The Mute Evils of the Past: Nuclear semiotics

The Soviets, much like Icarus, knew the risks, with their wax wings and RBMK Reactors. Given the ability to harvest the fusion power of our own sun, they attempted to approach godliness, causing their fall. Thousands dead, millions displaced, and an eternal scar left to mock mankind's hubris.

Artur Korneyev, Deputy Director of Shelter Object, viewing the “elephant's foot” lava flow at Chernobyl, 1996. US Department of Energy

The aptly named "Elephant's Foot" is an abomination to life itself. Completely disregarding its toxicity and radiation output, it was never supposed to naturally exist. Nonetheless, in 1986, following the failure of the Soviet reactors, this affront to god willed itself into existence from reactor 4 in Pripyat. This mix of reactor fuel, sand, and steel, called corium, became the most dangerous thing ever created.

It takes a dose of approximately 400-500 roentgen to kill 50% of people. When the Foot first appeared, it excreted approximately 10000 roentgen per hour. In 2018, when measured, it excreted 200 roentgen per hour. After about 35 years, this concentrated glob of sins of man still holds the ability to kill you in less than a day. It, like all nuclear waste, will continue to be radioactive for hundreds of years to come. They will continue to be radioactive for years, decades, and millennia to come. When every single language of ours ceases to exist, and our society is forgotten, what will happen to those who come across this danger?

Those in the field of Nuclear semiotics have this haunting job; explaining the horrors we created to a people who have not the slightest idea of how we have damned them. What if they don't know what nuclear energy is? What if they don't share any language with us? In the act of trying to solve this problem, the field found that the warnings we leave must be pictorial in nature due to the lack of shared knowledge. A paper published by the Sandia National Laboratory gives a handful of messages that these warnings should evoke:

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 unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

A Nuclear Pictogram created by the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico also had a vested interest in Nuclear Semiotics, creating this and a multitude of other warnings. The Isolation plant created a conceptual design of the plant which held an information room in the center of the complex, with the hallways leading here designed to create a dissonant whistling sound whenever the wind blows through. This was another way the field wanted to warn the ignorant future, via architecture.

Spike Field, a proposed site marker for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, by Mike Brill. 

The Sandia report created designs for the landscape to make it seem poisoned and uninhabitable. The Black Hole was a giant circle of basalt and granite for the plant to sit on, serving to scare off those on a pilgrimage and making the site unable to be farmed upon. The most infamous of these is the field of monolithic spikes protruding from the ground.

All of these proposals cleverly portray the danger of nuclear sites, but what if they don't care? Let's say you came across a chest with a skull and crossbones. Would you open it? From an objective angle, you shouldn't, a skull and crossbones are a sign of death, which is a warning to you. From a cultural standpoint, though, you know this warning was placed here by pirates to hide treasure. What if those in the future think the same? That instead of tons of heavy metals, which will easily eviscerate every organic compound in them, we actually buried the One Piece here. In response to this, Thomas Sebeok and Alvin Weinberg proposed the Atomic Priesthood. This entails a group of Elders, who would learn and hold the information surrounding these spots and pass them down from this generation to the next. Critics say that this would vastly favor hierarchies, giving advantage to those who are closer to the priesthood or more powerful.

Look at what we must do for the future to counteract the actions taken today. Chlorofluorocarbons, microplastics, CO2, and nuclear waste. It's all the same. We commit some evil to further ourselves a minuscule amount, only to make those who come after us do tenfold the work to counteract it. As organisms that have survived thousands of years via selfishness, at what point do we overcome this intrinsic characteristic for generations to come?