So any day now -- heck, even today maybe -- the U.S. Senate is expected to officially approve Yucca Mountain as the nation's high-level nuclear waste dump. This is because the U.S. Senate, as a whole, is made up of cretins.
But that's not the point of today's column, which is: the signage that is being proposed for the Yucca Mountain site to alert future generations that there is some real nasty stuff there that they don't want to mess with. There is one word to describe this signage: CREEPY. The Las Vegas Review-Journal's Keith Rogers did a story on this very issue on July 6, and in all seriousness, the story creeped me out and got me thinking in a way that's far more serious than any humor columnist should ever be thinking.
While the proposed signage is still a work in process, the working idea for signage at Yucca (as well as a mid-level waste isolation area in New Mexico) includes:
-- 25-ton granite monoliths, which are spiky-looking and really big, that would surround the perimeter of the completed nuclear waste dump.
-- A face, carved on the monoliths, patterned after Edward Munch's painting "The Scream." You've seen this painting before. It's got some bad mojo. To jog your memory: Imagine a hairless, bug-eyed Bea Arthur, without her teeth, shrieking in horror, and you've got the general idea.
-- The circular, common nuclear waste danger sign.
-- Words in at least six languages that say something to the effect of "Caution: Biohazardous waste buried here."
Put this all together, and it's freaky enough. But the idea that we are even talking about needing to make such signage is truly disturbing. The wonks involved with the process try to explain it the best that they can.
"There is no way we can predict what the language structure will be in 10,000 years into the future," said Roger Nelson, the chief scientist at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, to the Review-Journal.
Gotchya. But my question is this: Aren't we recording history these days? While language will be undeniably different in 10,000 years, won't our descendants be able to read our stuff, since we're recording the changes as we go along? And how would we humans just forget that we put nuclear waste there?
Of course, these signs are being designed just in case -- in case something happens to our society, like something happened to Egyptians, etc. Something cataclysmic. Something awful. Something possibly related to George W. Bush's environmental policies. Or asteroids. Or nuclear war. Or a disease that destroys society. Or alien invasion. These "in case" scenarios are extremely creepy to think about themselves.
But the fact that federal scientists are sitting around, trying to warn a post-apocalyptic society to avoid something that WE made -- that is wrong on an additional 23 different levels. We're using nuclear energy and, as a result, making this deadly stuff when, instead, we could be pursing the usage of something like solar energy, which produces no waste.
And on a Nevada-centric level, this stuff is being put in our home state, 100 or so miles from 1.4 million people -- after being transported all around the country. Is this really smart?
But this goes far beyond Nevada. It bothers me that in the year 12,000-something, people could be roaming across whatever the Nevada desert is then (remember, most of Nevada was once a massive sea -- that's why there are ichthyosaur bones out there) when they come across enormous granite spikes with a screaming face on them. It bothers me even worse that this stuff could HARM THEM.
What are we humans doing to ourselves? What are we doing to our descendants? These are questions that need to be explored. The cretins aren't just the folks in the U.S. Senate. This is our society as a whole.
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan who promises to try to be funny again next week. Jimmy's column appears here Tuesdays, and he can be reached via e-mail at jiboegle@stanfordalumni.org.