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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Now we get to the good part: the buried storage rooms and information center. To cook up these, the DOE once again turned to the ancients for inspiration. They considered Newgrange, a passage grave in Ireland thought to be more than 5,000 years old; the Great Pyramids at Giza, Egypt, 4,500 years old; rock art done by Australian Aborigines 25,000 to 35,000 years ago; and the Acropolis in Greece, which has been standing for 2,400 years.
Not to bring up an unpleasant subject or be tiresomely pedantic, but given that the stuff we intend to plant at Yucca Mountain may remain seriously nasty for, like, 100,000 years, how does the longevity of any of the above apply to this project? Well, remember that the EPA only requires that the warning monuments last 10,000 years. After that anyone who wants to go nosing around the boondocks is on their own.
Where were we? Oh yes, the buried rooms and info center, cozy granite spaces with no restroom facilities and no seating. The roofless information center will have its walls inscribed with details about "the disposal system and the dangers of the radioactive and toxic waste buried therein." There is no provision for videos, pets are allowed -- granite's very forgiving when it comes to messes. The center will sit up high to facilitate good drainage -- always a plus for rooms without roofs where incontinent pugs may forget themselves.
The two buried storage rooms are another matter. If you liked those old movies about the building of the pyramids as much as I did -- humongous blocks sliding hither and thither, hysterical slaves getting sealed into secret chambers -- you're going to love these. The rooms will be constructed of huge granite slabs "joined by fitting the pieces into slots ... to eliminate the need for mortar, grouts, or metal fasteners." This is a good call. The three-year-old grout on my tub is already doing disgusting things, and don't get me started on zippers.
My favorite part is the entrance to these rooms. It will be a plugged hole, two feet in diameter. Once our archaeologists of the future pull the plug and wriggle into the room, they'll find "tables, figures, diagrams and maps" engraved on the walls. However, if we look at the current, up-swinging weight statistics for U.S. adults and children and figure that the trend will continue over the next several thousand years, we must assume that we'll then be looking at a population that resembles overinflated pregnant manatees, and their likelihood of getting through a 2-foot aperture is slim to none. Of course, they did manage to get Winnie the Pooh out of that hole. Maybe we could inscribe that chapter next to the plug.
Then, buried all around the site, will be the "thousands" of small inscribed warning markers, made of "granite, clay and aluminum oxide." The DOE experts based this idea on the Code of Hammurabi, an inscribed stone slab found in Iraq (don't tell Dubya it was found in Saddam's country or we'll have a replay of the pretzel horror) and Mesopotamian clay tablets. I figure our markers will feature Jewel's poetry on one side and select excerpts from Nancy Reagan's "My Turn" on the other.
That's about it. Your tax dollars at work.
Now, I'm not a scientist, so maybe this whole project makes a lot of sense to someone. A scientist, for example. And don't get me wrong, I don't want to be a wet blanket or soft on terrorism. Building these monument thingies sounds like a patriotic hoot. I think they'll look very cool and be inexpensive to maintain.
I guess we just have to accept that, as with so much our government does, the whole plan's a little kooky, but in a sweet way. Apparently none of the experts who were consulted suggested that putting up our own Stonehenge might accomplish the same thing that the original Stonehenge (or Newgrange, or the Pyramids) has -- endless poking about, drilling and excavating by experts, nonexperts, tourists (and their pets) and freelance goofballs.
In fact, I'm guessing that Yucca Mountain or the Carlsbad site might be selected, a few thousand years down the road, as a perfect spot for some futuristic version of our own Harmonic Convergence celebrations of a few years back. In which case, we might want to tack on a few million for stadium seating and some bathrooms.
