Peter M. Leschak: Nuclear waste and the curse of the ages

Commentary

Two thousand years ago, Augustus Caesar prohibited lead water pipes in Imperial Rome.

Lead, highly malleable and corrosion-resistant, made for fine plumbing, except for one detail: lead poisoning. It causes serious nervous disorders and has been judged by some to have contributed to the fall of the empire.

We tend to view history as a straight-line progression, especially in the realm of technology and science. Knowledge, we assume, is garnered, catalogued, filed and augmented by the following generations in an orderly fashion.

It's curious, then, that in the summer of 1975, I spent several days helping to excavate and remove lead water pipes in a city in Minnesota. Our public works crew replaced the lead with copper, noting that the lead service lines had been installed as recently as the 1920s.

Ironically, the lines were replaced not over concerns about toxicity, but because they were leaking. What else has been forgotten during the past two millennia?

Equally pertinent: What will be forgotten?

This question was studied by a group called the Human Interference Task Force, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy to produce a report titled "Reducing the Likelihood of Future Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-Level Waste Repositories."

That is, radioactive waste.

Sometime, somewhere, we'll need to establish a permanent site or sites for storing extremely toxic and durable nuclear waste.

The bulk of public attention has been focused on the siting and construction of the facilities -- how they can be made reasonably secure from earthquakes, flooding and other threats for a long, long, time.

The half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years, and physicists estimate 10,000 years of isolation are required for it to reach a safe threshold of radioactivity.

But in say, 1,000 years, will humans know that? Will they recognize the waste site and understand it is dangerous? Will anyone remember?

At first it seems a silly question, because our society is inundated with information and its propagation and our capacity for producing and transmitting data increases at dizzying rates.

Even so, there's little reason to assume any given body of knowledge will survive for centuries, much less millennia. What we consider vitally important today, future generations may disregard or be ignorant of.

At some point, all nuclear fission plants will wear out, and no new ones will be built. The cost and hazards may prove prohibitive, the political obstacles too great, or -- more happily -- alternative sources may supplant them, including the holy grail of nuclear fusion.

When fission and its associated waste fades from the scene, how long will it be before people forget about it? But if individuals forget -- or never hear of it in the first place -- won't there be historical records?

Perhaps, but consider: We have a record of Augustus Caesar's ban on lead plumbing.

Thousands of years from now, the essential facts about fission reactors may have devolved to scholarly arcana, a footnote in ancient history known only to a few obscure specialists in, say, Twenty-first Century Infrastructure Studies, and then not fully understood.

The actual waste will endure. Somewhere underground (presumably) it will hunker in darkness, radiating death.

Since hiding it completely would defeat the purpose of public safety, and is probably impossible anyway, there must be some means to signal its presence and its hazard.

So assuming we can site and build a repository that will last 10,000 years, how do you label it?

Signs? Simply construct incredibly durable titanium billboards, or carve deeply into hard stone, and write the purpose of the area?

But in what language? Will English, the current lingua franca, be understood multiple centuries from now?

Probably not.

Languages are fluid and pliable, in constant flux, and over historical time subject to dramatic mutation. Witness how quickly English has changed in just five hundred years.

Here's an excerpt from Chaucer's 14th-century poetry:

When that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendered is the flour.....

Thirty-three percent of those words were not recognized by my word-processing program. And 500 years is only one-twentieth of the time required for the waste to decay.

If we can't rely on language, what about symbols? A skull and crossbones?

Maybe, but even this currently universal symbol of danger and death has not always supported this meaning.

In "A Dictionary of Symbols," J.E. Cirlot notes that the human skull once served as a representation of "what survives of the living being once its body has been destroyed.

It therefore comes to acquire the significance as a receptacle for life and for thought."

Not exactly the sort of receptacle we're labeling.

The Human Interference Task Force concluded we can't rely on either language or symbols over the long haul. It opted for pictographs -- a series of drawings arranged in panels like a cartoon and displayed on monoliths in a Stonehenge-like arrangement over the waste repository.

The drawings are simple, two-dimensional sketches showing the possibility of radioactive contamination of ground water.

In the first frame, we see canisters of waste buried beneath the water table -- the water being represented by little drops, and curiously, the characters H₂O. (Is the nomenclature of science any more permanent than the English of Chaucer?)

A well has been drilled into the aquifer and is being used to irrigate crops.

In the second frame, the well is depicted as extending into the waste storage area, allowing contamination to seep into the water above and be taken up by plants being consumed by people.

The radioactivity is represented by little figures strongly reminiscent of the blips on the old Space Invaders video game.

In the third frame, these pernicious blips have penetrated the torsos of the people, one of whom is clutching his stomach in pain. In the fourth frame, he/she has fallen to the ground.

Would such drawings warn people or merely puzzle them? It's likely that the pictographs would inflame curiosity, if nothing else, attracting people to the site.

Thomas Sebok, of the Indiana University Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, posited that legends and rituals might be a more effective answer.

He envisioned an "atomic priesthood" (as have some science-fiction films, most notably in a sequel to "The Planet of the Apes") that would preserve the knowledge of the radioactive waste, passing it from generation to generation via taboos and cautionary folk tales, or quasi-religious dogma and liturgy linked to curses or the threat of supernatural retribution.

Sebok admitted that the mechanism for implementing such a system was "unclear.

Folklore specialists have advised that they know no precedent ... except the well-known but ineffectual curses associated with the burial sites [pyramids] of some Egyptian pharaohs ... which did not deter grave robbers."

However, the key difference between radioactive waste sites and King Tut's tomb is that the "curse" of the waste site is truly effectual. Grave robbers weren't frightened off by dead pharaohs because they knew them to be harmless.

The atomic priesthood might be rebuffed, too -- at first. But perhaps eventually, when intruders who venture into waste sites (hoping for treasure, for enlightenment?) get sick and die, people may take notice.

But again, for how long? Will that knowledge also fade over time?

I suspect that people in each generation or two will become contaminated. Through ignorance, forgetfulness, defiance, apathy or accident, someone will come into contact with the waste.

Even in the unlikely event some foolproof scheme is devised for effectively labeling waste sites, there will probably be some fool who doesn't believe it, feels compelled to challenge it, or simply ignores it.

While every effort should be made to secure our deadly waste, I doubt there's a way to keep the repository inviolate for 10,000 years because, in 1975 A.D., I dug up lead water lines that the ancient Romans knew were a bad idea.

As we contemplate the reinvigoration of nuclear fission power plants, it's one more responsibility to consider.

Peter M. Leschak is the author of "Ghosts of the Fireground," "Letters from Side Lake" and several other books. He lives in Side Lake, Minn.

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