access shafts would be filled with rocks and concrete. The landscape over the repository would be landscaped and the repository could be safely forgotten.
      In response to the critics of their plan, Posiva says, “It would take years to dig with a material that probably doesn’t actually exist. And the site is not interesting in terms of mining resources. Also, you should note that after the next ice age, there will no longer be any city or building in Europe anyway. Everything will have disappeared under a mile of ice. So, any question (on the necessity to communicate its presence for thousands of years) is completely hypothetical.”
       On the other hand, a future civilization might have some use for nuclear waste. If they have the technology to dig sixteen hundred feet for an unmarked geological repository, they will likely have the understanding and technology necessary to safely handle nuclear waste.
       There was a conference in France on this same subject in 2014. A report that preceded the conference said that “the approach of trading the topic of radioactive waste through mystical tales could be interesting, as the core of the message can be packaged in stories that deal more with fundamental existential themes (creation, death, size, freedom, etc.) and less with daily political or ideological topics.”  
      My fear is that none of these things will be done. If we are facing the decline of our civilization as has been claimed by many scientists, there will also be a decline in funding for these kinds of projects and a decline in political will to carry them out. There are many places around the world where nuclear waste is being stored. There are many places where the development of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons have left areas of terrible radioactive contamination. There is a whole lake in Russia that contains high levels of radioactive materials. Maybe some effort will be made to safely store some of these dangerous materials for millennia, but they will be few and far between.
      If there is a collapse of our civilization because of resources exhaustion, greedy ruling elites and/or climate change, we will most likely be left with a global landscape scattered with dangerous zones where death and illness would find those who strayed into them. If the human race endures through the millennia, perhaps there will be legends of cursed lands to avoid. Maybe future civilizations will add their warning to avoid these places and they will be famous and well-known. Twisted and diseased plants and animals may also provide a warning to avoid these cursed lands. As with many problems that face us, only time will tell.
      And, finally, it may be that those who follow us will learn to curse their ancestors who tried to gain the power of the gods and failed miserably, leaving the world with a deadly legacy.

Ambient office  = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 110 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 107 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 110 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

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

Ambient office  = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 118 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Beefsteak tomato from Central Market = 127 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 56 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 49 nanosieverts per hour

Part 3 of 5 Parts (Please read Part 1 and Part 2 first)
       A report issued by the Sebeok research group suggested that a nuclear priesthood modeled on the Catholic Church could be created that would pass information about nuclear waste down through time in a “a mixture of iconic, indexical and symbolic elements” and “a high degree of redundancy of messages.” The problem with this idea is that all existing major religions deal with the great questions of life. They have endured because people turned to them for answers to such questions as the meaning of life and what happens after death. They also serve important ritual functions to sustain social cohesion. A cult based on the threat of nuclear waste would have none of these answers or functions. It is unlikely that such a cult would survive very long.
       Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the study of meaning-making, the study of sign process and meaningful communication. Franciose Bastide and Paolo Fabbri are two European semioticians. They have suggested that genetically modified domestic felines or house cats could be used to preserve information about nuclear waste. For instance, they could be designed to change color when exposed to nuclear radiation. There could be mutations among such cats which could destroy their radiation reaction. If such cats bred after being exposed to radiation, they could pass along lethal mutations that would kill or cripple their kittens.
       Other researchers have suggested that art could provide a medium to transmit messages over the centuries. Peter Galison is a professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. His concern with the use of art for this purpose is that if it is too idiosyncratic to a particular artist, culture and/or time, it may be too obscure to be understood by people millenia later. On the other hand, if it depicted realistic pictures of human beings in agony near a radiation source, it might be useful.
       A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and an icon in computer usage, is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. An ideogram or ideograph is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases.
       Pictograms are already in use to mark radioactive materials as mentioned above. Pictograms have been suggested as a means of communicating the dangers of radioactive wastes to future generations. However, Florian Blanquer with ANDRA says that pictograms are only successful if they are based on social conventions of the culture that generates them. If those social conventions disappear with the passage of time, then those pictograms become meaningless.
       A pictogram that shows a skull with a pair of crossed bones beneath it is a very well know symbol of death. It was flown on a flag by pirate ships to intimidate the crews of other vessels they were attacking.  However, it originally had quite a different meaning. Alchemists created it during the Middle Ages. The skull was meant to represent Adam, the first man. The cross bones were supposed to indicate the promise of resurrection. So, in a few centuries, the meaning of the pictogram changed from indicating eternal life to indicating death, in other words, the pictogram came to represent the exact opposite of its original meaning.
Please read Part 4

Ambient office  = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 132 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 133 nanosieverts per hour

Crimini mushroom from Central Market = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 127 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 104 nanosieverts per hour

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