Long term storage

Where and how do humans store long term storage (ie 10 of thousands of years)

Stone engravings and parchment will be around far longer than anything since the start of the electronic era, apart from some types of plastic waste.

Any digital form of storage is lucky to last 30 years before becoming so obsolete nothing will read it, so data needs to be continually copied on to later technology.

Yup – as I wrote in Learned Publishing twenty-six years ago… https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Opinion/ElecArchiv.html (it’s probably findable on Learned Publishing’s own site too, but I know the link to my copy…I should probably dig out theirs…)

We don’t, basically.

As Druck says, what we’ll leave behind is stuff engraved in stone (which around here is often a bunch of seemingly random dates) and whatever plastics don’t degrade.

If a future civilisation or visitors don’t know how Christian dates work, stones saying 1884 and the like will have no significance.
Plus, it’ll be clear that our “God” was called Coca-Cola and everybody had a little cylindrical fetish to him/her/it in their house… ;)

The massive amounts of information around is the pinnacle of human understanding (I won’t say “knowledge” as there’s plenty of misinformation too), but all of it is a transitory illusion. The books will degrade, the metal will rust, and electronic things will fade away until there’s nothing but randomness (assuming it can even be “read”).

It is, actually, an interesting subject in designing the entry to nuclear waste sites. How does one mark a place as “THIS WILL KILL YOU” when they don’t know, in the future…

• What language will be spoken.
• If warning symbols ⚠️ will make any sense at all.

This… is interesting reading: https://wipp.info/

Interesting reading indeed. What little surprises have our ancestors bequeathed to us, I wonder? A monotheistic religion, maybe? Curiosity?

The cockroaches will make twittering songs about us.

It is, actually, an interesting subject in designing the entry to nuclear waste sites. How does one mark a place as “THIS WILL KILL YOU” when they don’t know, in the future…

It’s a hopeless task anyway. However clever the warning, it’ll almost certainly either be eroded away or buried in time. If it’s engraved in good solid stone, then maybe someone will find it a hundred miles from the shaft it marked, deposited there by a glacier, and wonder what the hell it’s all about.

If it’s buried, then someone might dig straight past it and never see it, just finding their way into the system at some other point.

Store the nuclear waste on the moon! That worked so well in 1999.

If rocket launches and orbital adjustments were reliable enough, you could put it into an orbit around the Sun, closer in than Earth so there was no chance of it coming home to roost. (You need the orbital adjustment to achieve this: anything launched from Earth without a subsequent orbital adjustment will be in an orbit that intersects Earth’s orbit, and the object will sooner or later collide with the Earth.)

But they’re not. And we’d be looking at a LOT of launches, there’s rather a lot of the crap to dispose of.

A monotheistic religion

:) Why have one when you can have three that are basically the same thing and they all hate each other. And of those three there are groups and schisms and splinters and they hate each other too…

That worked so well in 1999.

Small ship crashes, KABOOM like it was filled to the brim with explosives.
Never woulda guessed that was the same guy that did Thunderbirds (small ship crashes KABOOM) would you?

If rocket launches and orbital adjustments were reliable enough

You just need one aborted launch to cause a level of contamination that would make Fukushima look like a walk in the park.

there’s rather a lot of the crap to dispose of.

If it’s still radioactive, can’t more energy be extracted from it? Or is the processing cost more than the value of the removable energy?

You just need one aborted launch to cause a level of contamination that would make Fukushima look like a walk in the park.

Exactly.

If it’s still radioactive, can’t more energy be extracted from it?

Reprocessing used fuel is a really nasty process. When it first comes out of the reactor, it’s billions of times more radioactive than the original uranium. It’s producing a lot of heat, but very much less than the reactor it came from – and inconveniently, a rapidly reducing quantity of heat, as the shortest half-life isotopes decay. It’s so radioactive at this stage that you stick it in a cooling pond (which boils off pretty rapidly, but at that inconveniently diminishing rate…).

Once it’s a bit less radioactive, you might reprocess it – but it’s still millions of times more radioactive than the original uranium, so it’s a nasty process. It makes reactors look rather friendly.

Most of it is never reprocessed. It’s highly radioactive, and for the first few decades it’s still producing a lot of heat, but not a nice consistent or controllable amount of heat. The fission products will be a radioactive hazard for a few centuries; the actinides (mostly Pu249) for hundreds of millenia.

Reprocessing is mainly intended to separate (most of) the actinides. Some of these are fissionable, and can be returned to the reactor. A few have other applications, notably Pu248 which with its 87.7 year half-life can indeed be used as an energy source in thermoelectric generators, but that’s a tiny amount of energy compared with the original reactor, and a very specialised application; and Americium 241 which is used in ionisation smoke detectors (or thermoelectric generators if you want longer life than the Pu248 ones – but they’re also five times heavier for a given power output).

The rest of the actinides (that’s most of them) are neither fissionable nor radioactive enough to be useful – but are radioactive enough to be hundreds of thousands of times more hazardous than the original uranium. But at least the volume of them is far less than the volume of fission products they were mixed with, so (possibly) a bit easier to cope with.

It is, actually, an interesting subject in designing the entry to nuclear waste sites. How does one mark a place as “THIS WILL KILL YOU” when they don’t know, in the future…

The sharp rise in radiation levels as you approach should be a bit of a give away. These sites aren’t placed where anyone can just wander past, future generations will have to active look for and explore them, and by then you would hope a miniaturised Geiger counter would be part of their communication device / brain implant.

The sharp rise in radiation levels as you approach should be a bit of a give away.

Except that unless someone’s already broken into the repository, there won’t be any rise in radiation levels. And anyway, if we’re needing to warn people that this stuff might kill them, surely we’re thinking of a future in which our technological civilization is largely forgotten.

https://static.explosm.net/2023/07/08212016/atomic-bomb.png

Cool, that one has a comic generator. A bit of button mashing later and…
https://explosm.net/rcg/ibjomtgiv
Invent your own backstory. ;)

https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Fiction/Birgom/Birgom5.html#Curse

https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Fiction/TempleZ/TZ.html

Then there’s this, from Nirex’s “Review of 1987-1991 Site Selection for an ILW/LLW Repository (June 2005, Number: 477002)”:

12.3 The Repository Concept

The repository concept that was under consideration in the previous siting studies was based on a repository that was envisaged to be backfilled and sealed as soon as possible after all the waste was emplaced in its vaults. In response to feedback from its stakeholders and the public, Nirex has since developed the Phased Geological Repository Concept. This allows the monitoring of the waste in underground storage, under controlled conditions, for a period of perhaps hundreds of years until society takes the decision to backfill, seal and close the repository or, alternatively, to manage the waste in some other way.

This is a recipe for a repository that is monitored under controlled conditions for a period of a generation or two (at best…), then forgotten about and abandoned; never backfilled, sealed and closed or managed in any way at all.

(Lots more of my commentary on this at https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Energy/NuclearWaste.html if you’re interested.)

And finally, what the people responsible for such things have actually done:

https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Opinion/NukedMississippi.html