Faced with responsibility for disposing of highly toxic radioactive waste by burying it deep in the ground where it must stay for 10,000 years, the United States Department of Energy and other groups are struggling to design appropriate signs to prevent future generations of inadvertent intrusion into repositories. In order to be universally and unambiguously understood, these warning symbols must transcend time and culture. Radioactive waste management thus forces us to think about long-term communication and its implications for the present. How do we go about transmitting a message down through the generations to people we will never know and who have no chance of answering?
Communicating with the future: reaching out to the unknown
Radioactivity is dangerous. There is agreement upon that point. The final disposal deep below the surface for thousands of years is an issue engineers, physicians and government agencies have to deal with. But there is also society’s responsibility to let future generations know about our legacies. We know the nuclear waste is dangerous, but how can we communicate this danger and prevent unwitting contamination and a fatal outcome?
Beyond the technical issues, moral concerns, and ecological objections, no one knows what would happen if sometime in the far distant future someone comes across our legacy of buried radioactive waste and handles it improperly. To prevent such a scenario, beginning in the 1980s the US Department of Energy commissioned interdisciplinary groups of scientists to help them develop plans for communicating danger and risk with the future.
By the time the prototype Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) was built in New Mexico a decade later, a variety of surface warning markers had been installed. They were designed so that their message and meaning would be absolutely clear even without any humans’ being present to explain them. How did the researchers work out their ‘archetypal images’, combined with universal symbols and writing? What is their scheme?
The waste depository will probably comprise a number of huge monoliths and a long wall to prevent its being buried by wind and sand. Information centers, subsurface archives, radar reflectors and magnetic materials will provide communication for anyone who comes to this place. Printed onto thousands of small information tags will be two faces: a disgusted one and another one depicting a frightened, shrieking person, reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s famous painting. Between these faces, a warning will be written in different languages (Figure 1) But writing is not the primary solution to signing danger, because words change too much over time. More important are the signs, because of their simplicity and evidence. Even a kind of comic strip might ensure the message is clear 10,000 years from now without relying on language.
More recently, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) introduced a new warning sign (Figure 2) below to deal with the same issues. It has eliminated words altogether.
Imagining how to transmit a warning to an unknown receiver in an indeterminate distant future is a huge and thankless challenge for any theory of communication – an unsolvable, but none the less essential task. The communication must be definite and not open to any misunderstanding. It must be durable, changeless, and easily recognizable as a message. Yet communication is always uncertain, ripe with contingency, and deals with a gap between sender and receiver that must be bridged. Scientists and politicians dependent on their opinion take retreat to a supposed universality of signs and thus try to bring their argument into coherence. If communication by signs were truly universal and evident, then success would be easy and just a matter of choosing the right signs. However, much communication depends on context – especially cultural context - and when the context of a message varies, its meaning varies as well. This fact is dealt with by imagining messages with an invariable meaning: signs devoid of culture, culture-free signs.
These signs are supposed to be independent of all convention and usage. Thus, they are untranslatable. They are signs that are believed to communicate without being mediated. However, signs devoid of culture are signs that contradict a formal understanding of what a sign is. They negate the abyss they imply. The researchers and designers involved in these long-term communication projects imagine signs that contradict their character as signs, relying on an inborn knowledge that will not change for the next 10,000 years; they try to conceive of a communication that is no longer communication, because it is already common. They negate inherent paradoxes by resorting to concepts supposed to dissolve contradictions. In other words, whether in the year 2019, or 12009, the signs imagined would have the same meaning for anyone entering the radioactive danger zone. This dream is the wish that communication with the future hopes to fulfil: forgetting the buried but radiant conscience.
The problem is irresolvable. But that is the paradox: although no one can be certain of meeting its requirements, it is still possible that the messages will be understood and heeded. A sign is designed to convey a meaning without any cultural contingencies, a ‘cultureless sign’, that means, a sign leading to only one single meaning. But when a sign can transport every possible meaning, one of these could succeed in carrying the desired meaning to the future. Nonetheless we will never know.
