Abstract
Just a matter of time
If you re going to build a repository for radioactive waste, you'd better be prepared to keep people away—for a long time. Now that the Senate has approved Nevada's Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for the nation's spent fuel, with Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing the site could open its doors as soon as 2010.
To those who don't consider the end of the decade “soon,” wrangling with how to keep the site safe from unwitting intruders over the next 10,000 years might sound inconceivable. But wrangle we must: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has mandated that the government must provide for “10,000 years of regulatory concern” at disposal sites like Yucca Mountain and New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
In 1991, the Energy Department tasked two panels of experts with figuring out the best way to stop future generations from nosing around WIPP, where radioactive transuranic trash from defense projects is stored in underground caverns. The teams, whose members hailed from such fields as astronomy, anthropology, linguistics, environmental design, and engineering among others, felt that they could design a warning system that would survive 100 centuries. The hard part, they said, was coming up with a “pan-cultural” warning system that would be understood in an unimaginable future where people may have forgotten the nuclear fias-coes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Taking into account that cultural shifts would necessarily occur, the resulting recommendations were nothing if not complicated and bizarre. They included building a large system of “earthworks”— manmade berms in jagged (and hopefully foreboding) shapes that surround the area, some of which have underground rooms with detailed archives and records from the WIPP facility. Alternate designs have names like the “landscape of thorns,” “forbidding blocks,” and “spike field,” and they look just like they sound.
Details from Ashok Sukumaran's winning idea.
The same challenge was taken on early this year by entrants in a contest called the “Universal Warning Sign: Yucca Mountain.” Organized by Joshua Abbey of the Desert Space Foundation, the international competition garnered 150 designs from a broad spectrum of entrants. The Las Vegas exhibition of winning entries, which drew several thousand visitors, will be shown next in Fallon, Nevada, and may make its way to shows in California and Colorado. (Many entries are online at www.desertspace.org.)
Detail from “Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Mausoleum,” one of the contest's 150 entries.
The contest, intended as a non-biased and “strictly educational” endeavor to raise awareness about the consequences of a repository at Yucca, drew a wide range of ideas— from the potentially workable to some heavily political entries. Submissions fell into two general categories, Abbey said. The first includes more technical, practical, and possibly viable designs; the second “more symbolic commentary on the futility of effectively being able to achieve a marker that would really work.”
Andy Griffiths proposed building an artificial volcano atop Yucca to deter exploration in his “The Great Lie—A Warning to a Distant Future.” Complete with fake craters, synthetic molten lava, and steam bursts, the pseudo-volcano “sends a message of caution to future cultures using the universal language of nature.”
The modification of nature is the concept behind Ashok Sukumaran's “Blue Yucca Ridge,” the entry that judges selected as best of show. Yucca plants, genetically engineered to be blue, would be thickly planted on top of the mountain. The idea is that upon seeing the stretch of mutated yucca, viewers would instinctively comprehend the dangers of what lies beneath.
“It's this striking beauty that represents this very serious lethal warning,” said Abbey. “And it has another irony— presently Yucca Mountain has no yucca growing on it whatsoever.”
“This is not just a giant aesthetic splotch in the desert,” said Suku-maran, who wanted his design to incorporate a “living system.”
The problem with the “menacing earthworks” that the government has in mind is that they are not likely to deter “future Indiana Joneses,” said Sukumaran.
That's the inherent problem with any proposed warning system— the paradox of a keep-out sign.
“Markers ultimately are provocations for human curiosity,” said Abbey, citing the pyramids as an example. If you build it, they will come—and it's near impossible to keep them out. After all, who can resist a good mystery?
“Blatant and permanent markers will increase, not reduce, the probability of inadvertent intrusion,” said geography professor Martin Pasqualetti in his paper “Landscape Permanence and Nuclear Warnings.” A more appropriate approach is a “landscape of illusion,” which would use “underground warning devices.”
But “No warning can guarantee deterrence for 10,000 years,” Pasqualetti wrote.
Even if permanent markers can be effective for that long, it might not be long enough. Critics of the EPA-designated timeframe say that it was a random choice and that radioactivity will still be present and dangerous after 100 centuries.
But perhaps all this forward thinking won't matter. After all, physicist Stephen Hawking has suggested that the human race may not make it through the next thousand years.
Asleep at the switch?
In July, U.S. Air Force Gen. Simon Worden told Aerospace Daily that the Earth faced new dangers from asteroids—and this time he wasn't talking about big dinosaur-killer, wipe-out-life-on-Earth-as-we-know-it asteroids.
Worden hypothesized that at some point one of the 30 or so small asteroids of a few meters in length that hit Earth's atmosphere and explode each year would be interpreted by either the Pakistani or Indian government as an attack by the other, thus accidentally triggering a nuclear war between the two nations. India and Pakistan, said Worden, lack the sophisticated sensors that allow the United States to distinguish between natural impacts and nuclear detonations (BBC, July 15).
Two days later, however, scientists responded to Worden's fear-mongering, pointing out that the sensors needed to do the job are included in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty's system of worldwide monitoring stations, now under construction (Anano-va, July 17).
Into the cold clutches of technology
“If we have a history of Western civilization, it's a history of the battlefield,” says filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, whose most recent film, Naqoyqatsi, will be released October 2.
Naqoyqatsi means “war as a way of life” in Hopi, but the title actually refers not to the war of the battlefield but to the “sanctioned terror against life” that, according to Reggio, technology is waging. The film is the anticipated-by-some finale to a trilogy that began in 1983 with Koyaanisqatsi.
You may have missed Koyaanisqatsi, but about 35 million have caught the film, and in the 1980s it was as much a college cult favorite as A Clockwork Orange and Eraserhead. The non-narrative film is made up mostly of time-lapse images of urban life—people going up and down escalators, highways pumping corpuscles of white headlights and red taillights—set to a minimalist score by composer Philip Glass. It was widely interpreted as a searing indictment of an increasingly depersonalized, technological society (the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi means something like “life out of balance”). A less acclaimed sequel, Pow-aqqatsi (“life in transformation”) followed in 1988.
That was it for a while. Money for a third film was not forthcoming until, inspired by a 2000 New York Times article describing the plight to make Naqoyqatsi, Steven Soder-bergh signed on as executive producer. Philip Glass again composed the score, which this time showcases cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
Ironically, to create a film about the malicious nature of technology, the filmmakers turned— consciously, Reggio says— to technology itself: 100 percent of the film's images are digitally altered, colorized or decolorized, slowed down or speeded up, stretched, masked, and generally “re-animated,” as Reggio calls the effect. In addition, the film relies heavily on stock footage— only 20 percent is made up of original photography. In contrast, the previous two films were shot on location worldwide. The footage in Naqoyqatsi includes science and military films, cartoons, old newsreels, commercials, sports documentaries, corporate videos, and television programs.
The film's co-producer, “media technologist” Joe Bierne, said that even though Reggio distrusts technology, he was openminded, curious, and creative with new techniques. “Sometimes I think you respect your enemies more than your friends, and Godfrey has tremendous respect for technology,” Bierne said.
Nevertheless, the images Naqoyqatsi presents put technology firmly in the hot seat. Its “civilized violence,” as Reggio puts it, may not be as simplisti-cally malicious as a Terminator-style future where intelligent machines seek to eliminate humanity (though Reggio says he thinks that's possible), but technology's creep is a type of war nevertheless. “I see it as a very aggressive presence,” Reggio said. “It's not very considerate.”
Sarah Horowitz is a freelance writer living in Oakland, California.
Tick … tick … ticked off
Imagine our surprise when we saw the July 1 issue of the American Prospect, with an image remarkably similar to the Bulletin's Doomsday Clock on the cover— except that the hands were at four rather than seven minutes to midnight.
July 1, 2002
Perhaps, we thought, the folks at American Prospect used the image because they didn't know where it came from. But then we saw the magazine's contents page, featuring a picture of Leon Lederman, president of the Bulletin's board of sponsors, resetting the clock to seven minutes to midnight last February 27.
March/April 2002
It was hard to imagine that no one at American Prospect questioned their seeming appropriation of the Bulletin's clock. After all, announcements resetting the hands of the clock are made with great fanfare and reported by media all around the world. And this phenomenon isn't exactly new: The clock started ticking in 1947.
American Prospect has now posted a correction on its Web site, directing visitors to the Bulletin.
Midnight Oil on nuclear transport
The city of Chicago didn't want any banners except those of corporate sponsors at its annual “Taste of Chicago” festival. But Peter Garrett, the lead singer of the Australian band Midnight Oil, promised to display some kind of anti-Yucca Mountain message during the band's July 4 set.
July 4: Midnight Oil in anti-nuclear apparel.
“Oh, we'll get it in there somehow,” Garrett told reporters the day before. During the set, he and lead guitarist Martin Rot-sey wore the message on their shirts.
Standing in line at the drinking fountain after the show, I overheard one concert-goer ask her friend, “So what's this thing about mobile Chernobyl?”
For Garrett—who considers himself “an activist who is also a musician” —the issue hits close to home. In his native Australia there's a proposal afoot to bury nuclear waste in the Outback.
As president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Garrett has fought uranium mining inside the Kakadu National Park and worked to prevent construction of a second nuclear power plant in Sydney. “It's a challenging and depressing topic,” he said, noting that the Australian media “would be more resolute” in dealing with an issue like Yucca Mountain.
“It's a bad idea happening at a bad time,” Gar-rett said after the press conference. “If we speak as loudly and strongly and passionately as we can, people will start to listen.”
But isn't it a little late? With both houses of Congress voting to support the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, and a public that seems uninterested in opposing it, it now seems inevitable that nuclear transport trucks and trains will begin hitting the roads and rails later this decade. “If I were you guys,” Gar-rett said to screaming fans, “I'd be looking at real estate in Florida.”
In Brief
In mid-June, the U.S. government went to court to try to block the sale of a couple of collectors' items: the two electrical plugs used to arm the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The plugs had been in the possession of Morris Jeppson, a crew member of the bomb-dropping Enola Gay, who took them from the plane. In allowing the sale to go forward, the judge ruled that the government, which, he pointed out, had shown no concern at all about the items for 57 years, had failed to demonstrate that the sale endangered national security. The buyer, retired physicist Clay Perkins (above), who paid $167,000 for the devices, said he believed they would be of no use to any would-be bomb developer (BBC News, June 15).
Ottar Grepstad, the director of Norway's cultural center, is pleading with hackers—to crack into his system. He lost access to the archive, which contains electronic copies of Norway's most important historical documents, when the man in charge of computer-related activities died without sharing the passwords. If only he had known about “Dead Man's Switch,” Aryeh Holzer's program that will post messages to Web pages, send last farewells via e-mail, and encrypt or delete files. The program works by counting down a user-specified interval of time. If not reset before the countdown is complete, the program assumes you're dead and carries out a series of pre-arranged tasks (WiredNews, June 5).
While South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges continues his losing battle with the Energy Department for assurances that plutonium from the closed Rocky Flats bomb plant won't stay in his state, attorney Marguerite Willis is intervening in Hodges's suit with a different argument. She claims that the presence of plutonium will lower property values, so every South Carolina resident should receive $10,000 in compensation. Constitutional lawyers aren't advising residents to spend the money just yet, however. Said one University of Colorado law professor, suing on behalf of an entire state is “a sure-fire loser” (Rocky Mountain News, May 30).
Americans may or may not feel better knowing that some of the business practices and ethics deafness that have been uncovered this year are not restricted to U.S. corporations. When British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) released its annual results in July, the British public learned that the company had: lost £1.2 billion (£2 billion if a one-time charge is included); estimated that cleanup of its nuclear facilities would cost about £48 billion, which it expects taxpayers to cover; and that it was awarding its chief executive officer a raise of £15,000 (The Guardian, July 15; BBC, July 4).
In July, the army released the first part of a computer game called “America's Army,” designed to encourage potential enlistees to role-play their way through basic training and combat missions, as well as try out a variety of army careers. The entire game, which cost about $6.3 million to develop over two years, is expected to be released this fall. The game's developers say that in designing the combat portion they were “very careful on the blood thing.” For instance, they nixed the noises often associated with combat games, choosing instead to indicate a successful hit on an opponent with a simple red blotch (Washington Post, July 2).
Rumor has it that the Defense Department had been flirting with the name “Global Command” (suggested short form, “GoCom”), as a grand new moniker meant to indicate the integration of U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Space Command. But in mid-July, the department apparently decided to stick with the name Strategic Command—Stratcom, for short. At least money will be saved: When SAC became Stratcom a decade ago, every single thing at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska that bore the old insignia—street signs, wall signs, door signs, seals, even rugs—was scrapped. (Omaha World-Herald, July 13).
Two students from MIT's Media Lab Europe have devised the ultimate in personal sound—a tooth implant that transfers digital signals from radios and mobile phones directly to the innerear via bone resonance. With more than one implant, surround-sound stereo could be just a trip to the dentist away, designers say (WiredNews, June 21).
Alice Stewart
Alice Stewart, an epidemiologist whose work has been admired by many long-time Bulletin readers, died in late June near Oxford, England, at age 95. Her pioneering studies of the effects of exposure to radiation were at first dismissed by both medical and government authorities, only to be confirmed and accepted later.
Dan Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles-based nuclear policy organization, knew Stewart through her involvement with studies of the Santa Susana, California, nuclear facility. Stewart, says Hirsch, “was a courageous and kind person and insightful researcher whose break-through findings about radiation are still not appreciated.”
The daughter of one of Britain's first female doctors, Stewart earned her medical degree from Cambridge and joined Oxford in 1941, at first studying the health of munitions-plant workers who filled shells with TNT. After the war she joined Oxford University's School of Social Medicine. From 1974 until she retired two years ago, she was a senior research fellow in social medicine at Birmingham University.
As a woman in a traditionally male profession whose work yielded results many did not want to hear, Stewart had to be tenacious. She took on both the British and U.S. governments with studies demonstrating that radiation was more dangerous than officials wished to believe or were willing to admit.
Alice Stewart.
In the mid-1950s, in the Oxford Child Health Surveys, she established that children whose mothers had had abdominal X-rays while pregnant were twice as likely to to develop leukemia by the age of 10. Her findings were widely criticized in the nuclear establishment, which believed then in the beneficial effects of radiation.
Despite early protests, Stewart's results were consistently confirmed by later studies, and by the 1970s routine prenatal X-rays had been abandoned.
In the mid-1970s, Stewart served as a consultant to a federal study of the effects of low-level radiation on workers at the Hanford nuclear weapons reservation in Hanford, Washington.
When the survey revealed that Hanford workers, whose doses often exceeded international safety norms, were more than 10 times more likely to develop cancer later in life, the government fired the study director and consultants and declined to publish their results. But Stewart refused to relinquish her data, and succeeded in independently publishing results based on her data and on material submitted to her by others.
As the years went by, Stewart's findings were increasingly accepted. In part as a result of her testimony in 1990, Congress forced the Energy Department into an historic agreement to make its worker health data available to independent researchers.
A biography by Gayle Greene, The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation, was reviewed in the July/August 2000 issue of the Bulletin.