How do you design a "Keep Out!" sign to last 10,000 years?

The Department of Energy is creating a vast monument to scare future trespassers away from radioactive waste sites. Their plan: A granite Stonehenge thing with warnings in Navajo!

By Douglas Cruickshank

May 10, 2002 | Imagine you're part of an archaeological expedition 6,000 years from today, stomping around the desert in an area known long ago as Yucca Mountain, Nev. You are looking for the remnants of a once flourishing civilization, a nation state that apparently called itself the USA back in 2002. You're 10 days into your quest, not finding much of anything, when one of your team runs up, all sweaty-faced and panting, insisting that you come see what he's discovered.

You follow your flushed, jabbering colleague around a rocky outcropping, and there, vividly etched on a granite monolith, is a towering reproduction of Macauley Culkin in "Home Alone," hands to face, mouth agape; or maybe it's one of Francis Bacon's shrieking pope paintings or Edvard Munch's "The Scream."

You don't recognize any of these startling cultural icons from the distant past; you don't know who made them, or what they symbolize. Hell, you don't even know that they're cultural icons, but the whole scene briefly scares the bejesus out of you. Then, like Howard Carter stumbling on the tomb of Tutankhamen, you experience a serious rush of exhilaration, aggravated by a serious case of the heebie-jeebies, as you realize that you've just chanced on a history-making breakthrough, a discovery of earthshaking significance.

So, which do you do? 1) Immediately pack up the entire expedition and evacuate the area never to return? 2) Waste no time in commencing a major archaeological dig and cementing your place in history?

Amazingly enough, the folks over at the U.S. Department of Energy are banking on curious humans (or whomever) from future millennia to go for Door No. 1.

As it becomes increasingly likely that, despite Nevada's protests, President Bush will get his wish for Yucca Mountain to become the nation's central nuclear waste repository (the House has approved it by a 3-1 margin; the Senate may vote on it as early as next week), the doings of the DOE, which will be charged with building the facility, warrant greater attention.

For the last two decades, it has been the daunting, if not nutty, business of the department to study and design warning monuments for radioactive waste sites, such as Yucca Mountain or the already functioning Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M. When I heard about this eerie undertaking, I called the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management's Yucca Mountain Project (YMP) to see what I could learn about the harebrained -- I mean, farsighted -- scheme.

The YMP has a toll-free line staffed by real people, specifically established to field questions from yo-yos like you and me. When I called, a very nice, patient, soft-spoken woman named Jenny McNeil picked up the phone.

"You know," McNeil told me, "there has been a lot of research, since the '80s, in an effort to come up with plans for monuments that would transcend specific cultures and languages."

Ms. McNeil was a kind soul, and her voice had a definite calming effect, but she wasn't a fount of information, so I called Sandia National Laboratories where, in 1991, the monument plan was first described in a study produced by the lab for the DOE. I talked to an official there (who asked not to be quoted by name). "Is this something that's actually going to happen," I asked him, "or is it a dead subject?"

"Oh, no, no, no," the Sandia official told me. "It definitely will happen."

The monuments are intended to last for thousands of years -- the waste may stay toxic for as long as 100,000 years. If everything goes as the DOE hopes, an archaeological expedition tens of centuries hence will take one look at these structures and hightail it in the other direction -- just like we do now whenever we come across mysterious ancient monuments covered with strange inscriptions and odd images.

What are they thinking?

And they are big thinkers over at the DOE. They're not talking about slapping up a few signs with a red circle and diagonal line over a mushroom cloud or a glowing mutant, or even something slightly more ambitious like that unnerving black obelisk in "2001: A Space Odyssey." No, what the DOE has in mind is more on the order of Stonehenge, but with a better class of stone -- granite -- and magnets.

Magnets? Of course. You need magnets to "give the structure a distinctive magnetic signature." (I knew that.) But also because they nicely complement the "metal trihedrals" (three-sided pyramids) that will provide that all important "radar-reflective signature." Very Captain Kirk, and more and more fascinating as you get further into its psychotic science fiction novel aspects.

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