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Do not dig here until 12000 AD : Hazardous and Radioactive waste buried here

Yes, that is the warning that will prolly be displayed on The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP. It is an underground repository licensed to safely and permanently dispose of transuranic (TRU**) radioactive waste left from the research and production of nuclear weapons.

The facts about WIPP are stunning for example: it is built to last for next 10,000 years; USD 9 billion spent on this dump; it will accommodate waste of 40 years; the storage is 2,150 feet underground. After knowing these facts, one obvious doubt came to my mind was ‘how the hell will they ensure its safety against earthquakes?’. But as I dug deep, I found that it is located in the remote Chihuahua Desert of Southeastern New Mexico, project facilities include disposal rooms mined 2,150 feet underground in a 2,000-foot thick salt formation that has been stable for more than 200 million years. This cleared my doubt that it will remain safe for a few thousand years to come (wishful thinking?).

How is TRU’s safety ensured while transporting to the WIPP facility? An organization named TRANSCOM is responsible for monitoring its safety from beginning to end, which has facility to monitor movements round the clock. It uses satellite communication and computer networks to monitor. The control center houses databases containing scheduling, routing, shipment content and emergency information about each WIPP shipment. Vehicles transporting waste to WIPP are tracked by satellite. It has a stateful monitoring and planning systems in place in case of abnormal events and changes in weather or road conditions.

Guarding the facility for its lifetime isn’t a very appealing idea when we look at its budget. So will it be guarded? for how long and who will guard it? Well, the facility will be guarded for next 100 years after 2033 AD, until when outside experts with the task to design a 10,000-year marking system for the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site, and estimate the efficacy of the system against various types of intrusion. The goal of the marking system is to deter inadvertent human interference with the site. The panel of experts was divided into two teams. This is the report of the A Team; a multidisciplinary group with an anthropologist (who is at home with different, but contemporary, cultures), an astronomer (who searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence), an archaeologist (who is at home with cultures that differ in both time and space from our own), an environmental designer (who studies how people perceive and react to a landscape and the buildings within them), a linguist (who studies how languages change with time), and a materials scientist (who knows the options available to us for implementing our marking system concepts). The report is a team effort. There is much consensus on the design criteria and necessary components of the marking system.it will be full. Guarding it will be responsibility of US Energy Department. After that it will be abandoned. That is when prolly the caution message will be displayed all around the place: “Do not dig here - forever!!”.

That said next question came to my mind was ‘who will ensure that the message will reaches to everyone who may or may not understand English?’ Actually this is one question that will rise only after 2030. But for curious, the answer is its not just the English in which they will be displaying the message. The message will be displayed in many languages like French, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Navajo and provision for any contemporary languages that might exist then. But are language enough for communicating the danger message? Will there be any illiterates? Perhaps there will be people whose language isn’t there warning them.

To address this subject I will be writing another blog article in a day or two.

** TRU: All TRU elements are heavier than uranium, have several isotopes, and are man made. Key radionuclides found in TRU waste include americium-241 and several isotopes of plutonium (plutonium-238, plutonium-239, plutonium-240 and plutonium-241). The half lives of many are considerably longer than 20 years. For instance, the half-life of one isotope of plutonium 24,000 years. (Reference: http://www.wipp.energy.gov/library/acrsl/Chapter1.pdf)