There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years. And if you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human from 10000 years ago, you'll realize how non-trivial that is - no language, culture or knowledge capture system would survive for this long intact. There is a fascinating body of research about how to solve this problem (with no definite answer). E.g. see https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/how-t...
> There's a fourth dimension to it - remembering why the hole needs to be guarded for 10000 years.
I can imagine some sort of post-apocalyptic copper age religion where the religious brotherhood exist to guard the 'cursed caves', without understanding why. But everyone knows that people who enter the caves either die at the hands of the strangely deformed beasts who live there, or of a mysterious sickness sometime afterwards.
Yeah, I probably played too much D&D as a child :)
The argument that we need to do something about this waste beyond the timeframe of our civilisation is mind boggling to me. This is the only risk we seem to take this seriously - in no other arena can I recall people arguing about what something will look like in 10,000 years. What about war between America and China? >1% chance, massive potential for death and destruction. Who cares if some poor person digs into an old nuclear waste dump in 500 years compared to that?
We can leave this problem to the future. If they have regressed so far that they can't detect nuclear then they have bigger problems than radiation poisoning.
Threats to energy security are so much more of a threat than potentially maybe not being able to figure out how to reprocess spent fuel until it isn't a health hazard.
This stupidly assumes that the people that dig the hole won't be able to communicate with generations after it.
The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet so the only reason this would be a problem is if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
> won't be able to communicate with generations after it.
Oh, they will be. But there must be specific structure to communicate this information, otherwise it is assumed "common knowledge" and nobody talks about it until suddenly everybody realizes nobody really knows anything about it because all people that knew it assumed it's obvious and nobody thought to talk about it explicitly and now they're all dead.
> The nuclear symbol is widely recognized across the planet
Now. Will it be in 10K years? Who knows. Try to read works about 15th century life and see how much of that was obvious back then is obvious now.
> if every one of the cultures that understands the importance of it is killed off.
The cultures that exist now won't probably exist in 10K years. Could we pass knowledge through if we took consistent effort - maybe. But the whole point is how to make sure it's a consistent effort over 10K years.
One can at least hope that humanity's level of technology does not regress. So then there is at least the fact that the radioactivity can be detected even after the signs have long gone.
Possibly, though not guaranteed - we have radioactivity detectors, but not many people carry them with them and use them on everything around. We'd still need to somehow communicate that this place needs detecting - and if people there would not be using nuclear energy for some reason, they might not even think about needing to check that place for radioactivity, at least not until there is some serious trouble.
The hole is already dug. Instead of going in the hole, the waste is sitting in collecting ponds or concrete casks very, very close (100 yards) from major waterways.
I thought the problem was solved:
1. Dig hole.
2. Put it in hole.
3. Guard hole.