The decommissioning of the Santa Fe nuclear power plant has already begun and many questions remain unanswered about whether the nuclear waste will be stored in casks at 703 or the government will remove the waste to an unnamed nuclear storage site. It is not 11Alive and anytime soon. Toxic remanence from the Cold War remain for millions of gallons of highly radioactive sludge and thousands of acres of radioactive land and that waste will remain toxic for the next 10,000 years. The US government wants a proposed waste site to come up with a plan to warn future generations about the radioactive poison underground but how. A new documentary introduces us to what kind of warning that should be. The documentaries called containment and joining me is the kill -- codirector Peter Galison from Heidelberg University. Peter welcome to the program. Thank you. Pol of your -- part of your facility focuses on nuclear waste. Tell us about this site. In the southeast corner of New Mexico is a huge and deep salt deposit promotions 250 million years ago this would be a very good place to put nuclear waste. Why is the government concerned about how to warn future generations. After all we are a literate society we can leave records for posterity. To they think civilization will collapse in the next 10,000 years? You are dealing with questions that are on the timescale of civilization itself recorded human history is about 5000 years. Twice that is 10,000 years so the Department of Energy assembled a group from scientists to archaeologists and anthropologists and they all came together to try to imagine the future and why people might dig into this space and then to figure out how to market. Then we see some of the scenarios that futurists and science fiction writers came up with about the world 10,000 years ago. Tell us about some of those were. When people wanted to predict the future and the Cold War and how it might take place they made up these scenarios. Short sketches of what might happen. That's what they did when they had to think about the much more distant future of 10,000 years. What if there was a radical change in climate are a collapse in civilization or building an underground train in such an automatically that you could dig through the waste site and never see the markers and surface. What could lead people to dig into it. For instance they saw the markers they don't believe the warnings that were left from the ancient Egyptians that say if you dig into this to human all your descendents will suffer horrible and painful deaths. With. And because we think there is treasure. We have a clip from the documentary discussing how the team thought about creating these warnings. We wanted something that did not depend on language we veered towards a potent form of communication. It does not have to be learned and happens viscerally. Landscapes our peril because you can go to a place in he can say there is something wrong here. What did this for boarded landscape that Michael and his colleagues came up with? He thought if we try to say things literally through language or even pictorially the possibility of misunderstanding is too great. We need to be able to address this in some way that people just respond to universally. He imagine for instance spikes on the ground where you had these huge stones that allowed difficult passage to narrow to inhabit or to farm. When you think about what they are concerned with like spikes that nobody would see that as welcoming they would know that something was not right in this area. Another idea was to create sort of a theme Park. People thought some of the things that we know from the deepest past from the stories of Homer our biblical understanding or other forms are accounts of what was happening have lasted because they were narratives that were compelling to us beyond any particular monument or fragment that might remain from the time. The began to say can we make a kind of a story the way we have characters like Smokey the bear our biblical stories or Homeric stories may be that we could start our own mythical legend like way of grasping the past. The thought if there was a place that people went to learn about these stories a kind of a theme Park Museum that maybe people would and that continuing traffic to that place learned to stay away and not to dig. That the government ever decide on which wanting to use. As long as people are using the site there are armed guards with flat jacket and they are serious about guarding a. The problem is once the site is filled in a couple of decades nobody will want to pay the private security forces to go around and militarize trucks with machine guns it will be an open sites. That's when you need the warnings so when they have the monument on file it looks like a kind of Ricky Taylor -- rectangular Stonehenge but it would not be decided which one to build until the site was near final closure. It airs tonight on KPBS TV. At 11 PM. Thinking so much. Thank you for inviting me to your show.
A salt cavern in southern New Mexico is one of the few sites in the country designated for long-term storage of nuclear waste created during the Cold War arms race. But with the waste remaining toxic for thousands of years, the federal government has imagined what society might look like 10,000 years from now in order to best warn future generations to stay away from the site.
In the 1990s, the government gathered architects, artists and futurists to imagine ways the underground waste could be discovered. There could be global illiteracy, so leaving written instructions wouldn't work. Soldiers could crash land from space, so any monument had to be easily recognizable from above. Or just as looters ignored warnings on the Egyptian pyramids in search of treasure, future scavengers could think any monuments left above the site were markers for something valuable.
"The government was essentially being driven to science fiction in order to be able to open a multi-billion nuclear waste site," said Peter Galison, a professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard University.
Galison is also co-director of "Containment," a documentary on nuclear waste storage airing Monday at 11 p.m. on KPBS-TV. The film shows one of the leading suggestions is a series of giant spikes emerging from the ground, intended to create a sense of unease.
"We wanted something that didn't depend on language. We veered toward a potent form of communication that doesn't have to be learned and happens viscerally," architect Michael Brill says in the documentary. "You can go to a place and say, there's something wrong here."
The New Mexico site, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, is still accepting waste and a final monument design won't be chosen until the site is closed, according to Galison. That might not happen for another 20 years.
Galison joins KPBS Midday Edition to discuss other options for warnings, including a possible theme park with a Smokey the Bear-esque mascot called Nickey Nuke.
