A Praedial Universe

Geologists, by nature, are territorial in their habits. Foraging among bushes, around boulders, and along rock ledges, their comestibles are fragments of once-living organisms. Scraps of earthdata, collected from crumbling outcrops, are shoved into a mental pouch that holds a current working hypothesis. For the field geologist, as for the farmer, or for anyone who depends upon an intimacy with the earth, knowing makes one protective.

I knew nothing of the bonding power in terrain when I agreed, in 1975, to help government scientists explore for the first geological site for the disposal of the plutonium-contaminated radioactive waste. The making of atomic and hydrogen bombs had created highly toxic wastes and failure to solve the waste problem was threatening development of the nuclear industry. It was logical that geologists be given the task of finding a place for the "permanent disposal" of waste. The mythology that created the word plutonium implies that a solution to this difficult problem lay deep within the earth.