This Place is a Message: A Nuclear Human Factors Story
One of the most fascinating human factors stories I’ve ever heard is of the development of nuclear waste warning messages. The practice is also known as “nuclear semiotics,” and surrounds a shockingly complex concept: nuclear waste remains dangerous to humans for 10,000 years after it is buried. So how can anyone put safety procedures in place that protect people 10,000 years from now?
My favorite comparison, which keeps coming up if you dig into this topic, is the pyramids. Enormous, spiky structures, about as ominous as they come, covered and filled with pictorial warnings that transcended several generations of language change at nearly 5,000 years old. They are a masterclass in warnings that lasted and were successfully received, but they did not work.
We were determined to get into those pyramids anyways. In fact, many people across the world have it on their bucket lists to visit them.
In the instance of pyramids, the danger was of a more spiritual nature, the goal being to protect those buried within the pyramids from being desecrated. The danger of nuclear waste is a more literal one; but how do you express that to the future?
There are very few scholars alive today who can even read the old English that Beowulf was written in, a mere 1,000 year old language. How do we tell people important information without words, or catch their attention without catching their interest?
Written Messages
To begin with, let’s talk about New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
WIPP is the reason the majority of these semiotics ideas were conceived: 2 million cubic feet of radioactive leftovers from United States nuclear projects. The US Department of Energy spent almost 20 years just picking the site as they tried to discover the best way to “dispose of” nuclear waste. The site hosts a 250 million year old salt deposit half a mile underground, which can prevent radiation from contaminating the surrounding area.
The site will be sealed in 2070, and human factors experts have until that time to craft the perfect warning sign.
Here’s one of the more popular suggested written warnings:
This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
The vagueness of the message feels simultaneously ominous and matter-of-fact; which is the exact aim of the Sandia Report.
Sandia National Laboratory is a nuclear development lab that both supports WIPP’s development and intends to use it, hence their production of the Sandia Report. The report suggested that any nuclear waste message should be made up of four levels, each one increasing the complexity so that future generations could have access to both ease of understanding and the maximum amount of information available. The levels are as follows:
- Rudimentary information: “This place is a message”
- Cautionary information: “This message is a warning about danger”
- Basic information: Tells what, why, when, where, who, and how
- Complex information: Highly detailed written records, tables, figures, graphs, maps, and diagrams
You can probably tell that the first three concepts contribute significantly to the vague, ominous tone, especially as they attempt to make the message more translatable; but where is the complex information?
The solution suggested by many of the WIPP reports was that an “information center” be placed at the site’s geometric center, like a museum, with all necessary documents and diagrams needed to understand the facility.
Paired with most of the suggested messages was a line that asked anyone who could read it and found it to be in an outdated tongue to update it or translate it for future generations, hypothetically keeping the message functional. This could, however, act like a long game of telephone, with extremely necessary information being inadvertently abandoned or dismissed alongside the development of language.
In our recent podcast episode, “Can a Message Last 10,000 Years?,” our RCA experts examine these written messages and signs and discuss their problems in many modern human factors stories. You can check that video out here.
One of my favorite parts of this podcast is when they suggest more practical solutions than just signs, and they jokingly suggest “Indiana Jones-style traps” to keep people from investigating nuclear waste. I think that’s a great idea, but it would appear that the nuclear semiotics team did not consider it, or perhaps that they were concerned it would make the site too interesting not to investigate.
They did, however, come up with a fascinating list of possible practical solutions.
Physical Barriers and Mental Deterrents
Suffice it to say, the danger present at a nuclear waste site necessitates more than a fence as a physical barrier. The Sandia Report recommended creating a “shunned land” with structures that evoke fear and discomfort. For example, they suggested building the information center out of concrete walls, positioned in such a way that the wind would create a haunting whistle as it passes through it.
The most commonly suggested idea was a “landscape of thorns,” with enormous spikes protruding from the ground in all directions. These would make the area difficult to traverse and also give a distinctly threatening appearance to the land. Despite the fact that the large, spiky structures in Egypt do not appear to deter people, the US Government’s conclusion landed upon using these spikes, and engraving warning messages on them in English, Chinese, Spanish, Latin, Hebrew, and Navajo.
Of the shunned land suggestions, I personally like the “black hole” idea. This one suggested that they place an enormous slab of black-dyed concrete over the area, making the land impossible to farm or build cities on top of. This one creates a physical barrier that would be extremely difficult to dig through, deters people moving into the land for any other reason, and creates an ominous image altogether. Better yet, it doesn’t require any signs or language difficulties to keep people away.
Cultural Messaging
When you tell a group of people that they have 10,000 years to complete a project, they start to get creative. When it came to cultural messaging, those brainstorming for nuclear waste disposal certainly did so.
In 1980s Germany, a poll was issued that asked a question: “How would it be possible to inform our descendants for the next 10,000 years about the storage locations and dangers of radioactive waste?”
Many of the answers looked at the culture around them, and looked for anything that could have been said to have lasted that long.
Linguist Thomas Sebeok looked to the long lasting message of the Catholic Church over almost 2,000 years, and recommended creating an “atomic priesthood” who would make rituals and myths that would stress staying away from off-limits areas and insist on the dangers of entering them.
Science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem suggested biologically coding plant DNA to create “information plants” that would grow near nuclear waste storage sites and warn humans about the danger of the land.
A particular favorite answer to the poll was the proposal of author Francoise Bastide and semiotician Paolo Fabbri, who suggested breeding color-changing cats.
They called them “ray cats,” and pointed to the long history of cats living near humans, as well as the lasting impact of cats on both ancient and modern stories. They suggested that ray cats be bred to change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions to indicate danger. Then they suggested, for the cats’ message to last, that there should be a significant body of fairytales, poetry, and songs that indicate the danger of following a cat that has changed color. In 2014, Emperor X even wrote a song for the ray cat idea, called “10,000 Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty.” Catchy, I know. You can listen to it here, if you’re curious.
Admittedly, these ideas are long shots, but I think they make a good point about human factors: it takes more than a sign or a reminder in order for a message to stick in a person’s mind. We can make important information memorable in our own workplaces by changing our workplace culture, placing realistic barriers in place, and focusing on why breakdowns actually happen. That’s where we come in.
Human Factors is Our Bread and Butter
If the struggles of the WIPP to find a successful strategy sound familiar to you, TapRooT® RCA is here to help. These ideas are our specialty, and we would love to start talking to you about how you can implement them. If you’d like to have that conversation, contact us for a free briefing here.
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You can watch our video on nuclear semiotics on the TapRooT® Podcast here.
If you’d like to read the Sandia Report for yourself, you can access it here.
