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LANDSCAPE PERMANENCE AND NUCLEAR WARNINGS
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IDENTIFIED SCENARIOS
Acknowledging that many permutations of events could compromise the integrity of WIPP over a period of 10,000 years, the DOE decided that the best way to deter accidental exposure would be with permanent landscape warnings. The only way to increase the likelihood that such landscapes would serve their intended purpose would be to first develop a small and accurate group of scenarios of future events.6 The Southwest Team developed five scenarios, three of which focus on technical change and two of which stress political change: the U.S.A. Forever Scenario; the Mole Miner Scenario; the Doom and Gloom Scenario; the Seesaw Scenario; and the Free State of Chihuahua Scenario (Benford and others 1991).7
In the U.S.A. Forever Scenario the nation continues to develop within its existing political, cultural, and socioeconomic structure. The Southwest Team believed that this scenario was insufficiently probable to warrant lengthy refinement, so no details were developed.
Under the Mole Miner Scenario, technological capabilities improve amid the emergence and solution of new problems. Social structure continues to develop; society advances enough to intrude on WIPP but not to render itself immune from the dangers of radioactive substances.
One of the many complicating factors in this scenario is a technological capability that continues to advance while innumerable other elements move at different speeds and directions. For example, a technically advanced society could use artificial intelligence to intrude on WIPP, only to find itself unable to stem subsequent leakage to the surface environment:
It is the year 2597, and a self-guiding and independent drilling device called a "smart mole" is tunneling underground in the southeastern corner of an area formerly called New Mexico. It was started on its way weeks earlier by those directing it down a conventional bored hole. It has since continued making its own independ-
ent path using carefully designed expert guidance and analysis systems and enough intelligence to assess results on its own. Most important, it has the "motivation" to labor ceaselessly in the cause of resource discovery.
The mole moves laterally through rock, fed by internal as well as external energy sources such as trailing cables. Speed not being necessary, its tunneling speed is quite slow-only a meter per day. It samples strata and moves along a self-correcting path to optimize its chances of finding the desired resource. In place of a drill bit, it uses electron beams to chip away at the rock ahead of it, seeing at least a short distance with acoustic pulses which reflect off nearby masses and tell the mole what lies in its neighborhood. CAT-scan-like unraveling of the echoes yields a detailed picture. Communication with surface-based operators takes place through seismological sensors to send messages-bursts of acoustic pulses of precise design which tell listeners what the mole has found. Burrowing upward through relatively soft salt formations, it encounters and penetrates several metal canisters, releasing radioactive materials into the environment. Before those on the surface realize what has happened, underground water becomes polluted and contamination reaches the surface. (Benford and others 1991, 17-19)
The details of this scenario are less important than the implications of its actually happening. Its primary significance is that it portrays an intrusion into a nuclear repository from other than a downward direction. In other words, the Mole Miner Scenario assumes spherical exploratory capabilities: If warning devices are positioned only between the repository and the surface, they may remain silent even when containment security has been compromised. Warning devices must reflect the unique directional flexibility of such a plausible mining technique.
A third future, the Doom and Gloom Scenario, envisions many events and developments that combine to produce a particularly hazardous situation:
Just after the beginning of the third millennium, several events trigger a devastating and long-lasting world recession, one accompanied by uncontrolled biohazards, DNA manipulations, epidemics, and hoarding of fossil fuels. These events work in dire combination with global warming, the loss of biodiversity, and ballooning population to produce devastating environmental conditions everywhere. Despite a common twentieth-century expectation of a safer and more secure future, calamity prevails. Arable lands diminish, coastal cities flood, and billions of people are homeless. In the chaotic conditions that develop, records once carefully cataloged and protected, including warnings of buried hazardous waste, are lost. Security containment at WIPP is breached by drillers desperately looking for water and other resources. Similar exposure takes place at repositories in other locations, and no one can retard or reverse the quick airborne dispersal of the dangerous materials they contain. (Benford and others 1991, 21-22)
This is not, of course, the only possible scenario of doom. Other disasters loom in outer space. Asteroids could strike the earth, axial wobble could disrupt global climate patterns, and fluctuations in solar insolation could upset ecosystem balances and retard advancements in knowledge. One part of this shift could be a diminished ability to detect underground radioactive waste and to shield ourselves from its dangers.
A fourth vision of the future, the Seesaw Scenario, assumes the gradual disappearance of institutional memory and even the means we employ to maintain it. As part of this development, warning markers and what they intend to communicate decay into unintelligible babble:
After hundreds of years of decline, society rebuilds itself in those parts of the world suitable for agriculture and sedentary life. This includes the area formerly known as southeastern New Mexico, and explorers are newly probing the earth's crust there for things they need. Political instabilities in the region during the dimly remembered centuries of the "Late Oil Age" prevented some of the original oil from being pumped out, and now a renewed quest is jeopardizing the integrity of the repository that had been constructed in the same area but forgotten. Warning markers that had survived for many years are encountered by resource explorers in the year 2997, and though they come upon the remains of an imposing artifact, they are unclear as to its purpose. "Perhaps they left it here to tell us that there are energy resources down below." "Maybe there is danger. Perhaps we should consult the scholars to see if they know anything about this." "You know these old artifacts-all rusted junk. Let's drill and see what we can find" (Benford and others 1991, 22-24)
Creating a persistent marker detectable by a civilization that declines and then advances again would seem feasible. A marker on the earth's surface that is large, long lasting, and not easy to destroy would probably do the job. The primary problem is likely to be attempts to destroy the marker intentionally, perhaps through vandalism. A more perplexing problem is how to transmit the desired message. Language is likely to be especially fluid during a period of decline and rebirth. Although future scholars may understand ancient languages, they are unlikely to be involved in mineral exploration. The Seesaw Scenario--a staple of science fiction-is a serious challenge to marker designers.
The last of the five scenarios, the Free State of Chihuahua Scenario, reflects the consequences of a likely continuation of people moving northward from Mexico:
The year is 2097. The past century has been one of political upheaval in the former American Southwest. After ceaseless wrangling among the diverse regional interests and perceived inequities in political representation, the United States is fragmenting into a cluster of smaller nation-states. During this time, a similar process has affected the stability of Mexico, a country traditionally plagued by tensions between the relatively affluent North and the centralized political control to the South. Its northern provinces have formed the Free State of Chihuahua.
Political uncertainty in the Free State is leading to a large-scale exodus of Anglos as well as many long-established Hispanic families from the lands formerly known as the United States. They are escorted by forces loyal to one or the other of the new U.S. countries, and they practice a scorched Earth policy, destroying most of the technological infrastructure, especially installations of potential military value on the northern side of the former U.S.-Mexico border.
The Free State lacks foreign exchange and has poor credit. Because it is limited in available natural resources, its people evolve into a scavenger society, recovering, repairing and reusing all available technical artifacts from earlier times. While
making excavations at something once called Sandia National Laboratories, Free State resource archaeologists discover references to a place called WIPP, along with photographs of waste barrels filled with abandoned tools, cables, and clothing. Fragmentary maps are also found, which allow the location of the site to be established. References to hazards are not found. In any case, social knowledge of radiation is limited, due to the development of non-nuclear energy sources during the twenty-first century.
Encountering only ambiguous warning markers, those charged with locating and characterizing WIPP decide to enter. Later, still unaware of the potential hazard, the site is intentionally mined, breaching the storage vessels containing transuranics and exposing the workers and the environment to radioactive contamination. (Benford and others 1991, 24-28)
This scenario reminds us that no nation has survived for more than a few centuries. Large states have tended to fragment into smaller, more culturally coherent ones. For example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is today divided into at least nine smaller countries, and the Soviet Union met a similar fate only seven decades after it was created. It merits note, however, that union with northern Mexico is not critical to the scenario just described. Indeed, one can visualize many ways in which changes in political control might increase the possibility of inadvertent human intrusion.
LANDSCAPES OF RECLAMATION, REPULSION AND ILLUSION
As we strive to develop a permanent warning system for our nuclear-waste repositories, we must be ever mindful that the odds of an inadvertent intrusion will be influenced by how accurately we predict the future and how successfully we incorporate these predictions into our warnings. The daunting task of designing effective markers is made easier when we target the cultural landscape as the key element in all future environmental change and resource use because it helps us organize myriad design possibilities into three categories: landscapes of reclamation, landscapes of repulsion, and landscapes of illusion.
The first option, landscapes of reclamation, directly addresses one of the most fundamental uncertainties about effective warning strategies; that is, whether to make them blatant or subtle. Would, for example, an obvious marker divert people or attract them? Take the case of King Tut's Tomb, which remained undisturbed for centuries because it was unmarked and buried under debris from earlier excavations. It escaped the attention of grave robbers, Suggesting that the most prudent warning we could produce for WIPP would be no warning at all.
A principal question looms over this alternative, however: Would marking the site increase the chances of willful intrusion more than not marking the site would increase the chances of inadvertent intrusion? Reclaiming the site, leaving it unmarked, and allowing it to revert anonymously to the appearance of the pre-WIPP landscape could produce a high degree of protection against inadvertent intrusion. Given the legal duty to warn, however, this alternative is not presently available.8
FIG. 7--Large-scale warning markers help create landscapes of repulsion. Source: Trauth, Hora, and Guzowski 1993. (Drawing by Michael Brim)
The second option, landscapes of repulsion, relies on an intentionally odious and foreboding construction, erected both to symbolize danger and to deter intrusion (Figure 7). The intent of such a warning marker is the transmission into the future of a sense of danger, but landscapes of this type might produce an undesired effect of attracting the curious. Such attraction would seem likely even if the symbology were something simple, like Carl Sagan's suggested pictograph of a skull and crossbones (Trauth, Hora, and Guzowski 1993).
The third option, landscapes of illusion, has the advantage of overcoming legal concerns as readily as the likely human responses that might detract from the two warnings just mentioned. Under this option a so-called soft surface marker would meet the important condition of blatancy and warn the near-future generations, who would be most likely to know of the facility in the first place. The marker, made of a material intended to weather and erode, would disintegrate, leaving no trace. The marker would provide warning over the short term, when memory and curiosity would be naturally high, but would disappear from view after a few decades, as would active public memory of the wastes beneath it.
FIG. 8--A wide sensorium of devices would increase the chances of detecting nuclear waste, and spherical deployment of the devices would send warnings in all directions. Source: Adapted from Benford and others 1991. (Redrafted by Barbara Trapido-Lurie, Department of Geography, Arizona State University)
Despite the disintegration of WIPP's obvious warning, the public would not be without protection. First, record of the location would continue to be linked to topics of any prospective activity that might threaten it. Second and more important, hidden beneath the dull, surficial illusion of simplicity would be a wide sensorium of warnings, beacons, barriers, and deterrents, all configured into a spherical array.9 The spherical deployment would be a response to the possibility that a mole miner could approach the buried vaults from any direction (Figure 8).
The underground beacons should take at least three forms:
· Acoustic markers. Solid rock markers would be unlikely to shatter or lose shape in the salt beds. Large granite disks or spheres would be easily detected by acoustic probes. One array could be two straight lines through the WIPP drifts, intersecting perpendicularly to mark the center.
· Magnetic markers. These could be specially made, high-field, permanent magnets-the simplest a strong, single dipole located at the hazard's center-that produce a clearly artificial pattern.
· Radioactive markers. Left outside the bulk of the waste rooms and drifts, these could be small samples of common WIPP isotopes to warn off impending intrusion. Like similarly weak but telltale markers left on or near the surface, such markers have the advantage of conveying more precisely the type of danger ahead.
The markers would be detectable at various distances from the waste itself. Acoustic prospecting in the WIPP neighborhood would pick up the granite arrays. Magnetic detectors as small as a pocket compass would sense deep iron markers from the surface. Ultrasensitive particle detectors would discern either the waste itself or small tags with samples of the waste buried a safe distance below ground. These would be in amounts so small as to pose no health risk to the curious, weaker than a radium watch yet of long half-life.
This wide-sensorium approach would require no technological innovations to be effective. Even sensors at today's level of sophistication would detect this prescribed combination.
  
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Last Updated 03/16/1999 (jrjb)