Re: Long term nuclear waste disposal (was: The Year 2038 Problem)

From: Dan Pop (Dan.Pop_at_cern.ch)
Date: 06/07/04 

Date: 7 Jun 2004 14:40:19 GMT

In <m5065a7i6wz.fsf_-_@tombstone.sdct.nist.gov> p.black@acm.org (Paul E. Black) writes:

>Dan.Pop@cern.ch (Dan Pop) writes:
>
>> In <40BF053E.6B3F484A@yahoo.com> CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com> writes:
>> >Should
>> >any posted signs survive, the language in which they are written
>> >probably will not.
>>
>> No one expects any posted signs to survive, merely to be carefully
>> maintained. This would also take care of the language issue.
>>
>> Of course, one could imagine scenarios involving the catastrophic
>> destruction of the current civilisation and its replacement by the
>> descendants of a few tribes of bushmen that survived the catastrophe
>> by chance.
>
>If there are a few tribes of bushmen, what is the chance they'll
>wander through several hundred kilometers of desert to find the
>respository? And that they'll be able and willing to dig through
>hundreds of meters of backfill? And crack open thick steel
>containers? And grind the glassy waste to powder and spread it around
>or ingest it? Although we shouldn't stop thinking about such things,
>the repository seems okay.

The idea was that that those few tribes of bushmen would eventually
repopulate the world and create a civilisation with no "memory" of the
previous one.

Dan 

-- 
Dan Pop
DESY Zeuthen, RZ group
Email: Dan.Pop@ifh.de
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