[This Place is Not a Place of Honor] Imaginary Book Review: The 10,000 Year Telephone Game

    The vast variety of proposed nuclear waste warnings, from 10-foot tall granite spikes to glowing cats, is instantly intriguing; however, many of the solutions seem to exist in isolation from the others, with a clear gap between the odd-ball marker proposals and the DOE proposals. The only sources which seem to discuss the entire breadth of the proposals are news and magazine articles, which barely scratch the surface of the topic so as not to bore the average reader. Nuclear Semiotics: The 10,000 Year Telephone Game bridges this gap, offering comprehensive background to the solutions, as well as their relationships to each other. It opens on an almost-narrative cautionary note, describing how millennia-old monuments such as Stonehenge and the serpent mound have become all but meaningless today, a wonder to behold but impossible to interpret. Proceeding in a chronological order, it first gives background to the field of semiotics and some of the previous work of those on the human interference task force, supplying the reader with context as to how the team arrived at their conclusions. When it finally describes the off-color solutions prompted by the Zeitschrift für Semiotik poll in 1984, it highlights the skeptical response of the Human Interference Task Force to each idea, and the solutions are referenced often in later chapters on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant report in 1993, tracing the inspirations for the Sandia team’s menacing earthworks back to previous research in the field. With a particular focus on how each solution can influence a network of other marker proposals, The 10,000 Year Telephone Game gives its reader a full understanding of the small world of nuclear semiotics. 

[This Place is Not a Place of Honor] History Repeats Itself: Archeological Models for Nuclear Markers

  One of the greatest challenges in designing warning markers for a future so distant as (at least) 10 millennia is that it is impossible to run an accurate simulation to determine how a message will be received through years of cultural, political and societal change. Yet there are already plenty of experimental results which display the survival of meaning in a structure over thousands of years; we only need to look in the past. When considering their marker designs, the Human Interference Task Force, and later the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant team, used lessons learned from monuments throughout history to model their requirements. 

    Serving as the foremost archeology consultant for the HITF was Maureen Kaplan, who later contributed to the design panel of the WIPP project as well. The first distinction she used in her research was that historical markers were composed of 3 communication elements: Language, pictures, and symbols. Outlined in her report were 6 different historical examples of ancient markers surviving at least 1,000 years, including information on their location, history, material composition, intended purpose, state of preservation, and relevance to repository marker construction. 

    The first and likely most famous of the archeological examples are the Pyramids of Giza. One of the most impressive features of the already breathtakingly enormous structures is how long they’ve lasted, 5,000 years, which is half of the nuclear semiotic time frame, and for the most part they’ve remained both physically intact and recognizable in purpose: tombs for the rulers who constructed them. If records of Egyptian culture in historical documents, like the writings of Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, and Abd el Latif weren’t available to designate the intent of the great pyramids, the same intent could be gleaned from the numerous markers and writings inside the tombs themselves, displaying the efficacy of redundant linguistic and pictorial markers used in tandem with physical and symbolic ones. The structure of the pyramids has remained untarnished for a number of reasons, but mainly their immense bulk, which dampens the effects of erosion and discourages the quarrying of its materials or removal under new governments. 

    Utilizing size works for the pyramids, as they’re built to designate a certain spot, however, a nuclear repository would have to cover an area at least 14 times the size of a pyramid, and the devotion of resources to a pyramid of that size is impossible, or at the very least impossibly uneconomic. Additionally, over the centuries the tombs have been entered through under the pyramids and looted, aided by the fact that the written tradition around the pyramids informed people of the treasures inside. Hopefully any writing about nuclear waste repositories will avoid conveying the impression of having valuable contents, though this presents the possible benefit of adding buried markers to the system to discourage digging under the site (we’ll get back to this later in the post). Though nuclear waste markers with a pyramid’s shape and size would be inefficient, the pyramids are a testament to the longevity of a structure’s purpose through surrounding information. 

    The next archeological marker Kaplan examined are the Stonehenge megaliths in England. Out of the 6 archeological examples, these are the most similar in shape to the eventual waste marker proposals, and for good reason; a pattern of numerous standing stones around 13 feet high is physically imposing whilst still requiring less building resources as the pyramids, and even though around a third of the stones have been lost in the roughly 3500 years since the monument was finished, you can still tell each one is part of a greater formation due to their redundancy and proximity to each other. Stone seems to be a favorable material choice for markers, as proven by this example, which has survived both an unfavorably moist climate and an unfavorable political climate, standing strong amidst multiple invasions, the wars of the roses, and the two world wars. The glaring downside to Stonehenge’s success (for our purposes) is that despite its physical longevity, historians are still unclear about its original function due to a lack of inscriptions or records regarding the monument.

    Inverting the pros and cons of Stonehenge would give you the Acropolis of Athens, Greece. Its religious significance, and the specific purposes of several structures within the Acropolis, is apparent throughout the building’s sculptures, art and reliefs, as well as through extensive documentation, through which we know extremely specific information such as the architects and sculptors who contributed to the project, and even how the money was raised to build it. It may prove to be a useful model for archiving nuclear information on the site, a relevance recognized later by the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant team. 

    There’s been a great deal of structural damage to the Acropolis, for the most part due to human interference. In Maureen Kaplan’s words, “The Acropolis is an excellent example of ancient monuments that have suffered far more from the hands of man than from the ravages of nature.” Over the years the structures have been corroded by acid rain and pollution, the caryatids on the Porch of the Maidens have had to be replaced by casts, and the old iron bolts holding up the building were replaced by steel ones, which then expanded causing fractures in the surrounding marble. Some of this damage is attributed to its political proximity, such as the Venetian bombardment in the 17th century which triggered gunpowder explosions from inside the Acropolis and caused a great deal of structural damage, though if not for constant upkeep and restoration it is doubtful the Acropolis would still be standing.

    There are other historical structures which have survived due to consistent maintenance, though, perhaps implying that a nuclear waste warning structure could see a similar treatment from future civilizations. For instance, the Great Wall of China, another monument lasting over 2,000 years. Throughout its history it’s been breached in battle numerous times, then repaired with new materials, giving it a patchwork construction that remains structurally sound. The defensive purpose it serves, as well as oral and literary tradition remarking on its impressive creation and duty have incentivized its restoration. This may be a good indicator that nuclear waste repository markers will be maintained, as both structures are designed to protect the people surrounding them. 

    Damages to these monuments seem to occur most often when they are built close to civilization, as apparent by the continued survival of the Nazca Lines in Southern Peru, built around 100 BCE. The Nazca Lines are a series of immense pictures of animals and geometric shapes on the ground, drawn by removing the dark-colored rocky “pavement” that was formed naturally over thousands of years by erosion and rock decomposition in the desert. Due to its remote location, the lines had remained unbothered for some time, though in the recent few decades they’ve seen a good deal of degradation from tourist activity, and the patterns have been found to be quite fragile. Nuclear waste markers are to be much more durable, though the Nazca Lines prove that a sufficiently unpopulated location greatly increases the survivability of a marker, and that nature itself is not as likely to damage a marker as human interference. 

    The last structure Kaplan examined was mostly an example of what not to do: The Serpent Mound in Peebles, Ohio. The structure is a large line of gathered earth with a stone and clay core which forms the shape of an uncoiling serpent, assumed to be built by either the Adena or Fort Ancient Native Americans. This is about all that is known for certain about The Serpent Mound. There are many theories about when the structure was built, ranging from 3rd century BCE to 11th century CE, and without any existing oral tradition or written records about the site, historians are puzzled as to what the snake symbol means, or what the structure could have been used for. This loss of record is not the fault of the mound’s creators, but the structure is completely unique in the US, and without any point of reference from any signs or additional symbols on the site it’s impossible to firmly interpret. The serpent mound might be another convincing piece of argument against the use of the trefoil symbol in a marker, as though it may mean something to modern civilizations, a unique symbol alone is difficult to glean significance from without cultural context in the future. Additionally, the mound is very low to the ground, making it difficult to see the shape from eye level, a problem it shares with the Nazca lines. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the significance of the designs in both have been lost over time, implying there may be a correlation between symbolic memory and visibility. 

    In addition to the six examples here, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant team expanded on a few other archeological examples as models for more specific functions of the repository, such as the Vatican’s archives as a model for onsite long-term records storage. There are more than enough extra examples to include here, many of which are redundant with Kaplan’s research in the 80’s, though one of the more interesting references is to using a general feature of archeological digs to mark the site, that is, burying shards of ceramic pottery printed with pictographs and information which will convey that there was civilization on the site. Distributing these shards randomly may ensure that even if some pieces are removed for future archeological digs, there will be some left over for intruders to encounter as they dig or build on the site. These would certainly be in addition to larger physical markers, as sort of a backup plan, the kind of repetitive message delivery that is everywhere within the field of nuclear semiotics. It’s debatable whether buried pottery might inspire civilizations to excavate the repository for museums or archaeological purposes, spurring unnecessary activity on the site, though the reference to buried pottery has influenced many other ideas on underground nuclear markers, such as burying small bits of radioactive material on the outskirts of the repository almost as a “sample” of the contents deeper within.

    All in all, there are a few clear trends within these structures. The most survivable designs are made of stone, such as basalt or granite rather than marble or limestone, and have redundant patterns that can function even if part of the whole is removed. Kaplan’s 6 examples are all constructed from natural materials, which contributes to their lifespan, as metals have a tendency to be looted, recycled, or corroded (as is the case with the Acropolis). Additionally, it seems the longevity of the meaning behind these structures is dependent on written and pictorial markers, both on and off the site itself, and that structures serving a specific purpose to the civilization or community are more likely to be renewed, though also more likely to be damaged. Building the markers so that the entire system can be seen at once at eye level, rather than relying on an aerial perspective for the message’s reception, may play a part in reinforcing its cultural and symbolic memory. 

    Using archeology as a reference for deep-time structural design is an intriguing inversion of the study to me. Rather than examining a physical structure to design the narrative of the past, Nuclear Semiotics is examining the past (and potential futures) to design the narrative of a physical structure. 



References:

Trauth, Kathleen, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1993. https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf

United States, Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation. Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-level Waste Repositories. Columbus, Ohio, Government Printing Office, 1984. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6799619

Trauth, Kathleen, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Effectiveness of Passive Institutional Controls in Reducing Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant for Use in Performance Assessments. Columbus, Ohio, Government Printing Office,1996. https://www.wipp.energy.gov/library/cra/baselinetool/documents/Appendices/EPIC%20Revison%201.PDF 

[This paper was published as part of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant project. It discusses the requirements of passive institutional controls, and lists a number of historical examples of long-term information preservation, assessing what we can learn from the past in order to create effective future markers.]

Joyce, Rosemary A. The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us About Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material. New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2020. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=R8XLDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=art+in+nuclear+waste+warning+messages&ots=Xj5VaDwT9W&sig=yZVml2hgfFBG-rBRLCNV1nLggqE#v=onepage&q=art%20in%20nuclear%20waste%20warning%20messages&f=false 
Anderson, Kelli. Designing for Deep Time: How Art History is Used to Mark Nuclear Waste. Pratt Institute, Master’s Thesis, 2005. http://www.kellianderson.com/MSthesis.pdf 

Kaplan, Maureen F and Adams, Mel. “Using the Past to Protect the Future.” Archeology, vol. 39, no. 5, Sept 1986, pp. 51-54. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41731805 

Kaplan, Maureen. United States, Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation. Archeological Data as a Basis For Repository Marker Design. Columbus, Ohio, Government Printing Office, 1982. https://books.google.com/books?id=RxMCF4ncI-8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false  

Engler, Miriam. “Post-nuclear Monuments, Museums, and Gardens.” Landscape Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005, pp. 45-58. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/38935797.pdf

[This Place is Not a Place of Honor] Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Used)

    My parents bought a Harry Potter book box set for my older sister when we were in second grade, and since then each of those books has been read front to back at least a cumulative 10 times by my family. The first three books had around 200-300 pages, which wasn’t unreasonable for me at the time I read it, though the fourth, the Goblet of Fire, was a daunting 636. It took me the longest to read out of all the books, but I loved it the most, and you can certainly tell from our copy’s battered state. First of all, the frayed cardboard cover of the book is visible through the corners, and the cloth spine is pilled, stretched and caked in dust. The pages themselves have held up only half decently: there aren’t a lot of tears, though the first 30 or so pages have some water damage, and most every page has been dogeared, had their bottom corners bent upwards, and have a crease near the spine where my sisters or I would fold them into place. Yet the most noticeable wear and tear is that a few sections of the book have fallen out completely, and the footband of the book has come unstuck from the spine, revealing more flimsy cardboard and brittle chunks of dry glue, the first 250-something pages of the book only hanging on by the front cover.

    Our copy is somewhat inhibiting to read, and it has to be handled gently to keep the pages from falling out, making it impossible to quickly hide it under the covers when reading with a flashlight past your bedtime. I can’t remember when exactly the book got to be in this sorry state, though it would be somewhere between 6 and 8 years ago. I’ve reread the entire series around 5 or 6 times, and each time I briefly consider purchasing another copy when I reach book 4, until the thought is dispelled by nostalgia. Plus, on recent rereads of The Goblet of Fire, when I reached page 245, I could just put the severed chunk I was reading from in my bag rather than toting around a heavy book. Convenient!

[This Place is Not a Place of Honor] Aesthetic Omens Part 1: Conflicting Opinions on Beautiful Warnings

     The primary objective of a nuclear waste warning marker is to deter future humans from intruding on the site, and to that end, many of the marker proposals, whether physical, symbolic, or cultural, aim to intimidate or unnerve their audience. Physical structures proposed for the Waste Isolation power plant feature purposeful asymmetry, such as the leaning spikes or the thorn field, or are built to purposefully inhibit use of the land, such as patches of rubble or a “black hole” field of land that discourages agriculture or travel over such a sun-absorptive plain. Yet these repulsing structures or images threaten a marker’s secondary objective, that of self-preservation. If a marker is visibly revolting, even a culture still aware of its purpose might seek to tear it down, and if a culture isn’t aware of its purpose, the markers are constructed to appear unsacred and insignificant, offering no incentive to keep them there. 

    Then, perhaps creating an aesthetically pleasing or visually compelling marker could counteract the possibility of its removal by unwelcoming institutions. Whether nuclear waste warning messages should have artistic intentions is a highly debated topic in the field of nuclear semiotics, and it certainly has its pros and cons. The Human interference task force report was still in the early stages of nuclear semiotics, so the question wasn’t given much detail, though they did argue that having some intrinsic aesthetic or educational purpose to the markers might discredit the marker’s portent of danger. Additionally, using artistic markers on the smaller scale-- pictographs and images artistically depicting nuclear waste rather than large-scale architecture-- might implore humans to excavate the site for curatorial or anthropological purposes, reading the signs as “there is art buried here” rather than “there are harmful materials buried here”. Jon Lomberg, of the members of the WIPP markers panel team B and a professional artist himself, urged against symbolic art for waste markers, firstly because art is ambiguous, and though it can be a powerful tool in nonverbal communication, the artistic intent is not always as clear as the art’s depictions themselves. As an example, he referenced how ancient cave paintings clearly depict animals and people, though offers little clue as to why they might have been created, other than simply to create art, which leads into his next counterpoint: art in itself is a purpose. Creating waste markers to be pieces of art might cause its future viewers to believe their purpose is creative expression, not that the art is simply a means to an end. Furthermore, it could attract tourists eager to see the site, encouraging business and settlement around the site, which could lead to more opportunities for inadvertent intrusion. 

    Yet there are many in the field of nuclear semiotics who recognize the potential benefits of aesthetic markers. David Givens, a member of the HITF debated that attractiveness could discourage future societies from destroying the markers, and furthermore, artistic representations of importance, “such as regularity of arrangement, amount of material, homogeneity of elements, regularity of shape, congruity, number of independent elements, symmetry, and degree of random-ness in distribution, show "impressive similarities'' among cultures”. Art history is notoriously adept at preserving cultural memory. One of the members of the WIPP markers panel team A, Dieter Ast, stated “Beauty is conserved, ugliness discarded,” and that creating markers that instill awe in their audience might mitigate the possibility of their removal. 

    Additionally, one of the arguments against aesthetic designs could be construed in their favor; calling attention to the site may reinforce its meaning for a longer period of time, and tourism may even encourage future societies to monitor or protect the WIPP from intrusion. In fact, the Boston group of the WIPP futures panel modeled a scenario where a museum/theme park/permanent world’s fair à la EPCOT is built around the plant, and a fictional character, named Nickey Nuke (a little on the nose to be honest) preserves the memory of the site’s importance through education and entertainment accessible to the public. This was one of the team’s few scenarios in which they concluded no human intrusion should occur, and though it’s an extremely specific scenario, it models the possible benefits of creating the site to be appealing or attractive. 

    In the end, the stance of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant group was that an aesthetically attractive marker might incur unnecessary risk, or cause the warning to be misinterpreted or discredited. Another reasoning (briefly) given for this position was that using artistic platforms to create a marker would make it extremely difficult to establish any sort of international standard, which would be ideal in ensuring that the message is interpreted as intended (although the task of standardizing the designs from this many interdisciplinary groups is difficult on just a national scale, there is still much work to be done in coordinating any international directive). 

    Somewhat ironically, this lack of an international standard contributes to the fact that other nuclear waste warning projects worldwide don’t share the DOE’s general assumption that marker designs should be unappealing. In 2015, The National Agency for the Management of Radioactive Waste in France, or ANDRA, launched a call for art projects “Imagining the memory of radioactive waste storage centers for future generations", which has since become a recurring contest. A similar agency handling Dutch radioactive waste, COVRA, commissioned artist William Verstraeten to paint their facilities bright orange and create a series of photographs depicting nuclear decay for the interior of the building. The first project was for a (relatively) short term period of ten years, for the purpose of making the facilities understood and accepted by the public, and it seemed to work; they reported the public response to the facilities had gone from mistrustful to welcoming due to the project. Furthermore, independent artists, in national as well as international scenes, have been exploring solutions to the waste warning problem in their own work, creating a wider range of approaches and results than can be found in the DOE reports. These artistic techniques for conveying nuclear danger, as well as whether they can be considered successful, will be covered in a later post.

References

United States, Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation. Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-level Waste Repositories. Columbus, Ohio, Government Printing Office, 1984. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6799619

[The Human Interference Task Force, formed in 1981, was the first real effort to create nuclear waste warning messages for the long-term future. Though the majority of their solutions have yet to be implemented, and the Yucca Mountain storage facility project (for which the report was originally intended) has indefinitely stalled, these ideas circa 1984 are the Nuclear Semiotics equivalent of The Old Testament, the original DOE proposals for long-term nuclear waste warning messages.]

Trauth, Kathleen, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1993. https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf

[If the HITF report of 1984 is the Old Testament of Nuclear Semiotics, the Sandia report is the New Testament. It branches off of the ideas set into motion by the Task force, and presents some of the most circulated solutions in the field, such as hostile architecture and certain pictographs. Additionally, it took an interesting approach to diversifying its ideas by splitting its team into two focus groups; you’ll find the individual reports from each team as well as a general report here.]

Hora, Stephen, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Expert Judgment on Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1991. https://www.wipp.energy.gov/library/cca/CCA_1996_References/Chapter%207/CREL3329.PDF [This is the final report of the Futures Panel for the WIPP project. It summarizes the teams' findings, methodology and conclusions, and in its appendix you'll find all four individual team reports.]

Codée, Hans D. K. “Give the Public Something, Something More Interesting than Radioactive Waste.” WM’03 Conference, Tucson, Arizona, February 23-27, 2003. https://xcdsystem.com/wmsym/archives//2003/pdfs/37.pdf 

[A conference paper by a representative of COVRA, the facility holding radioactive waste in The Netherlands, detailing the first ten years of their site and the effects of artistically interesting facilities on their public appreciation.]

Choi, Harry. “Nuclear Semiotics.” Medium, Oct 24, 2019. https://medium.com/@mhscho0096/nuclear-semiotics-c10c434a0407 Accessed Nov 14, 2020.

[A more mainstream news source overview of Nuclear Semiotics, though I’d highly recommend this one over other similar sources, as it tends to cover a wide variety of solutions concisely yet thoughtfully, explaining why a certain method may not work in a comprehensive, almost narrative fashion.]

“Preserve and Transmit Memory.” ANDRA, 2018. https://www.andra.fr/nos-expertises/conserver-et-transmettre-la-memoire Accessed Nov 14, 2020. 

Anderson, Kelli. Designing for Deep Time: How Art History is Used to Mark Nuclear Waste. Pratt Institute, Master’s Thesis, 2005. http://www.kellianderson.com/MSthesis.pdf 

Joyce, Rosemary A. The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us About Securing the World’s Most Hazardous Material. New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2020. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=R8XLDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=art+in+nuclear+waste+warning+messages&ots=Xj5VaDwT9W&sig=yZVml2hgfFBG-rBRLCNV1nLggqE#v=onepage&q=art%20in%20nuclear%20waste%20warning%20messages&f=false 

Carpenter, Ele. “The Nuclear Anthropocene.” Fluid Encounters Between Art and Science Conference, Umea, Sweden, October 2-3, 2014. https://www.academia.edu/10113931/Ele_Carpenter_The_Nuclear_Anthropocene 

[This Place is Not a Place of Honor] The Futures Panel: Writing Sci-Fi on the Government Dime

 The comprehensive report created by Sandia National Laboratories in 1993 was and still remains one of the foremost studies on nuclear waste warning markers. It utilized guidelines and research done by the HITF in 1984, though the iconic hostile architecture design proposals, tiered system of information delivery, and infamous written waste warning (This place is not a place of honor etc.) all arrived from that effort to prevent long-term human intrusion on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Up to now, when we’ve discussed the Sandia Report we’ve been mostly examining the proposals and guidelines put forth by the markers panel. However, another crucial aspect of the process, one which informed the markers panel to create their innovative and adaptable solutions, was the preliminary “futures panel”, whose task it was to chart future methods of human intrusion into the WIPP, examine the probability of various types of intrusion, and model scenarios for the development of human societies over the next ten millennia. This is where we find science fiction bleeding into nuclear semiotics. 

    The Futures Panel, like the HITF and the markers panel, was composed of a wide variety of disciplines: physics, social science, law, science fiction, climatology, and futures research (a deeply intriguing field of study I hadn’t heard of until now) to name a few. They hired 16 consultants, and to fully exhaust every possible scenario, divided them into 4 groups of 4 based on geographical location, each group containing experts in different fields. Due to this split, the panel ended up with a variety of methodologies carried out by each team and differentiating factors for intrusion projected by each one. Specified in the issue statement was the need for broad-based knowledge and creativity in the projections for future societies, and a call for “scenario analysis” of future civilizations, and the product was a vast, interdisciplinary range of detailed, vaguely science fiction-sounding concepts. 

    The Futures Panel first determined the different modes of inadvertent intrusion into the WIPP. Some are what you might already know or expect, such as archaeological or construction-based excavation of a site, drilling for oil, mining, or water impoundment, though a few of these methods may appear less obvious. The Boston team raised the possibility of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant being reopened for the storage of additional waste materials, and a few of the teams realized inadvertent intrusion could occur from digging transportation tunnels. 

    They then examined potential influencing factors which could lead a society to forget the danger of the site, misinterpret or ignore markers, and pursue these methods of intrusion. All four teams agreed that technological advancement or regression would be a great determining factor in future intrusion, and the patterns of technology might switch back and forth in a variety of ways. The Boston team argued that both technological innovation and stagnation might both increase the likelihood of interference, as more advanced and less dangerous mining tech might increase the incentive to drill on a site, and technological stagnation might promote excavation when resources are scarce. The Washington A team, on the other hand, identified a scenario in which technology stagnates due to 100% efficiency energy recycling, which would make intrusion for resources unnecessary and unlikely. 

    Additionally, population growth would create incentives to excavate the site for potential resources. Economic growth was of foremost concern to only the Washington B team, which argued that other factors such as a need for resources and the industrialization of the future would vary based on wealth, and that trade might cause less technologically advanced communities to have access to drilling technology, without knowledge of the risks drilling at a site would pose. As expected, a lack of awareness would be key, and improper records would largely increase the probability of intrusion, especially if there is only partial memory of the WIPP, as an understanding of the site’s location but not its dangers could incentivize archeologists or salvagers. Two of the four teams asked for consideration of not marking the site whatsoever in order to discourage deliberate exploration by “treasure-hunters”, though the Markers team concluded from their overall recommendations that possibilities of inadvertent intrusion through mining might increase if the WIPP is left unmarked. 

    The last influencing factor is government control, something guaranteed by all four teams, as cultural transitions caused by political change would discontinue the perpetuating information or mythology surrounding the WIPP and cause markers to become lost in translation. Strangely enough, three out of four of the teams modelled specific scenarios in which New Mexico secedes from the United States, two of which predict its annexation by Mexico. 

    These established factors were displayed in a number of scenarios, the variety of which is too great to cover in a single post, but I’ve cherry picked some of the more influential or intriguing ones. 

    The Boston team presented ten highly detailed “point scenarios”, and for each one determined the probability of each of its most important features occurring. A scenario titled “Mysticism and Religion- 2091” projected that an anti-science cult would dig into the site to discover alternate realities and the meaning of life, describing the scenario in a notably detailed style, even explaining the ideologies of the cult and the names of several priests. Of course, the probability is astronomically low that the scenario would take place word for word, down to the religious epiphanies and childhood experiences of a cultist named Senoj, though this scenario echoes some concerns raised against Sebeok’s atomic priesthood, in that the propagation of warnings surrounding nuclear waste may lead some to misinterpret it as religious significance. 

    Also created by the Boston team, “A Feminist World- 2091” presented an extremist female-dominated society, which disregards all science from the 20th century as byproducts of male arrogance, and dismisses the warnings because they discovered they were all created by white middle aged men. The writing arguably villainizes feminism as a movement to reject all men and all scientific knowledge associated with men, rather than it being a push for equality between genders, though this is beyond the scope of my analysis. One thing to gain from the exploration of this scenario is that it does highlight some biases of the WIPP team, and in the conclusions section, the Boston team proposed consulting more women or members of ethnic minorities. 

    A “seesaw scenario” in which technology fluxes between advancement and regression was deemed one of the most dangerous by the Southwest team. In this particular model, an energy crisis after the exhaustion of fossil fuels causes machinery to become unusable, and plunges society into a technological dark age. Overtime, the languages we use today fall out of practice (though, in an interesting detail, they are maintained exclusively by the scholars of religious institutions). Society builds back up to around the level of the 18th or 19th century, until old machinery is rediscovered which is deemed to be much more efficient, and the search for a source of energy to power them up again causes people to drill for oil in New Mexico and eventually breach the WIPP. The rise, fall, and remembrance of technology is a common device in many science fiction stories, and it’s one the Southwest team argued would be both likely and dangerous

    The Washington A team centered their research around the availability of resources in the future, and presented four possible scenarios. The fourth is presented as an optimistic best-case scenario, and many of their recommendations aim to spur societal change in that direction. The ideal that population growth and technological advancement regardless of environmental consequence is disregarded, and humans enter an era of constant harmony and coexistence with the environment. The spare technological efforts are to develop renewable energy to the point of 100% efficiency, and the population remains stagnant to reduce stress on the environment. In this scenario, there would be no need to drill for oil, as no energy shortage or demand is present. It’s a lofty goal, though it does provide a beneficial end goal to their recommendations, one of which is to focus efforts on propagating renewable energy technologies around the site such as solar panels or wind turbines, so there will be no future energy hunger.  

    The Washington B team did not model a highly specific scenario like the other teams, though their “general” projections were arguably the most narrow of all 4 teams, notably affixed to the idea that capitalism is going to be a constant in all human society for the next ten millennia. The majority of their report detailed the projections for the GDP per capita and population growth. Inflation of oil costs would be the most dangerous possibility for the future and the most likely incentive for intrusion, though they argued the lowest possible scenario would be a rejection or erosion of Western powers. If such a “social shock” were to cut people off from Capitalist Western civilization, it would either be due to fanatic religious extremists forcing people to reject capitalist ideologies, or due to some unknown disease afflicting the mind or emotions which would alter human behavior to inflict such an unprecedented “civilization break”. I am by no means exaggerating; these two situations are their only modelled instances in which society would de-Westernize, and of course, both were deemed unlikely. 

    It’s apparent some of these projections are pretty tongue-and-cheek, as the Boston team prefaced their “point scenarios” section with, “Even though we have written the scenarios with an occasional attempt at humor, they have a serious purpose.” Though, as these researchers emphasize, just because a scenario is wildly improbable does not mean it can’t be useful. The same result of intrusion could result from a vast number of societies, and 10,000 years from now there are bound to be aspects of society which sound absurd to us today. Absurd fictional models of the future may be just what we need to provoke creative solutions for an existentially long-term problem, and as a result, their suggestions were relied upon and referenced often in the markers panel report. 

References:

Trauth, Kathleen, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1993. https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf

Hora, Stephen, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Expert Judgment on Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1991. https://www.wipp.energy.gov/library/cca/CCA_1996_References/Chapter%207/CREL3329.PDF
[This is the final report of the Futures Panel for the WIPP project. It summarizes the teams' findings, methodology and conclusions, and in its appendix you'll find all four individual team reports.]

Gordon, Theodore, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Inadvertent Intrusion into WIPP: Some Potential Futures. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1990.
[The Future Panels Boston team report. It takes a double sided approach, offering general suggestions for what could cause a breach in the WIPP, then adds 10 highly specific narrative scenarios. I would argue that out of the four teams, this one explores the most absurdly creative possibilities.]

Benford, Gregory, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Ten Thousand Years of Solitude? On Inadvertent Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Project Repository. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1990.
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/22/064/22064107.pdf
[The Futures Panel Southwest team report. Their research revolved around a few predicted patterns of technological advancement or regression and models at least one highly specific society for each pattern.]

Chapman Duane, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Inadvertent Intrusion into the WIPP Repository: Report of Washington Area Team A to the Sandia National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1990.
[The Futures Panel Washington A team report. Their focus was placed on availability of energy resources in the future, and modelled 4 general possibilities for technological and societal development due to the society's access to fuel.]

Glickman, Theodore, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. The Report of the Washington Area Second Team on Future Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the WIPP Repository. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1990.
[The Futures Panel Washington B team report. It's mostly concerned with the state of the economy 10,000 years into the future and how the market's demands might incite intrusion onto the WIPP in search for oil.]

Glenn, Jerome C. “Introduction to the Futures Research Methods Series.” The Millennium Project, Futures Research Methodology—V3.0, April 30 2009. 

Benford, Gregory. Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2000. 
[Gregory Benford is a science fiction author who consulted on the Southwest team of the Futures Panel; his first nonfiction book, Deep Time, explores various ways in which humanity has attempted to send messages to future societies, and it recounts his experiences working on the WIPP project. It provides an intriguing personal perspective that's hard to come by between cut and dry government report sources, and you really get insight into the thought process of the panelists, plus his background as an author contributes to its readability.]

This Place is Not a Place of Honor: Sandia Report Marginalia

     The text is from one of the two major US Department of Energy reports for creating long term nuclear waste warning messages, specifically the report from 1993 for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant by Sandia National Laboratories. I annotated onto screenshots of the pages rather than on paper, since it's become easier for me to keep track of online sources than physical ones. These pages establish the requirements of any warning message, as presented by two different teams on the WIPP panel, and come relatively early in the  report. It's interesting to draw parallels between what the Sandia report deems important and the requirements of earlier efforts in the field of Nuclear Semiotics, and my notes are somewhat about assessing the team's design solutions and comparing them to other proposed markers.

This Place is Not a Place of Honor-- Nuclear Semiotics Reading Plan

Nuclear Semiotics Reading Plan

Asterisks indicates currently inaccessible sources

Short-term goals (To read more thoroughly):

Sebeok, Thomas A. “Pandora’s Box: Why and How to Communicate 10,000 Years Into the Future.” Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, 6 November 1981. https://www.generalsemantics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/gsb-49-sebeok.pdf

Jensen, Michael, Nordic Nuclear Safety Research. Conservation and Retrieval

of Information- Elements of a Strategy to Inform Future Societies about Nuclear Waste Repositories. Roskilde, Denmark, 1993. 

Givens, David B. “From Here To Eternity: Communicating with the Distant Future.” A Review of General Semantics, vol. 39, no. 2, 1982, pp. 159–179. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42575926

Munsch, Sebastian. “The Atomic Priesthood and Nuclear Waste Management - Religion, Sci-fi, Literature, and the End of our Civilization.” Zygon Journal of Religion and Science, vol. 51, no. 3, 2016, pp. 626-639. https://www.academia.edu/27875581/The_Atomic_Priesthood_and_Nuclear_Waste_Management_Religion_Sci_fi_Literature_and_the_End_of_our_Civilization_in_Zygon_Journal_of_Religion_and_Science_Volume_51_Issue_3_2016_p_626_639

Sebeok, Thomas A. United States, US Department of Energy, Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia. Columbus, Ohio, Government Printing Office, 1984.

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/16/010/16010244.pdf

Risk assessment of Sweden’s repository

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252675003_Nuclear_Waste_Risks_and_Sustainable_Development

Trauth, Kathleen, et al. United States, Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories. Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Government Printing Office, 1993. https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf

United States, Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation. Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-level Waste Repositories. Columbus, Ohio, Government Printing Office, 1984.https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6799619

5-page WIPP report on passive institutional control requirements

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1242770

Pierce, Sebeok, and the Semiotic Reformation on Contemporary Communications

http://www.gilsonsociety.com/files/011-031-Magsino.pdf

Paper on Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics, goes into Sebeoks work

https://biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/view/255

Gregory Benford and a few others’ WIPP official doc contributions. This would be very helpful for sections on predicting what the future holds. Includes 3 scenarios of technological advancement/regression

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/22/064/22064107.pdf

Thomas Sebeok’s review of his own submitted report to HITF, a part of the Topics in Contemporary Semiotics Book series, perhaps I could find other sources there

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-3490-1_13 *

Mid-term goals (To read in the next two years):

Ghertner, D. Asher, et al. “Security Aesthetics of and Beyond the Biopolitical.” Futureproof:

Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life. Durham, NC, Duke university Press, 2020. https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2698/chapter/1965540/Security-Aesthetics-of-and-Beyond-the-Biopolitical

Gregory Benford (sci fi author on WIPP panel)’s first hand account of working to come up with these solutions, which he calls Deep Time. Gives good insight into their thought process, as well as what it was like to work on this team

https://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html *

Environmental Impact Statement for Yucca Mtn depository

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0326/ML032691306.pdf

EPA on institutional controls

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/final_pime_guidance_december_2012.pdf

2004 Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Implementation Plan

https://www.wipp.energy.gov/library/PermanentMarkersImplementationPlan.pdf

Handbook of semiotics, less specific more general usage in modern society

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=rHA4KQcPeNgC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=topics+in+contemporary+semiotics&ots=dgi1vTjO6f&sig=RPtT7MfPxhhYks4-Xy9ExMgyJJc#v=onepage&q&f=false

Into Eternity (2010) documentary

Long-term goals (To read in the next five years):

Circles in architecture as the perfect form

https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/1999/bridges1999-173.pdf

Semiotics for Beginners David Chandler pdf

https://postarchive.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/semiotics-for-beginners.pdf

Using the Past to Protect the Future, by Maureen F. Kaplan and Mel Adams, Archeology, Sept. 1986, pp. 51-54. *

A complete, 218 page history of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant project, this gives history to the creation of the plant and the problem at hand. Not focused on scientific nitty gritties or solutions, more on the context for these ideas

https://www.sandia.gov/about/history/_assets/documents/MoraWIPP991482.pdf

Directory Sources (Sources with useful bibliographies and links):

Dunn, Charles. Multigenerational Warning Signs. March 17, 2011. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph241/dunn2/ (General, Trefoil)

Forum site with good sources and overview, but it’s really sketchy 

http://www.nuclear-heritage.net/index.php/Marking_Nuclear_Waste_Disposal_Facilities(General, Nuclear energy today)

Tannanbaum, Percy H. United States, Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation. Communication Across 300 Generations: Deterring Human Interference with Waste Disposal Sites. Columbus, Ohio, Government Printing Office. 1984. https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/16/010/16010245.pdf?r=1

[Percy Tannenbaum was a social psychologist on the Human Interference Task Force, his report favors the usage of the trefoil for millennia, though it’s mostly just assessing what an information system needs to illicit a certain psychological response, not offering any one solution.] (Psychology, pictographs)

Pandora’s box secondary review 

https://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/academic/courses/01sp200a/students/enricaLovaglio/pandora/Pandora.html (linguistic and myth evolution)

Technical University of Berlin, Institute of Language and Communication. “And in all eternity: Communication over 10,000 years: How do we tell our children's children where the nuclear waste is?” Journal of Semiotics, vol. 6, no 3, 1984. https://www.semiotik.tu-berlin.de/menue/zeitschrift_fuer_semiotik/zs-hefte/bd_6_hft_3/ (fringe ideas, ray cats, satellite moon)

Choi, Harry. “Nuclear Semiotics.” Medium, Oct 24, 2019. https://medium.com/@mhscho0096/nuclear-semiotics-c10c434a0407 Accessed Oct 23, 2020.

[A more mainstream news source overview of Nuclear Semiotics, though I’d highly recommend this one over other similar sources, as it tends to cover a wide variety of solutions concisely yet thoughtfully, explaining why a certain method may not work in a comprehensive, almost narrative fashion.] (General, archeology, linguistics)

Paper on Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics, goes into Sebeoks work (Linguistics, Psychology, Semiotics)

https://biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/view/255

Nuclear Energy Agency Reference Bibliography for nuclear waste memory and messages, I’m HYPED about this source (General, about everything but fringe ideas)

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/10003972/nea-rwm201113-rev1-oecd-nuclear-energy-agency

Topics requiring additional sources:

Art in Nuclear waste markers

Hospitable markers

Swedish Repository

Linguistic Predictions

Historical warning structures/ archeology

Satellite Moon

Biosemiotics