Scientists plot to warn future generations about dangers of nuclear site
A thousand or so years from now, a huge underground salt mine in Carlsbad, N.M., will collapse and bury the tons of radioactive, plutonium-covered detritus from nuclear-weapons production that are stored within. But the plutonium will be exceedingly toxic for another 249,000 years. How to make sure nobody digs it up 500 generations down the road? Scientists, futurists, and historians have tried to predict what the future will hold — feminist corporations? robots? preindustrial tribes? — and how to communicate danger. “No culture has ever tried, self-consciously and scientifically, to design a symbol that would last 10,000 years and still be intelligible,” says one anthropologist. The current plan, which will take a century to complete, consists in part of a two-mile-long berm surrounded by concrete markers with warnings in a variety of languages and pictures of horrified human faces. A quarter-million years later, still apologizing for our mess …
