My objections to WIPP, I thought, were based solely
on technical grounds and on the serious implications of the brine chamber.
What I didn't understand at the time was that each of us carry "genes"
for territoriality that can become expressed under the right circumstances.
If there was to be a nuclear waste dump in "my basin," then the
site had to be as perfect as possible. No hidden blister of brine, no concealed
threat to future generations, would be acceptable. But as genes often do,
mine failed to complete their mission, overwhelmed by more powerful forces.
The WIPP repository is completed, the trucks are hauling in the waste. and
elevators are carrying it to the burial chamber. With completion of the
WIPP facility guardianship has shifted from geologists to scientific panels
that still must deal with the problem of releases of nuclear waste. Not
anchored to the land, members of panels and commissions have the freedom
to think abstractly about "multi-mode release limits, collective
doses, and acceptable risks." Guardianship is couched in language
such as "propagations of comparative uncertainties between individual
dose and cumulative release." The motives of scientists and administrators
have changed from protecting a place to protecting a future, an enormous
difference.
Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years which means that the lethal stuff
cannot be allowed to become airborne for ten times that interval. A quarter-million
years is an incomprehensible number, even for geologists. Experts and Federal
agencies have arbitrarily declared that 10,000 years is a long enough interval
for which anyone can reasonably be expected to be responsible. But being
responsible for the future, however short one thinks it might be, puts one
in an uncomfortable position and scientists and science managers, to spread
accountability, have sought the help of futurists, historians, archaeologists,
and linguists.
Stonehenge!, said the anthropologists, predictably. Pictographs!, said the
non-verbal linguists. Together they came up with a plan that would ring
the WIPP site with a circle of huge manufactured stones, each pointing skyward.
Embedded in each stone would be a pictographic story, cast in bronze, to
ward off all but the most curious of our children's children.