SINCE THE ARGUMENT for nuclear disarmament and an end to the proliferation of nuclear capabilities doesn’t seem to be going particularly well, scientists are now having to think of ways to warn future generations thousands of years in the future of the dangers buried in the ground beneath them.

Because language evolves at an alarming rate - 4 xampl, jst l%k w@ hs hapnd 2 lang n d lst 10 yrs - boffins are now pondering how best to warn our descendents, say in the year 52008, that directly underneath them lies a rotting nuclear arsenal, fouling up their groundwater supply.

In just 60 years, the human race has managed to create so much nuclear waste that we no longer have any room to store it all above ground. Countries are now having to build massive underground facilities where they can dump anything toxic or nuclear, where it will (hopefully) remain safely sealed for many hundreds of thousands of years until it poses no more risk.

But what signs or language can be used to ensure that people in the future won’t dig it up and think: “wow, that antique tube with the yellow and black markings will look simply fabulous in my living room” are not exactly obvious.

Take Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example, which even to very clever academic boffins remain something of a mystery. Or Latin, which any poor school kid forced to suffer through tedious lessons of it will tell you remains largely incomprehensible. And neither of those are more than a few thousand years old.

In order to warn future people of the potential dangers we left them in the form of plutonium or caesium-tainted waste, or even just to let them know where it is, in case by then they’ve figured out how to neutralise it all, semiotics (the study of signs), linguistics, history and anthropology all have a role to play.

Tom Peake of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says "The need to address the disposal of nuclear waste and its long-term potential hazard has been the impetus for research into long-term memory".

One possible way, put forward by US boffins at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a nuclear waste dump bang in the middle of the New Mexico desert, is to erect huge stone blocks engraved with symbols designed to last for thousands of years. Hmmm…. So, maybe, with that in mind, it would be wise not to dig anywhere near Stonehenge in the near future.

Europeans, in a move predictably led by the French, reckon that a better way of dealing with the problem is to cosy up to our nuclear waste and somehow integrate it into the rich fabric of our society. As they have been doing in France for as long as anyone can remember. Claude Pescatore, a specialist on waste management at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD's) Nuclear Energy Agency reckons this is the only way warnings can be transmitted from generation to generation through oral tradition and folklore.

"Disposal facilities can be made part of the fabric of the community rather than operated in isolation from it" he said.

As well as welcoming nuclear and toxic waste into our daily lives and becoming its friends and custodians, France also has a cunning second plan. The country’s National Agency for the Management of Nuclear Waste (ANDRA) is faffing about scribbling all sorts of non-verbal images on "permanent" paper which can apparently last thousands of years. They are also making these doodlings particularly attractive, in the hope that future generations won’t think they’re a load of rubbish and chuck them in the bin.

"If a document is going to succeed in extending the boundaries of memory, it has to be attractive," noted Patrick Charton, the man in charge of sustainable development at ANDRA.

Unfortunately, the rate mankind is going, the nuclear labels are going to have to be meaningful to the race of super cockroaches that inherits the planet once we've messed it up good and proper. µ

L’Inq
AFP