What should we do with all the ray cats? with Matt Caplan

[00:00:03] So this is a major point when it comes to designing deep geologic repositories and the warning signs that will go with them is How will you make people aware of the danger or will you try to avoid drawing any attention to the place?

[00:00:20] It's this big decision that has to be made of how do we mark where we have buried transuranic waste Welcome to my nuclear life. I'm Shelly Lesher As you can tell from the title this is going to be one interesting episode

[00:00:43] Today my guest is Matt Caplan an assistant professor at Illinois State University He is actively researching white dwarfs and neutron stars, but also works on nuclear weapons issues Matt is interested in making nuclear science accessible to the public and writes for several YouTube channels

[00:01:02] Including Kurtzkozoff in a nutshell and PBS space time today we sit down to discuss What in the world are we going to do with all of our nuclear waste? But stay tuned to the end of the episode for an interesting listener challenge

[00:01:24] I know you do a lot of work in trying to reduce nuclear weapons And what would you do with all of the plutonium and uranium that we have in nuclear weapons if you get rid of them?

[00:01:35] So uranium is easier uranium you down blend to reactor grade weapons grade is very highly enriched with 235 Reactor grade is a much lower concentration. So you can down blend that and you can cook all of that and reactors

[00:01:49] Plutonium there are similar processes, but ultimately you are left with lots of they're called transuranic Elements, which are the things that are like plutonium. They're heavier than uranium and then there's also lots of spent fuel So there are these two big pipelines to making the nasty icky

[00:02:05] Green stuff in drums as the Simpsons would show it There's two pathways to it is the weapons programs and then fuel enrichment and spent fuel from reactors And what are we going to do with that? What's the way to store that or how do we store that?

[00:02:20] Because do the reactors use all of it? So the reactors don't use all of it they they Burn some of it or some of it is used in the reactor, but then it's partially spent and

[00:02:31] It's insufficient for further use. So some countries reprocess it meaning they extract the remaining uranium From the fuel and then use that the United States does not currently do reprocessing But either way at the end of the day you still have

[00:02:45] Spent fuel of some kind at the end of this process these these fragments of these these heavy nuclei from fission I have a question which is do you know why the US doesn't reprocess and other countries do?

[00:02:56] I actually don't this is just like a fact that I have in my brain, but but do you know the answer? I'd love to know I Do actually there was a very big campaign

[00:03:07] To not reprocess because there is a little bit of weapons grade plutonium in reprocessed fuel There's a concern that it's gonna be diverted I see right because the spent fuel has two thirty five and two thirty eight in it uranium and some of that you two thirty eight

[00:03:24] Captures a neutron and then you have plutonium two thirty nine right so spent fuel has Plutonium in it that can be used for weapons that actually makes a lot of sense. I should have guessed that But let's talk about what the US does with its fuel

[00:03:35] I'm gonna guess that we bury it in the sand and we just ignore it So we bury our heads in the sand and just ignore the problem the pipeline for waste management varies by country and it varies by

[00:03:49] Fuel type for example, so the United States in most countries they have to go into pools like literally like imagine a swimming pool Because it's literally really hot when it comes out of the reactor and it stays hot because of the further radioactive decay of these

[00:04:04] Fission fragments from the splitting of the uranium and it has to stay in these pools for at least a few years and After that they go into what's called dry cask storage So when you think of spent nuclear fuel you think of the Simpsons right like this cartoon

[00:04:20] Like 55 gallon oil drum, but it has green ooze in it like someone cracked open a glow stick Like this is the cartoon image that all of us have in our head and spent fuel is solid, right?

[00:04:31] It's manufactured into these little metal pellets that are then stacked into these things called fuel assemblies Which are these these really long big rods and it's ultimately those are then stored in these shielded casks essentially And then those are just sort of left out

[00:04:47] They do not have or they meaning the nuclear weapons and nuclear energy industry Don't have a viable very long-term Storage solution for these casks. So where do the casks live right now all over the place?

[00:05:03] So it's my understanding that they stay at the site. Yeah for the most part. Yeah So there's states that no longer have nuclear power plants but still have these casts Yeah, they're there storage facilities where some has I mean again

[00:05:18] This is this is a big industry that now spans decades And so if you look at any given state, you're gonna find different Solutions if I can put that in sarcastic air quotes, you can see me because we're on camera everyone else at home

[00:05:31] I have to describe my hand gestures too. They found these you know solutions But the solutions are band-aids and our workarounds when this stuff is potentially dangerous for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years

[00:05:42] Of one of these casks pops open that can cause environmental disasters for really long times So really the only solution that that exists on these geologic time scales is to bury it

[00:05:55] So heck in deep like a kilometer down that there's no chance that anyone finds it even long after the Barrier site or the entrance has been forgotten and is like literally an archaeological site. I

[00:06:08] Don't think you're giving people enough credit. I I believe we would find something a kilometer underground You know, it depends on the future of human technology, right? I think that there's this this idea that there is the potential for people to

[00:06:24] Deindustrialize or that there's some big accident nuclear war Where we end up in maybe not a mad max style apocalypse But where there's a deindustrialization for a long period of time where a lot of knowledge is lost

[00:06:39] So I don't think future humans with flying cars and shiny silver spacesuits are At big of a risk because they would in principle have the records of where these were buried I think it's a bigger risk of if you look at

[00:06:51] Centuries to millennia there is this almost inevitable feeling that there's going to be hiccups in human civilization Where where these records could get lost sort of like we commonly we as in humans not you and I Find ruins here and there

[00:07:06] Yeah, imagine imagine you're designing King Tut's tomb That's a bit what being one of these deep geological repository designers is like they're really thinking about rock and construction and storage On effectively indefinite time scales, which is a very different problem than most other things and the

[00:07:27] Nuclear or any sort of technology we otherwise build that's a really interesting way to think about it because You know everyone knows there's this mystery around King Tut's tomb like what does this mean?

[00:07:38] What did they want to say? What is this and I imagine that when he was buried it was obvious What was going on? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's his stuff if you look at the pictures from inside King Tut's tomb It's like here's sandals here's jugs. Here's his couch

[00:07:56] Here's a spare mattress like they buried him with his stuff and so it's this like really unique insight into into his life So this is important because King Tut's tomb we're gonna come back to the main point about nuclear waste

[00:08:08] As I promise but King Tut's tomb is important Because it was forgotten that made at this time capsule nobody knew it was there until it was busted open a century ago The pyramids at Giza for example these are obvious

[00:08:21] They're they're these huge monuments and so they were looted even by Cleopatra's time So they drew so much attention to this place that they were picked clean of valuables already thousands of years ago

[00:08:33] So this is a major point when it comes to designing deep geologic repositories and the warning signs that will go with them is How will you make people aware of the danger or will you try to avoid drawing any attention to the place?

[00:08:50] Oh, it's this big decision that has to be made of how do we mark where we have buried? Transuranic waste okay, so the solution here is we have to get rid of this waste

[00:09:02] We have to bury it a kilometer or so underground and we don't want anyone to touch it ever on Geological time scales. That's the problem. Yes, okay, so how do we do that because? you know I just think of Chernobyl and

[00:09:20] It's a disaster zone yet people including me because I've been there want to go I Mean I want to go for very different reasons than someone who plays a video game wants to go But people are drawn to danger. Oh, yeah

[00:09:33] So on a short time scale for example there there are a few of these and I I don't know if I would call them all deep geologic

[00:09:40] Repositories but if you type this into Google for those of you were at home who are like geologic repositories spent nuclear fuel You'll find lists of them

[00:09:47] There's a handful of these all over the world some of them count as deep some of them are not a kilometer down They're closer to the surface There's a couple mines in Germany where

[00:09:57] Intermediate level nuclear waste is stored which isn't exactly spent fuel the United States has the whip the waste isolation pilot plant in New Mexico for nuclear weapons waste and then there's Sweden and Finland Which are operational and under construction

[00:10:13] respectively that are meant to be storing spent fuel so it's just this idea of you dig down and Because you know that you're storing nuclear waste You're gonna treat it like a high security site at least for about a century

[00:10:25] Which is what the United States is committed to with the whip plant But then once this repository is full or the vaults that were originally dug have been packed to the gills with these casks

[00:10:36] Then the question is how do you cover it up and maybe make people forget that this was ever here? Well, or do you because that's two generations. It's easy to forget something in two generations. I

[00:10:47] Think so so yeah, there's this big question of how long does the memory live like do the guards a hundred years from now know What they are guarding at the whip plant maybe probably like someone who worked there before them may have told them

[00:11:00] So it's this really kind of confusing question of when is the memory actually lost of these places and I think that that would come from one of these really catastrophic failures of civilization I'm not sure that you even need a catastrophic failure

[00:11:16] I mean we heard from people in Georgia on a previous podcast that a war happened and People just abandoned their posts. So the surrounding people don't even know what's there. They just want to go in and they loot

[00:11:31] Metals yeah, so I hope that the vaults have very thick doors by that point But still if you're desperate and you need metal we see this in abandoned nuclear sources all the time I'm not sure that even that even matters. I think you need more than just fear

[00:11:49] To keep people away from something that they Dean could be valuable to them So this is one of the big questions in Semiotics are you familiar with this word? I know you are because you have to be but please explain Semiotics does okay, so so semiotics is

[00:12:06] The study of signs and their meanings and symbols So I'll give you an obvious example Every time you go to a bathroom you see this little stick figure Person and then there's a stick figure person that like has a triangle laid over top of it

[00:12:21] And somehow from an early age We all learned that this symbol means like man and woman respectively if you went back two thousand years People aren't necessarily going to recognize those signs

[00:12:32] They have this this intrinsic cultural meaning of like a man has this sort of dress and a woman Literally wears a dress and that's how you have these that's where these two symbols emerge from

[00:12:41] But then they become baked into our society as these symbol another good example is the floppy disk as a save icon Even though we don't necessarily use floppy disks anymore So we inherit these symbols over generations

[00:12:54] And the question is how do we define symbols for nuclear waste and nuclear waste storage sites to warn people over literally Hundreds of thousands of years potentially. I mean isn't the trifle though like the nuclear symbol isn't that good enough? Is it I don't know like imagine

[00:13:12] 100 200 years from now if Let's imagine a big treaty to get rid of nuclear weapons and all nuclear reactors people have just decided that it's too scary To have any nuclear technology and so all this goes away

[00:13:24] And then suddenly does this symbol have any meaning to these people anymore if it's not Ubiquitous to their culture or suppose that it's updated in order to be less ambiguous There's there's some other design the nuclear trifle oil is just like a nucleus with three emanations of

[00:13:40] Of radiation coming off of it. That could mean a fan That could mean a holy trinity that could mean a lot of different things if you're coming upon it for the first time

[00:13:49] That's true. And you know, you mentioned the save button. Does everyone even know that that's a floppy disk? They just know it's a save button. It's a running joke among Sort of our students at this point that when they find a floppy disk, they say hey guys look

[00:14:03] They made the save icon into a real thing Oh god, you haven't heard this joke before no I'm old. I'm so old. Okay. So Have people Try to figure this problem out because I imagine like okay. Well skull and crossbones come to mind, right?

[00:14:22] But then I also know there are cultures in which the skull and crossbones is not A bad symbol. Yeah, that's right. The skull can mean anything from like Rebirth to continuity of life to any of these other things

[00:14:37] So while we obviously associate the skull and crossbone with like grim danger doom bad stuff That doesn't make it a universal symbol. So like if I were to ask you hey

[00:14:48] What warning are you going to put on this thing so that everyone at every point in time understands Do not go further or you will die a really horrible painful death But you're gonna say okay

[00:14:59] Well, I'm going to start with that that nuclear truffle oil and I'm going to say no That's just a shape you're gonna say skull and crossbones That can have different meanings or it can change meanings. I think I said I'm just going to write in plain English

[00:15:10] Here be nuclear waste do not come any further But there's no guarantee that people will speak English or be able to interpret English in a thousand two thousand ten thousand years Or that language even survives

[00:15:22] I mean you've seen some of the nuclear films that language doesn't even survive a couple generations Oh, yeah, I have a favorite post apocalyptic film which is mad max thunder dome Uh-huh Are you familiar with thunder dome? I know I spoil it for you and everyone who's listening

[00:15:40] I think at this point it's old enough that you don't have to announce spoilers Okay, well for those of you at home who are listening along and want to avoid spoilers because you're going to binge watch the mad max series after this the hero mad max gets

[00:15:57] Sentenced to death by exile and he gets sent out into the desert but then he finds a Well this sort of aquifer and there are children there And it's apparent that the children are survivors of like a plane crash like a humanitarian evacuation during like a nuclear apocalypse

[00:16:14] But the plane crashed and the pilot went for help and never came back presumably died So these children were feral and they're frozen out with like a like a five-year-old's English, but they're all like teenagers at this point

[00:16:29] And so max is like trying to communicate with them. There's a literal language barrier even though they speak English And language as we've seen on twitter and tiktok evolves incredibly rapidly I imagine that without some of these

[00:16:42] Normalizers like mass media you will again see these really rapid changes in the english language Chaucer is only how many years before shakespeare But already those are so different from modern english that they're almost unintelligible

[00:16:57] So there's this big risk that any written language in any set of written warnings can become unintelligible especially if they're lost for thousands of years and there isn't sequences of

[00:17:08] Every hundred years or so an updated version of the message being put in place by someone who can read the english From a hundred two hundred years ago. There's the possibility that even reading becomes something that isn't even

[00:17:19] A thing for people and this is even possible in a highly technologic society like ours How far away from glasses that do our reading for us the replacement of our entire? surroundings with qr codes that are then

[00:17:32] Replaced and used to generate images that are shown only to us for advertising purposes This is not too far off that even a highly technologic society could be post-literate simply because technology has taken that from But of course in the apocalypse scenario, it's the same thing

[00:17:47] Literacy is lost in a generation without schooling. Yeah. Yeah I will say it doesn't have to do with reading But once you take away mass media that normalizes language

[00:17:58] I was in an exchange student in england and I actually had to interpret two people speaking the same language because of accents It was a guy from edinburgh and a girl from south carolina. They couldn't understand each other

[00:18:11] Incredible and so I literally had to say in my accent what each other was saying So now imagine that same problem But instead of three people from different parts of the planet at the same time

[00:18:23] Imagine three people from different parts of the planet all separated by centuries trying to communicate Yeah, so well and then what is what would you write it on for example? The obvious answer is a stone slab

[00:18:37] So we should really take inspiration from like the pyramids and other archaeological sites Anything organic that's like paper can degrade these things can oxidize Stone is like the go-to in all of these these semiotic studies

[00:18:53] Is there's a we know we're literally going to carve this into a rock wall because the oldest surviving writing that's in full and isn't partial or damaged Are these hieroglyphs cuneiform things that are literally carved into stone

[00:19:06] But couldn't that also have a problem because if we're talking about a post apocalyptic world Then isn't the environment going to be different and perhaps stone Like carving into stone isn't going to survive

[00:19:18] Well, this is part of the site selection for where you would want to put a deep geologic repository in the first place So what is the biggest risk beyond humans to a deep geologic repository?

[00:19:30] I think it starts with a w and it ends with water. You got it So you're obviously going to be thinking that even on short time scales like the time scales of tens of years

[00:19:42] You don't want to build anywhere that you have lots of water whether that's running water at the surface Whether that's groundwater Whether that's lots of rain and there's somewhere that has a humid time of year So deserts and rocky places that are geologically stable far from coasts

[00:19:58] Are really the only candidate for this And so well the good news is with climate change. There's more and more places that are going to fit that description Oh, that's great. So the whole planet will be a perfect

[00:20:10] Geologic repository in another hundred years anyway and going back to mad max. There's going to be plenty of desert That's right. The whole planet will just be the australian outback There you go. There you go. Anyway, so seriously

[00:20:23] So in the u.s. Wait sweden and finland have places that meet these needs Yeah, they're also they chose them very to be very close to their reactors

[00:20:35] So maybe maybe they're not making the same choices the u.s. Is they want the shortest transport distance possible from the reactors but there are very rocky geologically stable inland features in sweden and finland, so

[00:20:49] You know, not necessarily like the big sandy mad max desert, but still fits the bill sufficiently So have you heard this? I mean, I guess it's not new anymore. It's like 10 years old But in england they had taken the waste product that comes from steel

[00:21:04] And have mixed it in to make glass out of nuclear waste Yeah, vitrification is vitrification. Yeah. Yeah, it's great people again I mean we we were joking about this earlier. They imagine this green liquid But a lot of it is melted into literal glass because

[00:21:22] Quartz and silicates are geologically stable and if you get it wet It's going to survive better than something that will rust and corrode That's not to say it's impervious to water, but it is so much better than a raw metal on its own

[00:21:37] So why don't we just do that to everything that sounds great? And then you can just store it in drums. It's stable. It's I think that's isn't that more expensive. I mean every time you want to add a step to the process

[00:21:47] You're adding how many this is the big problem. I was gonna say it's very expensive, right? But it's safe Yeah, this is I think the biggest challenge with nuclear as a source of energy

[00:22:00] Is that there is the waste problem you have to acknowledge that there's going to be some amount of environmental degradation and contamination And stuff at the end that you have to deal with But that's not economical when you are subject to

[00:22:14] capitalist forces as you want to do it everything for the cheapest most cost effective procedure And that means cutting corners and not necessarily doing the best safest thing because that runs costs up And when a reactor is being decommissioned you're also at the end of life

[00:22:30] So that reactor is not generating any more money to support these activities So what would you do shelly? Would you Mark where your deep geologic repository is and try to warn people? Hey, this is a scary place with eternal poison

[00:22:45] Or are you going to subscribe to the fire and forget? Scrape the ground clean so that nobody no attention is drawn to the place I don't know because I can see both ways right if you say hey, this is a dangerous place people are going to be like

[00:23:00] Ooh, it's dangerous. Let's go figure it out, right? But if you ignore it Then there's going to be this buzz that hey, there's a treasure somewhere Let's try to find it. Oh, no Hopefully it's buried deep enough and in a remote enough location

[00:23:17] Then no one's going to find it by accident But there's going to be some sort of conspiracy theory Somewhere oh, there's it's going to be the future. Of course, there's going to be conspiracy theories

[00:23:27] But then people are going to be like, oh, well now we're going to have to find it And people are going to be searching for it and then what happens when they find it So I think yeah if they if they crack it they die

[00:23:40] Right, so I think maybe I like thinking this through I think I might go for a combination I might hide it But then if you get too close And you find it then be like whoa, hey By the way, you really really shouldn't be here

[00:23:58] You can't happen upon it. But if you do by accident come across it Then Like it wouldn't be the pyramids to me like that's just like hey, it's me But it would be hidden

[00:24:11] But if you happen to come across it then it'd be like oh wait. Hey, hold on you probably shouldn't be here That's kind of what I would do kind of a little bit of both

[00:24:18] I like that and that's actually pretty similar to what the federal government has suggested Wait, are you telling me I agree with the federal government and something in part so so in 1993 when they were commissioning the whip the the waste plant in new mexico

[00:24:33] Sandia actually wrote a big report Because the federal government was suddenly concerned with the 10 000 year Lifetime of this site and they asked a bunch of scientists And I think the best part of this is that a good idea can really come from anywhere

[00:24:49] The the people who were like asked to contribute to this are everything from like archaeologists to geologists to behavioral Psychologists to linguists like a good idea can come from anyone Which is that's kind of the fun

[00:25:02] But even a kindergartner could probably have a really good idea about hey What's intrinsically scary to a human being who doesn't actually have any culture right? I mean a kindergartner could give you good ideas snakes spider snakes spiders scorpions Scorpions are scary

[00:25:17] I'm going to go with the indiana jones and like everything in indiana jones is pretty scary Except then some teenager who wants to prove he's brave is going to go in looking for treasure

[00:25:29] So the and at the end it's a box of scorpions. That's better treasure than nuclear waste I would much rather have a box of scorpions Than transuranic elements. Yeah, that's true. Okay. So what did what did the kindergartens come up with?

[00:25:44] Okay, so so that's right the the phd kindergartners Decided on a multi pronged approach and they actually said that the site must be marked That was really their first recommendation was it you definitely need something big on the surface

[00:25:57] So people know what's here and they believed in telling the truth They didn't say that the point was to scare people off and to come up with something deceptive that here's a dragon Who is going to eat you they said it has to be truthful. I like that

[00:26:12] I like that. Here's a dragon that's gonna eat you I think that would that might work, but that might also attract someone who's brave and wants to slay the dragon, right? That's true. That's true. Okay. Okay. So okay So we're gonna tell the truth also

[00:26:24] It's very unlike the federal government to think in timescales of tens of thousands of years Very very unlike the u.s. Federal government, but commissioning a report is cheap actually building one of these things is expensive

[00:26:36] Okay, so so we'll talk about what the report said and then we'll talk about what they actually did You got it. Okay. So so report truthful and informative and they wanted multiple layers Something that's simple. That's just like hey, this is a dangerous place something cautionary

[00:26:52] And with with increasing levels of complexity in the message as people potentially Made their way deeper into the facility Even if this involved them drilling through rock and blasting through outside doors the more technologically capable a

[00:27:06] A group of adventurers might be the more likely they are to be able to decipher these messages that hey This is dangerous And that this is kind of an eternal poison that you absolutely should never let into your water supply and so forth

[00:27:20] And they also insisted we were talking about this earlier metals insisted on no materials with like reuse value so metals are out Barbed wire is potentially really useful as like a fortification. You shouldn't be using metals

[00:27:35] It should be big monolithic blocks of stone that are like so hard to move No one would bother to remove them to like prove that they were there And and it should just be of like no reuse to anyone and on top of that

[00:27:48] They also insisted similar to your idea on many of these Even beyond the location where the waste is buried so that even if the surface site is destroyed at the burial site

[00:28:01] There are other libraries that contain all of the same information mapping all of the world's deep geologic repositories So that if people come upon these they'll know hey Here's a map of all of the danger zones on earth that our civilization left behind that you should under no

[00:28:16] Circumstances ever go looking for treasure and so if for some reason the surface message was lost Then if someone dug a little further down they'd see another message And if that was lost then they see another message

[00:28:31] So it wasn't just one it was multiple messages and the further you got in The more messages there were like no we're serious. No really we're serious really don't go any further

[00:28:41] In fact one of the simplest first layer defenses they suggested is taking discs that are maybe the size of a record And maybe carved in stone and just scattering hundreds of these in the sand near the surface

[00:28:56] That say hey, do not dig or drill here. This is a nuclear waste site Do just stop disturbing this ground and this was like their first layer of defense was all around this big facility

[00:29:06] Having these discs buried in the ground that it's the first thing you're going to find if you start digging And that's not a bad idea. We see that all the time in houses, right little messages that say there's a gas line here Don't dig

[00:29:19] Mm-hmm. And I mean idiots still dig but still they know that they shouldn't be Yeah, this is the hard part of the question is how do you idiot proof one of these things when they have potentially

[00:29:30] Years to centuries to chip away at a vault door made of steel and concrete So they had a long time to come up with ideas and you said that there were multiple people involved in this

[00:29:40] It wasn't just physicists or archaeologists. What are some other ideas that they came up with? Okay, so so for the surface and like you're an adventurer coming upon this place

[00:29:50] What do you see that tells you that this is a dark foreboding place that maybe you should go no further dragons dragons Actually close. Okay. Edvard mouches the scream. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, so so one of the suggestions was that the perimeter of the site imagine like stonehenge

[00:30:07] But over tens of kilometers Giant like as big as a house rocks that Mark the perimeter of where this this burial site is very far out And so that anyone on top of the hill will notice that there's this like

[00:30:22] Zone that's marked and on those monoliths are big scary faces like edvard mouches You can look at this in these images these pictogram cartoons written in multiple languages saying this is a dangerous place

[00:30:34] What is buried here has no value. And in fact, it's incredibly dangerous. Don't disturb it We're telling the truth But that would more or less mark the perimeter that says this is a bad place Don't try to divert water here for irrigation to start farming

[00:30:47] That would be the worst thing you could possibly do and that was one of their first eyes this sort of outermost Just layer of warnings But they also had other ideas for deeper in too not just leaving it sandy but having multiple layers of these scary things

[00:31:01] So that I I actually like the idea of saying like hey Don't divert water here because if you just had this big stone circle And I was walking around and I saw to be like, hey I want to go check this out and then I saw these faces

[00:31:15] I'd be like I really want to check this out and then it says this is dangerous. There's nothing of value here I'd be like, hmm, but what is there? Right like I'd be curious we're humans. We're curious by nature

[00:31:27] This is the stuff that victorians would put on their graves to like deter grave robbers And all it does is attract attention and get your exactly Exactly, but if it said do not divert water here, I'd be like

[00:31:41] Oh, it may still be interesting, but it's telling me not to do something so Maybe I really shouldn't divert water here. Like there's a reason like if this was gold or treasure Why would they not want me to divert water here?

[00:31:54] I think this is the advantage of the honest approach is that some of the instructions are so very specific That it like triggers that part of your brain. It's like, I don't know like they might be telling the truth

[00:32:05] Right. I mean, I still might want to investigate, but I don't think I divert water there. So interesting Okay, so what else besides just having something sandy?

[00:32:13] I mean, you definitely you'd want to kind of salt the earth so nothing could grow there, right? Because you wouldn't want any crops there Hopefully you've built in a salt flat already, right? These are already dry desert awful places

[00:32:24] So salt flats are often decent candidates that are considered But that's also people that's also where people want to race their cars though I know and it's also good as money in the future

[00:32:35] You can go and you can farm salt and scrape it off of the earth and use that for food if you have any sort of Long-distance logistics for trading. Yeah, it's really hard. We're ingenious people

[00:32:46] I think this is really interesting. So i'm going to go further in and be like, I think there's treasure in here What's going to stop me? So the other ideas that they had is they wanted like spikes like giant again

[00:32:58] Sort of monolithic rocks, but that are spikes and spikes are just kind of scary They look like thorns and we do this in horror movies, right? They were in big scary movies when when the hero has been transported to the plane of existence of the bad guy

[00:33:12] That there's these like thorny dark spikes And so they had the idea for using like black basaltic rock because it's really heavy and it's hard to chip away at And it would survive on geologic times to make a just really menacing kind of landscape

[00:33:26] That would make you feel uncomfortable the same way munches the scream makes you feel this discomfort to let you know Yeah, there is something just not good about this place. They really opted for the central like again the pyramid of of giza idea

[00:33:43] They really did opt for for something like this whether it's like an enormous slab of concrete like a pyramid Or something that's rubble they suggested a rubble pile in the center that suggested Destruction

[00:33:56] potentially to signify there was a powerful culture here that it built something and they had been destroyed And that if they were so powerful and they were destroyed

[00:34:03] Maybe this is dangerous to you as well if you're not capable of building something as intricate as this this rubble here However, let's look at all of those things. Let's look at Stone hedge and other stone circles. Let's look at burial carns. Let's look at the acropolis

[00:34:18] Let's look at everything else that signified great cultures and big things that people built and what do we do? We flock to them. We go there with is this a tourist attraction, right?

[00:34:27] So I don't I don't see how that alone is going to prevent people from being there even if it's scary The only way to I mean is there some sort of like

[00:34:37] Other way to tell people to like embed it in their culture that this isn't a good place to go because I mean people are scared of religious stories for example So some way to kind of embed that in in a memory This is the other prong

[00:34:54] Of nuclear semiotics instead of a physical memory being encoded in the place Trying to encode it in the cultural memory Or potentially something like an oral history if you can guarantee that the oral history is not going to evolve too strongly

[00:35:08] But religion is a perfect example because the oldest surviving stories that are retold in a High fidelity manner are religious texts You know, it's this big part of religious services that we tell it the way our ancestors did

[00:35:24] And so this guy sebioc who was a semi-autistic who was thinking about how do we warn the future? He said oh make a religion just create a fake religion from a whole cloth

[00:35:35] And they will have the warnings and they will tell of here be dragons and that this is a bad place And these are not places that are safe to go to and maybe the priesthood

[00:35:46] Would know the truth so that there is some knowledge if humans reindustrialize or if things change But just to have this cultural memory in the form of a priesthood That just disseminates the warning and makes sure that it's retained

[00:35:59] And then of course there's there's no guarantee that that works or that the message doesn't evolve rapidly Or that the message doesn't become inverted that this is a place that we must go and loot

[00:36:09] There's no guarantee that the priesthood survives cultures go to war and tribes go extinct And so the message could be lost But I think it's a really interesting idea partly because it's using the cultural memory to encode the the warning And also because it's using deceit

[00:36:24] Which is the exact opposite of every other recommendation every time that a scientist is asked how do you encode this information? They take the approach of an honest actor who wants to tell the truth because we're scientists

[00:36:36] And we want the public to understand and to know and seabye ox says no like don't don't trust people to make good decisions When they have truthful information tell them a lie to get them to do the behavior that you want for their own good

[00:36:50] I think in this case i'm going with him I think deceit might be the the route for for this one. I believe very strongly in True scientific communication to the public and trusting the public to make well-informed decisions when they have good information

[00:37:04] But in this case with this much at stake I might side with maybe a little bit of deceit as a first layer sort of warning What other recommendations were made or what else? I mean, this must be a really interesting report to read

[00:37:18] Because this is not really something that that as scientists we talk about or we think about I mean we just bury shit in the sand and go okay, that's great I mean the radioactive cats are kind of fun. Okay. I was hoping we'd get to the radioactive cats

[00:37:31] Yeah, isn't that the title of this episode? It will be yes Tell me because I want a radioactive cat Tell me about the radioactive cats Of course. So the 1980s were a crazy time Everywhere was post apocalyptic australia and nothing made sense

[00:37:48] And people knew that as opposed to now where everything makes sense That exactly exactly you see you're with me. You understand exactly what I'm going for you. I got you we're there so They were thinking about this nuclear waste storage problem on

[00:38:03] Thousands of your time scales and it was really like a wild west of ideas to just suggest Whatever came to your head of hey, how do we warn people in 10,000 years that this is a scary place?

[00:38:14] And so I think they were french bestied and fabrie had this idea similar to seabyeok of something that's a cultural memory and at the time genetic engineering was just beginning to become a thing And so they said well, what if we have cats?

[00:38:32] and these cats are genetically engineered to somehow change in appearance in the presence of radiation And there would be a cultural memory and like maybe a children's nursery rhyme song that when the cats glow

[00:38:48] We know not to go to this place or it's I don't know what that song was But you get the point that there would be a cultural memory attached to these Funny cats and so that means to avoid the place because these are your living geiger counters

[00:39:03] And they were related ideas too like using a cactus like a glowing yucca cactus again Because they were thinking of using the the us west for storage. So there's a handful of these ideas

[00:39:13] There was no real work done on this. No one ever engineered these it was literally just a suggestion But yeah, they get this name now of ray cats or these like radioactive cats

[00:39:22] Okay, but I think now perhaps technology has caught up and I think we could have radioactive cats now Oh almost certainly as long as they don't go extinct and there isn't a shortage of water and this like

[00:39:35] You know phenotype ties out you could in principle do this just release radio What what bad could ever come from releasing Some new type of animal into the wild none. I I can think of nothing bad that could happen

[00:39:49] I can think of no drawbacks only good stuff making a tourist destination out of the glowing cats of It'd be like it'd be like the six-toed cats from Key West, right? Like no one would want to steal them and take them home I'm sorry way

[00:40:04] You know about Hemingway cats No, I've never heard of this Hemingway has a property on Key West and he has six-toed cats And people try to steal the Hemingway cats Fascinating. I wonder if polydactyly this like extra tip, you know how polydactyly the extra finger

[00:40:24] That's a single trait dominant in humans. Yeah, I wonder if it's the same in cats Well, I don't know they're polydactyl cats, but yeah Okay, well note to self take a vacation to Key West and go steal one of Hemingway's cats But if there were these ray cats

[00:40:40] I think people would totally go and steal them Oh, absolutely. Yeah, this would this would be a like a trophy thing And if people learn that oh, hey if we disturb the dirt bore they glow more

[00:40:50] I think that you have the same problem here of the cultural memory inverting and something that's just too cool Is obviously not going to be able to retain this this scary message, but it is my favorite solution

[00:41:03] It's great for just how wacky and out of the box it is I feel like it really sets the bar high for crazy ideas for warning the future What it reminds me of is the old jasons from the cold war from the 60s and

[00:41:20] In 70s where they would come up with the crazy nuclear stuff This project reminds me of the jasons and all the crazy ideas they came up with

[00:41:28] Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if they were asked at some point. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a report from the jasons about Long-term storage. There's a handful of these. There's the whip report. There's the the 1984 human interference task force

[00:41:42] Which is another one of these big reports just documenting every idea you could possibly have to warn people Okay, here's my question. How do I get on one of these? I have crazy ideas. I was going to ask you oh

[00:41:55] You're the one with a podcast who would presumably have the credentials to I don't know. I mean you you you got the youtube. That's where it's all at right now

[00:42:04] I don't okay. So so we need to figure out how to get on one of these or or we make our own think tank I have an idea. Okay, so this is our job interview right now

[00:42:14] We're both interviewing each other. Okay jasons and what's happening is all we have to do right now Is come up with a crazier idea than seabyeok and his priesthood or the ray cats And then when the feds listen to it because obviously we're both on a list right

[00:42:29] They'll go wow like hire them immediately And then like two guys in suits with earpieces will come and interrupt us while we're teaching and we'll get whisked away in these Black suv's

[00:42:41] Right, so all we have to do is out crazy of them. So are you ready? I actually I actually have an idea Okay, so I just started thinking about this. I might need a little bit more time Okay, what's your out crazy ray cats and okay?

[00:42:52] I'm gonna go first and then and you give me yours and then Comments over. Oh, I don't have one. Okay good. Then I'm gonna win. You're gonna win. What's your idea? Out crazy. So I am gonna subscribe to the idea of not marking the physical site on earth

[00:43:08] I think Attention to the place oh I'll get back to that. I think the drawing attention to the site is is a recipe for disaster So the odds of someone drilling by chance

[00:43:22] Right on top of this place if you did a good job of bulldozing the site is probably pretty low So I think this sort of just let it be lost in the fact that the world is a really big place Is a pretty reliable strategy to avoid

[00:43:36] Disturbance from anyone who's let's say pre digital technologically. Okay. Okay, so With that said you would still want to warn a civilization that has ground penetrating radar And they can drill kilometers deep You would want someone with that level of technology that is

[00:43:55] Developed to that point in the tech tree of the video game, you know tech tree to be able to know What's there? So the easiest way to do this is to just put the warning on the moon Think about it for a minute

[00:44:10] But the dark side of the moon so we don't see it Exactly you obviously have to put it on the back of the moon. Obviously only Those with spaceflight capabilities Are going to know and when did spaceflight emerge spaceflight emerged as a consequence of

[00:44:27] Nations needing to get nukes from one side of the planet to the other faster So these things are in lockstep in the tech tree in our own history So if there's a deindustrialization event and then there's a period of reindustrialization

[00:44:41] I think nuclear technology and rocketry will probably emerge within a few decades of each other And so when they go to map the far side of the moon, they'll find a big pyramid full of secrets left by our civilization

[00:44:54] What other secrets would be in there? Oh, I don't know now. It's your turn Well, can I guess what other secrets would be in there? I mean you can put whatever you want I'm going to put nuclear waste storage sites and a whole bunch of information about

[00:45:07] You know the dangerous isotopes for them But if we're building a pyramid on the moon full of secrets, you might as well, you know pack it full other things I'm going to put the dangers of ai in there Hmm That's what i'm going to put in there

[00:45:20] How are you going to put that in there? What message do you write or symbols do you draw? You're really putting me on the spot there because I haven't thought about this I don't know what symbols I would draw But can I have cats in there?

[00:45:33] I don't know how you're going to pull that off, but you can try you can make sculptures of cats There you go Is this what the Egyptians were doing? Is they're just like hey guys these these are radioactive cats

[00:45:42] They'll glow and if you go a kilometer down under the pyramids, you'll find all of our uranium I hope that some conspiracy theorist does not take this episode and crop that sentence out And have me sounding like a complete loon on on their podcast

[00:45:56] It makes sense because didn't some of the cats have like emeralds for eyes I mean wouldn't you put emeralds in the eye your cat statues on the moon? Well, if they were radioactive cats, yes, I would But so you're gonna you're gonna forge them out of your rain

[00:46:10] There's no water on the moon. So you you don't have to vitrify it You can literally sculpt these out of transuranic elements if you want I could but really only the eyes should glow The rest of the cat should be and the eyes love it

[00:46:24] I absolutely love it. How are you gonna get a pyramid on the moon? That should be pretty easy. You just need like a space bulldozer It just needs to be big enough that they would see it from space as they're flying over. Yeah, just bulldoze

[00:46:35] Hundreds of square kilometers of the moon and they're gonna why are there no craters here? And why is there this giant like shape in the middle of it?

[00:46:42] And honestly, I might even use the bulldozer to carve like a 92 point star around it and have it right in the center Because 92 is universally going to denote uranium. Like it's one of these things that I think is

[00:46:54] Prinsic, why do you think 92 is going to denote uranium to everyone? Oh because this is one of these things that I think will survive is that even if Language and all of our other symbols go away

[00:47:05] Counting will have to reemerge or have to survive in a form similar to how we use it So I think one of the safest symbols is probably just a number or something denoting numbers

[00:47:16] Even if it's not a grid of dots a shape like a star or something with a certain number of points that are countable I think that would be a great semiotic symbol. Anyway, I'm going to write this up and submit it to a journal

[00:47:27] We should bulldoze a 92 point star on the far side of the moon with a giant information pyramid in the center of it for future humans My question is how many times do you get to try to bulldoze a 92 point star?

[00:47:40] Well, we have technology. We'll figure it out. I mean, that's an engineer's problem I had the idea the engineer has to figure it out now. That's right. Yeah, the archaeologists the architects someone else can handle that The construction worker it just use a drone right? It's the future

[00:47:55] Oh, yeah, it's the future but you have to do this now because It has to endure for tens of thousands of years Fortunately, the moon does endure for tens of thousands of years. It's not going anywhere

[00:48:08] Is the earth going to live longer than like is the earth going to spiral into the sun before all of the uranium has depleted Yeah, that's a good question. And so I guess this is going to depend on what your threshold for depleted is right

[00:48:25] Some of these nuclides have half lives of a billion years But a billion year half life means that there are so few decays coming off of a bulk material

[00:48:34] That it's basically harmless people think that really long half life means really bad because it stays radioactive for a really long time But short half lives mean that you have a big dose now and it decays away quickly

[00:48:45] these intermediate half lives of tens of years hundreds of years thousands of years are the most dangerous because you have this Trickle or this steady flow of radiation coming off of them So by millions to tens of millions to billions of years

[00:48:59] Many of those other elements have decayed depending exactly on whether or not you have transuranics or spent fuel but I would put my money on Not wanting to lick it even when the earth is spiraling into the sun

[00:49:12] I mean, but what do you have to lose at that point? It'd be a Pretty agonizing way to go out when I could just go up to the surface out of the repository and watch the sun start to Fill up the sky Okay Okay

[00:49:26] So how would you like to die in the apocalypse? I'm just going to go right under the nuclear bomb. I'm going to evaporate. I think that's the easiest way to go evaporation Good, I hope you live near a target

[00:49:40] Yeah, me too. Maybe that's how I should choose my next location Mm-hmm. That's right on the the bright side if you Don't get incinerated you have a nice apocalyptic job waiting for you as an atomic priest You know the real value of raycats

[00:50:00] I think there's there's a there's a real enduring cultural value to us not to people in 10 000 years from raycats and from Building semiotic pyramids on the far side of the moon

[00:50:10] I think there's real value in this and I think the value is not in the idea itself because these are ridiculous I think the cultural value is that it gets the public excited enough to learn a little bit about this big problem

[00:50:22] That we have and how the governments of the world are really not doing their part to prepare And hopefully if we tell enough people about raycats They'll think hey, maybe we should have a better solution than this

[00:50:34] And that someone really needs to start digging these really deep holes to hide this stuff West it just sit around on the surface for the next hundred years It's true because we don't want this stuff around and we don't want people to access it

[00:50:45] We don't want people to stumble across it and we don't I mean because there is a big danger For people to just stumble across transuranic elements Okay, I don't know that I can out crazy the pyramid on the dark side of the moon

[00:50:59] Maybe you're gonna be the only one that gets interrupted by suits. Yeah, well, that's okay I mean, that's how I'll text you. I'll say hey shelly. I win I'll give you a selfie from the backseat of the suv as a mod my way to Langley

[00:51:15] Thank you for listening and thanks to matt for his time and the challenge that I am extending to you What is your crazy idea to store our transuranic waste for the next 10,000 years?

[00:51:28] Send us an email at my nuclear life at protonmail.com and it may be featured in a future episode And you could also win some nifty prizes Until next time i'm shelly lesher and this has been my nuclear life

[00:51:56] Shelly i'm gonna go on record as having said I think that this is the weirdest episode of your show That I have ever listened to I don't know. There's been some weird ones Oh, no the one where we talked about empty in lake michigan

[00:52:10] Using a nuclear weapon to power a laser to knock a weapon out of the sky was on the uncover up That was probably the weirdest episode I had ever been on that's that ties with bulldozing the moon it does