The first suspects were bacteria.

Something was killing the microscopic oyster larvae at the hatcheries in Washington’s Dabob Bay and in Oregon’s Netarts Bay in recent years. The tiny oyster shells were crumbling faster than they could grow back, says Bill Dewey, public policy director for Taylor Shellfish Farms, which harvests geoducks, oysters, and other shellfish around Puget Sound. And soon, hatchery experts realized increasing ocean acidification was the true culprit. But what exactly that means, is yet to be determined.

“Ocean debasification is a bit awkward and not scientifically precise,” says Jan Newton, a senior principal oceanographer at the University of Washington.

Think back to high school chemistry and “pH,” which measures the acidity or alkalinity of a fluid on a 14-point scale. The lower the number, the more acidic something is. Distilled water is a seven and is considered “neutral.” Sea water’s pH is normally 8.1 to 8.2 on the alkaline side, where as black coffee’s pH is five on the acidic side. Orange juice’s pH is three. Battery acid is in the neighborhood of one.

Well, shellfish survive within a narrow pH spectrum. Taylor Shellfish’s oyster hatchery — located in the Hood Canal fjord jutting out from Puget Sound — lets sea water in at two locations, one that’s 15 feet deep and one that’s 100 feet deep. One day last week, the pH of the water at 15 feet was 8.4, while the water’s pH at 100 feet deep was 7.5, meaning the hatchery has to be especially careful about where its water comes from.

Scientists around the world have been studying ocean acidification in labs for decades, and many have been tracking shellfish hatcheries along the Oregon and Washington coasts. But the deaths of these baby oysters in the Pacific Northwest are the first confirmed cases of increasing ocean acidification killing aquatic creatures in the real world. And, in an area where shellfish harvesting is a $270 million-a-year industry that employs about 3,200 people, this is a big cause for concern.

In addition to the losses at Taylor Shellfish, Oregon State University researchers announced a definite link at another hatchery in Oregon.

Ocean acidification has been traced to two primary sources — carbon dioxide in the air and nitrogen-laden nutrients seeping from cities, septic tanks, and agriculture into the ocean. Carbon dioxide is also known as “the acid gas,” because it increases the acidity of the water it’s in, says Shallin Busch, a research ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Northwest Fisheries Science Center. NOAA set up the lab in Seattle two years ago to study ocean acidification. There, scientists are examining the effect of variables such as carbon dioxide, oxygen, and temperature on more than a dozen species of fish, shellfish, crabs, and squid.

Scientists have found that the ocean’s increased acidity corrodes calcium carbonate — the stuff that shellfish shells are made out of. Winds, currents, water depth, time of day, seasonal shifts, and even geographical features have all been linked to the ebb and flow of acidic sea water.

Ocean acidification is increasing, and that increase is accelerating, says Busch. Near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution — 250 years ago — the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content is said to have been roughly 280 parts per million (ppm). Today, we’re at about 390 ppm. The increase in carbon dioxide density in the air — and in the sea — is expected to significantly accelerate this century.

Photo by Harry Chen.

These are the issues being examined by a panel convened recently by Washington’s Gov. Chris Gregoire (D). The panel — a collection of scientists, shellfish industry officials, and federal and state government types — will focus on the current science and recommend how Washington can tackle ocean acidification along its coasts. This is the first state effort of its kind in the nation.

“We’re experiencing the impact of acidity before the rest of the world. … It scared the pants off us,” says Jay Manning, an environmental lawyer, the former chief of staff to Gregoire, and the panel’s co-chair.

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) agrees. She recently held a press event at Taylor Shellfish addressing the issue of acidification and the potential impact on the state. “Ocean acidification is a major threat to Washington state’s coastal economy and thousands of jobs,” she told reporters.

Potential measures include legislation to trim carbon emissions and deal with nutrient-laden fluids — such as sewage and storm water. It’s also possible that planting kelp and eel grass could help absorb excessive carbon dioxide in the water. Scientists are also looking at putting iron pellets in the ocean — which would act similarly to phytoplankton in drawing carbon dioxide out of seawater.

Of course, it’s not like the ocean knows state boundaries. And Washington’s coastal waters make up a mere drop in the bucket.

“It’s a global problem. There’s not much that Washington can do by itself,” Manning says.

However, there are several NOAA representatives on the Washington panel, meaning the federal government will be kept in the loop about the panel’s conclusions and recommendations.

Washington D.C. participation cannot be taken for granted. The Obama administration’s federal budget had recently trimmed $2.5 million from NOAA’s ocean acidification monitoring efforts. But Cantwell led a push to convince the U.S. Senate’s Appropriations Committee to restore the money last Thursday. That appropriation includes $250,000 to maintain a half-dozen federal buoys off Washington’s coast, plus links to another 20 buoys owned by other entities.

Installed in 2010, the buoys hold sensors that can measure and transmit real-time weather and pH data to NOAA.

“With this monitoring equipment, we’re able to see corrosive water coming and dodge it,” Dewey says. In other words, hatcheries would be able to gauge when to allow sea water into the hatcheries.

David Steele, president of the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association, is optimistic. “By keeping these sensors in the water,” he adds, “we can learn more about the changing water chemistry and develop ways to adapt.”

Treasure hunters enter a pyramid. The explorers either ignore or can’t read the hieroglyphics warning of the curse that awaits those who open the 3,000-year-old sarcophagus before them. The mummy awakens and kills most of the cast.

Rough translation: Seriously dude,
do not open this door.

Photo: iStockphoto

If only those ancient Egyptians had done a better job warning future treasure-hunters not to mess with their sarcophagi.

Today, the U.S. government faces a similar task: figuring out how to warn descendants hundreds to thousands of years in the future about buried nuclear waste — material that can remain deadly for millennia. As cleanups proceed at shuttered sites and talk brews about building new plants, the question is more pressing than ever.

How do you tell someone centuries from now not to dig up radioactive waste from a burial site that may be long-forgotten, or from a place that’s attractive to the curious? A thousand years from now, will the United States still exist? Will an earthquake or volcano have wrecked the burial site? Will the people understand English? Who will show up at an ancient, possibly forgotten burial mound in the year 3000 A.D. — Mad Max, or the Jetsons, or someone we can’t even imagine?

While the Department of Energy has held preliminary discussions about some scattered nuclear waste and uranium tailing sites, there has been no coordination between the sites so far. “We’re very concerned about it,” says Ray Plieness, acting director for land and site management for DOE’s fledgling Office of Legacy Management, established in late 2003 to clean up the nation’s messes. “We’re in the infancy stages in discussing it.”

Dear Future People: Oops

Richland, Wash., home of the Hanford nuclear site, is often cited as the most radioactively and chemically contaminated spot in the Western Hemisphere. This is where the world’s first industrial-sized nuclear reactor was built, where the plutonium for the first atomic bombs originated. Today, Hanford has hundreds of contaminated buildings, including nine long-shutdown reactors and five closed chemical-processing plants, each slightly bigger than an average World War II battleship.

Hanford is one of a few dozen former nuclear production sites scattered across the nation, relics of the Cold War that include sprawling facilities at Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Savannah River, S.C. Across the country, the government is undertaking more than 100 cleanup projects at such sites. All the projects have a common thread: they’ll end up burying wastes with half-lives of up to thousands of years.

Inside the storage facility at Carlsbad,
N.M.

Photo: Sandia National Laboratories

The best-known burial sites are a half-mile deep artificial cavern near Carlsbad, N.M., and the controversial proposed site at Yucca Mountain, Nev. More waste will be or already is buried at Hanford, Savannah River, Idaho Falls, and elsewhere.

Much of the waste is supposed to be kept isolated for 10,000 years — more than twice the age of the beat-up and cryptic pyramids and Stonehenge. Right now, these DOE sites are usually protected with “keep out” signs, chain-link fences, and guards. However, there’s no guarantee that any of those measures will be feasible more than a few decades from now.

The problem of how to produce more permanent warnings is coming up quickly for Hanford, where a battleship-sized plutonium extraction factory — a place dubbed “U Plant” — is supposed to be buried under a huge on-site mound by 2012. That and similar sites may prove tempting places to dig centuries from now. “You’ve got to think of reverse psychology,” says Kevin Leary, DOE’s technical leader for the U Plant project. “What if you tweaked someone’s curiosity [to dig instead of avoid digging]?”

At Hanford, a rough rule of thumb for planners is to look ahead 1,000 years. That’s like a Viking trying to conceive of an astronaut, then trying to pass a note to him.

Experts inside and outside of DOE have pondered this communication conundrum. The agency has assembled panels of scientists, historians, artists, and others to tackle from all angles the question of how a 21st century sign should look to a 31st century person. From symbols to colors to materials to size, everything’s up for grabs — and nothing’s been decided. The leading plans for the major sites in New Mexico and Nevada involve enormous berms, monuments, time capsules, and more. Meanwhile, detractors say that will only draw unnecessary attention, and suggest that the best notification is no notification at all.

Amidst the uncertainty, Jim Wise, an associate professor of psychology and adjunct professor of environmental science at Washington State University, led a course last year on developing nuclear warning systems. Wise says the ultimate solution doesn’t have to be a shot in the dark: “There is enough evidence to make some responsible decisions.”

Color Me Radioactive

Pointing out that many of the potential warning designs suggested to date stress creativity and beauty rather than rigorously analyzing the psychology of what someone in 3000 A.D. might understand, Wise paints a picture of the challenges ahead.

Look at manuscripts from England that survived from 1000 A.D., Wise says. First of all, very few of those documents made the 1,000-year journey entirely intact. And the written English is indecipherable to most people today. Although we understand some aspects of what life was like then, most of that era is a mystery to us. Given our track record of understanding 1000 A.D.’s communications, Wise speculates that a nuclear-waste burial site would need at least seven different types of warnings in order for at least one to survive 1,000 years and be interpreted correctly.

Now take into consideration that language, science, and technology have evolved much faster in the past 200 years than in the previous 800. And future changes will likely accelerate over the next millennium. After all, videotapes were state of the art in the 1980s, and are antiquated today. Computers become obsolete in less than five years — so what are the chances of a warning sign lasting 1,000 years at a nuclear burial site? The bottom line is, no one knows what to expect.

In 2005, along with undergraduate student Stuart Davis, Wise met with DOE officials at Hanford to discuss the findings of his class. Many of the group’s ideas, says Plieness, have come up in discussions at other DOE sites as well.

As far as materials go, Wise and Leary think ceramics — perhaps buried at varying depths above the waste — might do the job. Others suggest concrete or stone. Wise fears that steel and most metals would likely corrode or be salvaged for some other purpose during the next several hundred years. One anti-theft device might be to use the burial mound itself as a warning, Wise says, noting that furrows and ridges could be incorporated in the design so the wind blowing across would make a sinister sound — or that long-lived, prickly vegetation could be planted on or around the sites.

Whatever the size of the warning, Wise suggests following nature’s lead by using bright colors, long an indicator from one creature to another to back off. These include a bee’s black and yellow stripes, a coral snake’s red and yellow stripes, a monarch butterfly’s wings — even the exaggerated contrast between the pupils and whites of human eyes, which allow others to read fear.

Wise contends that any warnings should be based on universal symbols of danger: things like sharp teeth, claws, lightning bolts, even today’s biohazard symbol. “As forms get sharper and get more edges, people dislike them, even in abstract images,” he says.

Circles and other symmetrical images, on the other hand, are comfortable at a gut level. And that immediately raises red flags. Today’s universal sign for prohibited items — a red circle with a diagonal slash — could easily be knocked askew over the next few hundred years, ending up looking more like a pictograph of a hamburger, Davis says. And the well-known skull-and-crossbones symbol, also symmetrical, won’t necessarily retain its meaning. “Someone might find a copy of Pirates of the Caribbean, and say there’s buried treasure there [where a skull-and-crossbones marker is found],” Davis adds.

Photo: iStockphoto

And what about today’s radiation warning sign? “It’s unfortunate that the radiation symbol looks the way it does, because it doesn’t look very threatening,” Wise says. “Someone might look at it and ask: ‘Why did someone bury all these propellers?’”

Go Tell It On the Mountain

Wise’s group suggested sending a warning to future generations through “memory stewardship” — essentially ingraining the dangers of radiation into folklore that’s passed from generation to generation. The need for awareness is underscored by DOE’s Plieness, who says it could also be achieved by teaching about the waste sites in local schools.

Plieness also says it will be necessary to plan for technology evolving into unforeseen forms, by setting up administrative rules that would require pertinent nuclear-waste information to be added to and stored in whatever state-of-the-art information system exists at that time. Sounds straightforward, but there are almost too many unknowns to analyze.

For his part, Wise hopes that a survey similar to one Davis conducted — which asked 75 southeastern Washington residents what symbols, shapes, and colors inspired the most fear, with lightning, triangles, and red and black the top vote-getters — will be conducted across other nations and cultures. This, he says, could help gauge what will truly speak to every culture’s gut, now and down the unknown road.