Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id DAA29981 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sun, 26 May 2002 03:07:27 +0100 Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 22:01:23 -0400 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed Subject: Fwd: Bracing for Yucca Mountain's Nuclear Forever From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: Memetics Listserv <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Message-Id: <7B11CE3D-704C-11D6-9442-003065B9A95A@harvard.edu> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.481) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
While this story starts out without any seeming memetic prickles, what
it is talking about is the inevitability of cultural flux and the issue
of how to alert an alien to danger.
- Wade
****
Bracing for Yucca Mountain's Nuclear Forever
by R.C. Baker
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0222/baker.php
In 1945, as the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico
desert, one of its creators, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, recalled a
line from Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of
worlds." This being America, though, someone smelled a profit behind
this almost biblical source of power—nine years later, the Atomic Energy
Act allowed private companies to build commercial nuclear reactors, with
the promise of "energy too cheap to meter." But the bill for three
generations' worth of nuclear power is now coming due. The Department of
Energy is proposing to transport highly radioactive material from all
over America to a nuclear waste dump inside Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
Governor Kenny Guinn estimates construction of the facility will
eventually cost more than $60 billion.
He and most other Nevadans (with the exception of some local brothel
owners, who predict a free-spending clientele among the army of workers
expected at the site) are not happy that their state, already host to
the radioactive leavings of decades of nuclear weapons tests, would
receive 7 billion curies more. (By comparison, the accident at Three
Mile Island released 15 curies.)
In an interview, Steven Frishman, a geologist with Nevada's Nuclear
Waste Task Force, talks about "downwinders," people who suffered deadly,
long-term effects from the weapons testing, and how the federal
government "knew it was dangerous and they weren't telling people." Now,
he says, that same government, along with the nuclear industry, is
"spinning the site," using "extraordinary levels of optimism and trying
to convince people that it's safe because they have a political need to
do it, not because it's actually a safe thing to be doing."
The problem? The waste is so lethal that by law it must be completely
isolated for a minimum of 10,000 years. But many scientists (including a
panel from the National Academy) dismiss that time span as a
bureaucratic convenience. Others point out that much of the waste
(mostly spent fuel rods from commercial and military reactors) will
contain uranium, plutonium, and myriad other "iums" that will be
dangerous for upward of a million years. Nevada's concern is that the
site is not sound enough geologically to keep the waste from eventually
getting into the groundwater, food chain, and air. DOE's own best case
shows no violation of current radiation dose standards for roughly
100,000 years, but, as Governor Guinn's recent letter to Congress points
out, DOE's computer models "have an uncertainty factor of 10,000."
Still, the Yucca Mountain site is heading for a final, too-close-to-call
vote in the Senate, and if it is approved, the maw of bureaucracy must
be served. The Environmental Protection Agency has decreed that some
kind of marker be erected to deter human beings from entering, drilling,
digging, mining, or doing anything that would disturb the site or
release its contents into the environment for the 10-millennium
regulatory period.
So artists, architects, and engineers must grapple with a time span at
the outer limits of cultural imagination, a period that must take into
account climatic change (will the brutal desert currently surrounding
Yucca become wetter in a few thousand years?) and geology (there have
been 600 earthquakes of 2.5 or greater magnitude in the area since
1982). And then there is humanity: As Frederick Newmeyer, president of
the Linguistic Society of America, points out, any language becomes
"unintelligible to the descendants of the speakers after the passage of
between 500 and 1000 years." (Read any Chaucer lately?) So how do we
warn away people whose language, society, and beliefs we'll never know,
who may have undergone revolutions, disasters, wars, or epidemics right
out of The Stand?
The challenge of communicating danger over vast reaches of time was
taken up by an exhibition earlier this year at the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas, entitled "Universal Warning Sign: Yucca Mountain." The
organizer of the show, Joshua Abbey, wanted to use art to educate the
public about the long-term hazards of the proposed dump. He received
entries from around the world, many of which used the trefoil symbol for
radiation, designed in 1946. But the meanings of symbols change
drastically over time and from culture to culture. The swastika, long
revered in many parts of the world as a symbol of good fortune, is
metaphorically radioactive in others—it will get you jail time in
Germany.
The winning entry illuminates the problem of communicating tens,
hundreds, and thousands of generations into the future. Ashok Sukumaran
proposes to seed all of Yucca Mountain with self-replicating,
genetically engineered, cobalt-blue cactuses, using this unnatural
contrast against the ochre of the desert as a living warning. Clearly,
though, this painted desert would be hauntingly beautiful and alluring,
and might draw people rather than repel them. And there's the rub: Art
and architecture act as our highest expressions of humanity, not as
shouts of danger. Libby Lumpkin, the founding curator of the art
collection in Steve Wynn's Bellagio Hotel, said one of the reasons she
was interested in being a juror was "it was a show that no one could
succeed at."
Not that the government hasn't been on the case. The template for the
eventual marker at Yucca Mountain was conceived in the early '90s for
the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico, the eternal
(or so the DOE hopes) subterranean home of the detritus of the nuclear
arms race. Among other things interred there are "contaminated
laboratory piping, and booties and masks," says Michael Brill, an
architectural theorist and professor at SUNY Buffalo. He led one of two
teams of linguists, artists, engineers, archaeologists, and other
experts, who were charged by Sandia National Laboratories to design a
method of keeping future Indiana Joneses out of this real temple of
doom. "Passive Institutional Controls," meaning monuments impervious to
harsh climate and sandblasting winds, are mandated, because even the
federal government has to acknowledge it might not be around in a few
hundred years, never mind millennia hence.
Right off, Brill's panel discussed leaving "great piles of this deadly
shit above grade" so that anyone wandering near the site would become
ill and die. The panel roundly rejected using corpses as "BEWARE" signs,
however, due to inter-generational responsibilities: Our electric lights
today shouldn't cause death or mutants tomorrow. So Brill's team
concentrated on archetypal images of danger, things that are hardwired
in all of us regardless of culture, and came up with massive,
square-mile complexes such as Landscape of Thorns (50-foot-high concrete
spires with sharp points jutting out at all angles), Forbidding Blocks
(black, gargantuan, irregular cubes of stone, too narrowly spaced and
hot to provide shelter), and other "menacing earthworks," all designed
to convey "poisoned and parched and dead land, a place that's really no
place." Anti-art, in other words. Buried granite chambers with warnings
in the official languages of the UN were also planned, along with space
to re-carve them in whatever languages evolve over deep time.
DOE has opted for a cheaper design: a 33-foot-high earthen berm, half a
mile square, studded by granite monoliths inscribed with warnings and
pictograms of radiation danger. It has incorporated the experts' ideas
for an information kiosk; high vantage points from which to survey the
entire danger area; radar-reflective trihedrals; and small buried
markers to warn against excavation or digging. Still, nothing will be
built at the New Mexico waste plant until 2083, nor at Yucca Mountain
until sometime in the 24th century. Transporting, storing, and finally
sealing off such lethal material is a thorny, fraught process that we
will not live to see completed.
"Art is long; life is short," goes the old saying, but neither can cope
with the insidious longevity of radiation. We can only hope our distant,
unknowable descendants will understand that their ancestors crossed a
line in this century— that our mummy's curse is not metaphorical or
metaphysical, but very much the real thing.
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