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Far too often, governments behave like toddlers. They’re fickle. They don’t like to share. And good luck getting them to pay attention to any problem that isn’t directly in front of them. They like to push each other to the brink, and often do. But when they don’t, it’s usually because other people enter the proverbial room. Private citizens who step up and play peacemaker when their governments won’t or can’t. People who strive for collaboration and understanding, and sometimes end up finding it in unlikely places. Those people and the work they do, they’re the reason we’re all still here.
This season, we’ll hear from scientists, analysts, and idealists who have gone to crazy lengths just for a shot at making peace and building understanding From smoke-filled rooms in North Korea to secret labs in the Soviet Union… to the lawless seas, and even to the depths of outer space (or, at least, the conference rooms where they talk about the depths of outer space). This podcast tells the stories about the people holding us back from the brink.
Hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies faculty. Previously, he served as Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the founder of ArmsControlWonk.com, a leading resource on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation issues.
Produced by Gilded Audio and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
The Deal
Episode 6: Signs for the Future
Audio v3.1_FINAL
COLD OPEN - THE GOLDEN RECORD
[00:00]
What if you could talk to aliens? What would you say? How would you say it?
Those were the questions Jon Lomberg found himself trying to answer in 1977.
JON: Describe the world. Describe the world, in a hundred pictures and an hour of sound to extraterrestrials that you know nothing about. I mean, the whole premise was, was, was challenging.
Jon’s an artist and a lover of space. So back in the seventies when he heard that Carl Sagan was crafting messages about humanity for extraterrestrials, he wrote him a fan letter.
JON: … Sending him some of the art that I was doing at the time that was inspired by
some of his ideas. And from that initial fan letter, grew a lasting friendship that spanned over 25 years in many projects.
A few years into this friendship, Carl invited Jon to contribute to a project unlike
[01:00]
anything he’d ever done before: creating a greatest hits record… for aliens. A Golden Record. This record was commissioned by NASA and would explain life on Earth to any intelligent extraterrestrial who ever found it.
Sagan’s team had one task: capture all the diversity of life on earth: humanity, the birds, trees, culture, love, the ocean and so on, in a single record—not even a double album!—and then NASA would shoot it into space. No biggie, right?
BEAT
You can’t even begin to undertake something like that without making some assumptions about your alien audience.
First off the team assumed that the aliens would have eyes and ears to be able to see and hear the messages. They also reasoned that these aliens would understand the basic concepts of physics, gravity and things
[02:00]
of that nature, or else they probably wouldn’t have gotten to space in the first place. And they figured any extraterrestrials intelligent enough to find the record would eventually be able to figure out how to play the record.
BEAT
With these important parameters set, the team turned their focus to the actual content that would go on the record.
JON: We decided we wanted to have a sequence of greetings. not because we thought extraterrestrials would be able to translate them, but just because giving a greeting on something like this is a very human thing to do.
SFX - greetings from the record found here, faded under
Jon and the team used sounds to create an image of life on earth. Maybe it’s a longshot, but they hoped the aliens might recognize some of these sounds from their own planet: thunderstorms, animals, the din
[03:00]
of a large city...
SFX - Include accompanying sounds throughout description above from the record
Of course, there was no reason to expect that aliens would immediately know what this thing was when they found it. So Jon also designed a diagram for the surface of the record. It explained how to take some of its audio waveforms and decode that data to render a total of 116 photographs – everything from a nursing mother to a congested highway to diagrams of evolution and DNA structures. Unfortunately, since this was back in the 70s, the record had to go into space without some of humanity’s most iconic images, you know, like the cover of Nevermind or the AI image of the Pope in a giant coat.
And of course, they also added the sound and image of a rocket as if to say “this is how we made it here… how we’ve arrived at this moment.”
SFX - throughout the section below I imagine the sounds of a rocket launch, complete with a countdown, the sound of liftoff and cheers from the crowd. Would transition into some sort of dreamy, ethereal and spacious sounds [not music] as Jon describes his split consciousness.
Jon and the rest of the golden record team watched the launch.
JON: We were there and we all went to the bleachers where you sat, you know, to see the launch vehicle.
[04:00]
And when the rocket started rising on its pillar of flame, I had the sensation that my, my personality and my consciousness was kind of twinned and half of me was in that spacecraft riding it as it rose and disappeared into the sky and it was as pure and wonderful a moment as I've ever had.
As far as we know, Jon and his team's creation, this piece of themselves, is still floating out there somewhere in the universe. Right now, it should be… somewhere in the Pavo [PAH-VO] constellation, more than 20 billion kilometers from Earth, and counting.
Imagine the record in the stillness of space. Maybe the occasional dim light of a nearby star glints off its surface, but otherwise
[05:00]
just quiet and emptiness as it ventures ever further from earth. The instructions etched on it waiting patiently to be deciphered.
JON: The design will last for as long as it takes the occasional whisper of interstellar dust to erode it very slightly. Space is very empty and there's hardly any dust, but there is an occasional dust grain that will hit the surface and make a tiny, tiny little crater. So if you try to estimate how long will it take for that dust to wear down through the engraved playing instructions, that lifetime is considered to be something like a thousand million years. So that drawing will last a thousand million years protecting the surface of the record.
MUS
BEAT
It makes sense that NASA had to turn to an outsider, an artist, to figure out what to say to aliens a billion years from now. It requires
[06:00]
some really out-of-the-box thinking to even begin to contemplate such a question. The kind of thinking that governments, certainly, are not equipped for. It's not surprising then that Jon became a sort of go-to, out-of-the-box thinker for the US government. Fast forward a decade or so, Jon was asked to be part of another project. Instead of an alien audience though, this time his audience was humans - ten thousand years from now.
JON: The WIPP project was a dire warning toward descendants. Maybe even more urgent and more important than doing the golden record because the lives of our descendants were potentially at risk.
INTRO
The Golden Record was a radically optimistic endeavor - who even thinks we're going to be here in a billion years. But it is important to think about the impact of our actions on future generations. This episode, we follow Jon and a few other future-oriented
[07:00]
thinkers who participated in one of the government’s weirdest studies – how to explain the hazards of nuclear waste to human beings 10,000 years in the future.
ASTEROID CITY CLIP
If you're trying to contact the alien include me?
Did you hear anything from him so far?
No.
What's all this?
I put the American flag just to be patriotic. Now we need to really mean something, a universal message, not only to Earthlings,
We already thought of everything we could think of. A cross, a star, a four leaf clover, letters, numbers, hieroglyphics.
What's the point of projecting a star onto the moon?
Exactly.
I ask that sincere about equals T squared.
I still think it's too easy.
This is our chance to be actually worthwhile in our lifetimes.
I see what you mean.
I. 10000 YEAR RULE + THE WIPP
Dan Reicher was an environmental lawyer. When Dan sued the Environmental Protection Agency in 1987, he had no clue he was now on course to work, along with Jon, on the most far-out project of his life.
[08:00]
DAN: When you asked me to do this interview, I said, I gotta find my file. But I said, I think I have a good chance of finding it because it is marked “Dan's favorite report.”
Dan was a young attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council or NRDC, working under someone you might remember from this podcast.
DAN: My boss was the eminent physicist Tom Cochran.
JEFFREY: Did he ever take you skinny dipping?
DAN: No, he never took me skinny dipping.
NRDC is an advocacy organization working to safeguard the earth. They try to ensure that existing laws are enforced and push for new, stronger laws protecting people, plants and animals. A lot of the time, that includes suing the US government to make it follow its own environmental regulations.
One of the first things Dan was tasked with at the NRDC was looking into wrongdoing around nuclear waste disposal at the Department of Energy.
DAN: When you produce nuclear weapons, materials,
[09:00]
and everything goes with the nuclear warhead, you produce large amounts of both hazardous chemical waste and radioactive waste. And the energy department in many ways had taken the position that they were exempt from the normal federal environmental laws.
But, they definitely were not.
[music cue]
Around this time, the Department of Energy was constructing the very first permanent storage facility for the radioactive waste generated by America’s nuclear weapons program. The storage facility, a dump really, was to be a giant chamber, buried half a mile underground in the middle of a New Mexico salt bed. It was going to be called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP.
The existing EPA regulations required DOE to report about the environmental effects that the storage site would have over the next one thousand years. But nuclear waste is toxic way longer than that. So Dan wanted to find a legal mechanism
[10:00]
that would require DOE to project the environmental effects of the site for longer.
DAN: And I, I sort of stumbled on the Safe Drinking Water Act, because that's a law that governs the endangerment of underground water. And then I looked at how long the standards applied for, how much you had to project into the future, how much these waste would contaminate groundwater, and it was 10,000 years.
Dan used this obscure groundwater rule and sued the EPA. He won. Now, WIPP, the nuclear waste-storage facility, needed to project the safety of the site 10,000 years.
JEFFREY: You are now Mr. 10,000 years?
DAN: I, I was Mr. 10,000 years.
And how, you might ask, can you project 10,000 years into the future? Well, no one knew. Now, DOE had a problem.
DAN: What might happen to that waste and you know, who, who's around
[11:00]
to make sure that we know what happens to that waste and all of those sorts of things. So it it, it got very both exciting and sort of mind boggling at the same time.
BEAT
Nuclear waste is created in a bunch of ways: By nuclear power plants, nuclear medicine (think x-rays and radiation treatments) and from the manufacturing and dismantlement of nuclear weapons. Once this waste is created, it takes a really long time to break down and cease to be toxic to humans. Plutonium-239, the key material in nuclear weapons, has a half life of 24,000 years. Because the half life of these elements is so long, storing them until they are no longer hazardous to human health is serious business.
The WIPP storage facility was created specifically to store nuclear waste from the US military. The government chose to put this plant a half mile deep
[12:00]
in salt beds outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico because it’s among the driest and most geologically stable places in the US. The waste itself is packed into large metal drums filled with kitty litter. Like I said, serious business.
The drums are put in underground rooms where the salt will creep in, completely encapsulating them in time. With all of these protective measures in place, it’s unlikely that the containers will be corroded by water or an earthquake will shift the earth and burst open the drums holding the waste. The name of the game in storing this stuff is to keep it far away from humans in a very safe, stable environment until it no longer poses a threat.
It’s all well and good to find the perfect spot to store the waste, but …
[13:00]
a lot can happen in ten thousand years. DOE wasn’t thinking about the year 12,000 when it started digging a hole in that New Mexican salt bed.
But thanks to Mr. 10,000 years and his lawsuit, they had to plan that far ahead.
[MIDROLL]
To wrap their heads around the problem, DOE asked Sandia National Laboratories, one the nation’s premier nuclear labs, to put together a report to figure out how to keep humans safe from WIPP’s nuclear waste ten thousand years into the future. Sandia’s first step was to assemble a squad of nuclear waste psychics.
Dan Reicher was one of the first to get a call. I assume it went something like this:
SFX: 90s phone ringing [SFX on Jeffrey’s voice to make it sound like he’s on the phone]
“Hello, hello?”
“Hey, Mr. 10,000 Years. The guy who sued the pants off us.”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, we would like for you to help solve the problem you created.”
But Dan
[14:00]
wasn’t the only one to get a call.
TED: First of all, they contacted me by phone and they said, would you like to be part of this group? And I said, if you're trying to make a forecast for 10,000 years, you have misplaced something in your brain.
This is futurist, Ted Gordon.
TED: You want to get formal, Theodore J Gordon.
Despite his unique qualifications for the job, Ted was taken aback by the proposition laid out by Sandia.
TED: You cannot forecast tomorrow with any degree of certainty. Although it's more certain than 10,000 years. Agriculture was starting 10,000 years ago. So if we're, you're asking us to think about 10,000 years from now, you've got to be nuts, frankly. But it might be fun.
[15:00]
He accepted.
BEAT
Sandia kicked off this seemingly impossible task by recruiting a group of futurists, lawyers, psychologists, linguists… oh yeah and artists who encode messages onto golden records for aliens to find….
JON: It was funny because I thought that my work on Voyager was really a one-off. I would never have a chance to do anything even remotely similar. And then along comes this Sandia project, which in a way was the perfect counterpart to the golden record project with a very different kind of, of tone to it.
It was an incredibly diverse panel of twenty-seven men and …one woman. There’s something incredibly human about thinking you can project 10,000 years into the future but somehow can’t foresee thirty years of advances in gender equity. There's something also so human
[16:00]
about making a podcast looking 30 years back and not having a single woman in it.
Phase one was to figure out the future scenarios in which humans might stumble upon WIPP.
TED: First, let's start by saying there was a break-in, there was an intrusion of human beings 10,000 years from now, got into this storage area. How did they get there? What were they looking for? And we developed stories of how that happened.
And some of the scenarios were weirdly prescient.
TED: There was one scenario that had an underground subway running from Houston to Los Angeles, a vacuum tube, Elon Musk type machine.
JEFFREY: Yes, the boring company.
TED: And it turned out that the WIPP was right on a straight line between Houston and Los Angeles, and the
[17:00]
boring company entered the nuclear storage area unwittingly. Was that possible? Can you put a probability on it? Yes. The probability is zero or very, very close to zero. But is it something to think about?
BEAT
DAN: In terms of the scenarios, one was called radical increase. It was a massive increase in consumption of resources, because with a massive increase in the consumption of resources, you increase the probability that some future generation might say, “Hey, this is an interesting piece of property in New Mexico. We're looking for some specific minerals, let's go dig there.”
BEAT
The task was open-ended, and so were the conclusions. Everyone had very different ideas about the various ways the people of the future could become accidentally poisoned by today’s radioactive waste.
[18:00]
JON: They came up with so many scenarios that their ultimate conclusion was, you can't, you, you can't really say what's going to happen. There's so many possible things that could happen. So many directions that culture could take, so many ways that changing climate could affect the demographics of the region that predicting was impossible.
That conclusion that "Anything's possible" sounds a little like an answer from a magic 8 ball, but that is essentially what the group landed on. They had to assume that future human beings would somehow, some way, discover the WIPP site.
II. SIGNS FOR THE FUTURE
Phase Two involved the question of how to physically mark the WIPP site with a warning for future populations. And this task was a lot trickier than it may have sounded
[19:00]
- how do we even know how future humans will read, write, or talk?
TED: It, it was a situation, Jeffrey, where anything you could think of was acceptable.
TED: We said language might disappear. There might be no written language for sure, but maybe even spoken language disappears as people's brains get connected. One to the other.
TED: Anything you can conceive of is possible.
JON: Simply because the future was so unknowable that we, we had to take whatever actions we could and throw everything we could at the wall and hope some of it would stick.
Even if it was at risk of disappearing, language seemed like an obvious place to start. They could mark the site with a plaque that explained why it was dangerous. But which languages would still be spoken, or
[20:00]
even still be comprehensible, in the deep future? For context, Beowulf was likely written about a thousand years ago. Here’s a little snippet:
CLIP: Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeod-cyninga þrym gefrunon….
While it’s in English, our language has changed so much that it’s now incomprehensible to non-experts.
JON: Religion tends to be very durable and if religions hang around, the languages of their holy scriptures are gonna hang around too. So Latin, Arabic, Hebrew might be other choices of languages that will survive into the future.
A language used in a text as important and widely-read as the Torah or the Quran would stand a better chance of surviving than, say, an instruction manual in Esperanto. Even if the languages weren’t still spoken, if those texts survived, maybe they could be used to translate a message from the past like the Rosetta Stone.
JON: The third form of languages
[21:00]
that we considered were languages most indigenous to the area. So the idea being that those are the people that have the deepest roots in that area. If climate or economic or other forces make people leave, they'll be the last to leave.
The team ultimately recommended leaving the same message in seven languages: English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Navajo. Perhaps just as importantly, they acknowledged that new languages will continue to appear.
JON: We also thought leave space, with an implied invitation for people of the future to add new languages as they appear. So to keep the marker updated with new languages that evolve over the next few thousand years.
The message they recommended went something like this…
SFX - a voice different from Jeffrey’s with a lot of “big room” reverb
OMNISCIENT VOICE: this is not a place of honor . . . what is here was dangerous and repulsive to us . . . the danger is still present,
[22:00]
in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
I don't know. That sounds pretty metal to me.
CARL METAL SONG
BEAT
Just like they used multiple languages, Jon and the team also knew that using different types of markers would increase their chance of getting the message across. If one marker didn’t withstand the test of time, perhaps another would.
So they started thinking about symbols, which were around a long time before language.
JON: Symbols are powerful and important, but they're nearly all culturally determined. There are very few symbols that are truly universal.
If you see a skull and crossbones at least, maybe some people are going to stay away?
JON: I started researching that and I found that it was a
[23:00]
strictly cultural symbol whose origins were in medieval art. The artist would put a skull with two bones in a cross, and it was Adam's skull. And the cross was the promise of resurrection. So instead of being a symbol of death, it was actually a symbol of rebirth, a symbol of resurrection. And as such, had gotten incorporated onto tombstones
Yeah I just thought it was for rock records but Jon said it was being used in ship’s logs to record a sailor’s death.
JON: And when pirates started practicing their trade, they needed a symbol because they wanted to force a ship to surrender so they didn't have to damage it. They wanted to take ships intact. They didn't wanna blow them up. So you wanted to say, I'm a pirate. I'm gonna kill you unless you surrender.
So it starts as a symbol of resurrection, it became a symbol of threatened violence, and then…
JON: The third meaning was added when the emergent chemical industry needed a symbol for poison
[24:00]
and adopted it … And now if you look at the, at the final fate of the skull and crossbones, it's been adopted by the Disney franchise of Pirates of the Caribbean as their kind of symbol. And now you can see little girls carrying pink lunch boxes with skull and crossbones on them to school. So the lesson from that was a symbol is cultural and it can change.
You know, one Mexican woman on this panel would have said “day of the dead?” and saved them month’s of work… but whatever.
The panel did get there. In fact they wrote: “In Mexico, the bones are the repository of the life force, and thus the skull and crossbones would have a very different meaning.”
JON: We did find two things that were universal in human art. One was the stick figure,
Oh did I mention Jon's home in Hawaii is surrounded by many, many feral chickens?
[25:00]
JON: You recognize it on the walls of the cave art from 25 or 30,000 years ago. You recognize it in the art in, in ancient Egypt where they have human figures. So we thought we could use the human stick figure as a way of telling a story.
JON: The other thing that seems to be very, very common is the idea that a sequence of pictures tells a story. First this happened, then this happened then this happened. Kind of the comic strip, the storyboard. You find that in art from the far east. You find it in art in MesoAmerica. You find it in art in among the Native Americans in North America. Uh, the idea of a sequence of pictures telling a story.
The team thought faces would still be recognizable 10,000 years in the future. So they developed a series of images that showed a face growing more and more disgusted as time passed - something that they hoped would convey the danger of exposure to nuclear waste. Just another fail-safe
[26:00]
among many to drive home the point that you really don't want to hang out here.
BEAT
But they didn’t stop at signs and pictograms. Architect Michael Brill came up with a non-lingual, non-symbolic way of warning people to avoid the site:
JON: He suggested that the overall architecture of the site appeal to people's feelings, basically scare people. Basically tell people, this is something bad, this is something you don't want. So he came up with some massive architectural designs of, of very spiky landscapes and jagged sharp just–you couldn't really go in there without hurting yourself. And he hoped that that would convey the message that this is a place you should keep away from.
Brill’s giant spikes idea has captured the imagination of many present-day humans. A barren wasteland full of large, menacing sculptures would certainly make you stop and think. But the team had to consider
[27:00]
the possibility that stirring the imagination might not actually be a good thing.
JON: There's also the sense that graves have always tried to scare off people with curses. You know, all the tombs in Egypt are marked with terrible curses. If you break into this, terrible things will happen to you and your descendants for seven generations, and it never works. It just makes you more anxious to get in there.
Human curiosity is a force to be reckoned with. We’re still taken in by Stonehenge and Easter Island, despite not knowing why they were built… or maybe because we don’t know. Building a monument risks that 10 millennia from now, it will become the distant-future equivalent of the pyramids… which by the way is exactly what the pharaohs did not want.
Still, the idea of making the site an attraction came up….
BEAT
TED: One of the guys on our team,
[28:00]
the sociologist, wrote one of the papers and he said the thing that will last for 10,000 years is an amusement park that reimagines itself every century. So he wrote one called, uh, Mickey Nuke, or Nukey Mick or something like that.
It was “Nickey Nuke”. The idea was to build an amusement park on the nuclear waste site and the park's mascot -- Nickey Nuke -- would warn future generations of children to never ever dig under the park. The suggestion might sound silly, but the idea was to make an entire culture out of the waste site. Think: Disney.
[Musical Sequence with Nickey the Nuke]
NICKEY THE NUKE: I’m Nickey the Nuke, dude. If you dig here then you’ll be screwed.
The idea is based on the theory that strong culture lasts. Sometimes longer than language
[29:00]
and symbols.
The WIPP study was not the first time someone had considered how to warn future people about nuclear waste. Another proposal to create a culture was the atomic priesthood: basically, starting a new, secret religion, where at any given time, three people hold the knowledge of the dangerous storage site, and are charged with preventing others from getting close. Kind of like the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
“May we go home now please?”
Each time a priest died, the knowledge would be passed on to a new person. A cult of radioactivity…sounds like fun!
Another, much cuter, idea was to create a breed of cats that would change color when exposed to radiation. What is it about physicists and cats?
SFX—Skeptical meow
I have to be honest with you,
[30:00]
as my producers and I worked on this episode we kept wondering “why mark the location at all?” It seemed like no matter how it was marked, it would stick out, bringing people closer and making them curious. So we asked…
DAN: I do not subscribe to the idea, just, you know, shh, you know, forget about it and walk away and hope for the best. Cuz I think we have an obligation too, to warn people of, of what's there.
JON: The site is not supposed to leak, but suppose it does. Suppose 500 or 5,000 years from now, something breaks and it gets into the water table and it starts poisoning people a hundred miles away. They're not gonna know what's going on. So we have an ethical duty to warn.
BEAT
Ultimately, the recommendation Jon thought made the most sense was a bit more pragmatic. Instead of
[31:00]
amusement parks, he thought about the signage at national parks.
JON: When you go to a national park and you go to a, you know, an overlook, there's a plaque there and it may show you a contour, a little drawing of the mountain range you're looking at with the names of the mountains and the heights of the mountains and a little bit of history of the area. It doesn't occur to you to doubt the truthfulness of that.
JON: There seems to be no bias. It's just telling you the information. It doesn't occur to you to doubt whether the height of the mountain is right or the name of the mountain is right. It's done in a modest way. It's not trying to impress you, it's not trying to scare you, it's not trying to do anything, but just convey some information to you
JON: Don't scare them. Just tell them as clearly as you can. Just tell them the truth. And then what they do with that truth, of course, is up to them. If they read it and understand it, and decide, we're gonna dig there anyway. Well, it's on them. We've done our job. We can't
[32:00]
control their behavior. It's their world at that point.
BEAT
JON: We have no control over the future. So let's not pretend we do. Let's just tell them the truth as simply and clearly as we can.
III. THE FUTURE IS A DAY THAT NEVER COMES
The Sandia reports contained a variety of proposals, a slew of suggestions, and at least one terrifying new children’s cartoon character.
NICKEY NUKE: The Danger Is Still Present
And for now, all of those ideas have been shelved. WIPP is still an active nuclear waste storage site and will remain so for many, many years. Since the assignment was to think 10,000 years into the future, DOE doesn’t have to rush into picking a particular course of action. As it stands today, they’re due to announce their warning plans in 2028.
WIPP received its first shipment of nuclear waste in 2001. And while we don’t know what will happen 10,000 years from now, it took only 13 years
[33:00]
for this to happen:
[CLIP: WIPP LEAK]
[0:07 - 0:18]
For the first time we are seeing the immediate aftermath of a fire in the country’s only nuclear waste dump. It happened just days before a radiation leak that shut the place down and got WIPP fined for hazardous waste violations.
On Valentine’s Day 2014, there was a leak at WIPP. A canister containing nuclear waste broke open, spilling its contents. Apparently workers at the laboratory had switched the kind of kitty litter they were packing into the containers. Again with the cats.
SFX—Skeptical meow
Instead of the correct kind of kitty litter, they used an organic kitty litter that reacted with other chemicals to corrode the containers.
DAN: That in and of itself causes people to sort of ask, are we managing this facility correctly? And I wouldn't be surprised if it brings back this question, well, if within 20 years of opening the facility, we've already got a problem with a leaking canister, what's that gonna mean for the, for the long haul?
If the phrase “the long haul”
[34:00]
ever applied, it’s here, to a problem that every successive generation will have to face. The Department of Energy has fulfilled its obligation and conducted the study that Dan’s lawsuit had forced them to conduct. But how we deal with this problem will be determined by how willing DOE is to keep talking about it.
JON: There used to be an expression that I think it's supposed to be Native American, that any act has to be considered the effects that it’ll have seven generations down the line. And that's so different from the way our society operates, where political people tend to only want to get things accomplished that can be done in their own term of office, and they're not thinking about the long term.
It would be easy to look at the Sandia reports and say they're useless. A bunch of men stabbing in the dark about how to communicate with people 10,000 years into the future -- the word “futile” does come to mind. But
[35:00]
the people who wrote these reports didn't shrug their shoulders and walk away. They tried. And Ted says that, if the warning does end up sticking, it won’t be because of something his team came up with. It’ll be because future generations kept trying.
TED: Every 50 years we ought to do this study again. And see how much it's changed, see what new beliefs are there. See why we think we were so ignorant before. And there, therefore, planning is dynamic, not only here but everywhere.
One thing that ties Ted, Jon and Dan together, aside from the report, is that they believe what they did mattered. Even when they knew that the problem would outlive them by millennia, they felt they had a duty to face it.
DAN: I'm hopeful
[36:00]
that, you know, enough can be passed on that we can prevent some pretty big intrusions that could be very, very dangerous for individuals and a whole region into a nuclear waste repository.
JEFFREY: Yeah, I don't think anybody knows enough to be right or wrong about a question like that. I think it's just a question of temperament, which is one of the things I find so fascinating.
DAN: It's, it is that without a doubt and, you know, we, we, we won't be able to look back and see whether we were right or wrong because we'll be long gone.
JEFFREY: That's right. That's right. I won't be around to say I told you so.
DAN: I will remain an optimist cuz I, cuz I, I, I do think I have enough of the intellectual heft to, to say it, not as naive, but to say it with, with some, you know, some expertise.
BEAT
JON: I think that history and history in its larger scale has a lot to teach us and seeing ourselves as part of that history and not the end of it,
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just at a, a point in it. And there's going to be lots to come. It gives you some comfort that it's not just us and our problems, but we're in a larger context and we've had problems before that we've solved, and somehow humans are still here and society is still here.
JON: Let's act like we're going to be viewed by our descendants and evaluated by them and try to do the best we can for them.
CREDITS
Thanks for listening - I’m Jeffrey Lewis and this is The Reason We’re All Still Here. It's executive produced by me, Andy Chugg and Whitney Donaldson. Special thanks to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
This episode was produced by Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canny and Stephen Wood. It was written by
[38:00]
Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canny, Stephen Wood and me. Story editing from Sara Joyner. Additional editing from Whitney Donaldson. Technical direction and engineering by Nick ‘The Wizard’ Dooley. Music and sound design by Andy Chugg. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Additional production support from Ben Chugg. Vocal Performances by Carl Nellis. Additional production support from Gemma Castelli-Foley. Show Art by Ronin Wood and Anton Maryniuk.
Special thanks to Jessica Varnum, Christine Ragasa, Megan Larson and Maggie Taylor.
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NICKEY THE NUKE: Heyyy kids!
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