![]() Sitting on the other side of the table from me are two of the people whose job it is to think about this rather big problem. Here also lies the HQ of the UK’s Radioactive Waste Management Ltd (RWM). Then the first nuclear reactor in Western Europe, which began operating just down the road at Harwell on another former airfield in 1947. The former World War II airfield at Culham is home to the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority and to the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), the UK’s nuclear fusion laboratory. The bright, modern meeting room in rural Oxfordshire feels a long way from the desert of New Mexico and talk of atomic priesthoods, but it is closer than it appears. Ironically, there is now Ray Cat movement with its own t-shirts, songs, and documentary. Neither was the idea of breeding cats that would change colour when exposed to radiation and – it was hoped – give birth to the idea of the ‘ray cat’, the feline Geiger counter, which would over the millennia teach humans to run if their cats change colour. ![]() ![]() Linguist Thomas Sebok first used the phrase “nuclear priesthood” in 1981. ![]() Sadly, the idea to cover the site with a forest of massive concrete thorns was not taken up, nor the idea to create a self-perpetuating atomic priesthood who would use legend and ritual to create a sense of fear around the site for generations. Nuclear physicists, engineers, anthropologists, sci-fi writers, artists and others have come together in the very broad, esoteric field of research into the way that future humans – and anything that comes after us – might be warned of our deadly legacy The vast landscape proposed for the WIPP is partly influenced by science fiction. Welcome to the world of nuclear semiotics. Detailed information about the WIPP will be stored in many archives around the world on special paper stamped with the instruction that it must be kept for 10,000 years, the rather arbitrary length of the site’s license. In case the information becomes unreadable, there will be another buried 20ft below, and another buried in the earth barrier itself. Then inside the berm will be another square of granite columns.Īt the centre of this monumental “Do Not Enter” sign will be a room containing information about the site. Inside this perimeter, there is an earth berm 33ft (10m) tall and 100ft (30m) wide marking the repository’s actual footprint. The plan calls for huge 25ft (7.6m) tall granite columns marking the four-sq-mile (10 sq km) outer boundary of the entire site. The village above a hidden nuclear dump.The countries building miniature nuclear reactors.In its place will be “our society’s largest conscious attempt to communicate across the abyss of deep time”. The sprawling complex of buildings that currently mark the site will be erased. When the facility is full sometime in the next 10 to 20 years, the caverns will be collapsed and sealed with concrete and soil. A similar facility should also open in Finland in the mid-2020s. WIPP is currently the only licensed deep geological disposal repository in operation in the world. This waste will remain lethal longer than the 300,000 years Homo sapiens has walked across the surface of the planet. The huge complex of tunnels and caverns is designed to contain the US military’s most dangerous nuclear waste. But this message is intended to help mark the site of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) that has been built over 2,000 feet (610m) down through stable rocks beneath the desert of New Mexico. It sounds like the kind of curse that you half-expect to find at the entrance to an ancient burial mound. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. “No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. “This place is not a place of honor,” reads the text.
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