Gregory Benford - Ten Thousand Years of Solitude

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GREGORY BENFORD - Ten Thousand Years Of Solitude

ONE OF THE chores of physics professors everywhere is fielding telephone calls

which come into one's department. Sometimes they ask "What was that I saw in

the sky last night?" -- to which I reply, "Could you describe it?" This makes

for quick work; usually they've seen an aircraft or Venus.

Sometimes calls are from obvious cranks, the sort who earnestly implore you to

look over their new theory of the cosmos, or their device for harnessing

magnetism as a cure to the world's energy needs. These I accord a firm

diplomacy. Any polite pivot that gets one off the line is quite all right. One

of the few rules we do follow is that one may not deflect the call to another

professor!

In 1989 I got a call which at first seemed normal, from a fellow who said he

was from Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then I sniffed a

definite, classic odor of ripe crank.

"Let me get this straight," I said. "The House of Representatives has handed

down a requirement on the Department of Energy. They want a panel of experts

to consider a nuclear waste repository and assess the risks that somebody

might accidentally intrude on it for . . ."

"That's right, for ten thousand years."

I paused. He sounded solid, without the edgy fervor of the garden variety

crank. Still . . .

"That's impossible, of course."

"Sure," he said. "I know that. But this is Congress."

We both laughed. I knew he was okay.

So it came to be that a few months later I descended in a wire-cage elevator,

clad in hard hat with head lamp and goggles, and carrying on my belt an

emergency oxygen pack. I had a numbered brass tag on my wrist, too -- "For

identification," the safety officer had said.

"Why?" I had asked.

She looked uncomfortable. "Uh, in case you, uh . . ."

"In case my body can't be identified?"

"Well, we don't expect anything, of course, but you know rules."

We rattled downward for long minutes as I pondered the highest risk here: a

flash fire that would overwhelm the air conduits, smothering everyone working

in the kilometer-long Waste Isolation Pilot Plant outside Carlsbad, New

Mexico.

We clattered to a stop 2150 feet down in the salt flat. The door slid aside

and our party of congressionally authorized experts on the next ten thousand

years filed out into a bright, broad corridor a full thirty-three feet wide

and thirteen feet high. It stretched on like a demonstration of the laws of

perspective, with smaller hallways branching off at regular intervals.

Huge machines had carved these rectangular certainties, leaving dirty-gray

walls which felt cool and hard (and tasted salty, I couldn't resist). Flood

lights brought everything into sharp detail, like a 1950s sf movie--engineers

in blue jump suits whining past in golf cans, helmeted workers with fork lifts

and clipboards, a neat, professional air.

We climbed into golf carts with WIPP DOE stenciled on them, and sped among the

long corridors and roomy alcoves. Someone had quietly inquired into possible

claustrophobic tendencies among our party, but there seemed little risk. The

place resembles a sort of subterranean, Borgesian, infinite parking garage. It

had taken fifteen years to plan and dig, at the mere cost of a billion

dollars. Only the government, I mused idly, could afford such parking fees . .

Nuclear waste is an ever-growing problem. It comes in several kinds --highly

radioactive fuel rods from reactors, shavings from nuclear war-head

manufacture, and a vast mass of lesser, lightly radioactive debris such as

contaminated clothes, plastic liners, pyrex tubes, beakers, drills, pipes,

boxes, and casings.

Fifty years into the Nuclear Age, no country has actually begun disposing of

its waste in permanent geologic sites. Many methods have been proposed. The

most plausible is placing waste in inert areas, such as salt flats. Also

promising would be dropping waste to the deep sea bed and letting subduction

(the sucking in of the earth's mantle material to lower depths) take it down.

Subduction zones have a thick silt the consistency of peanut butter, so that a

pointed canister packed with radioactives would slowly work its way down. Even

canister leaks seem to prefer to ooze downward, not percolate back up. (A few

million years later, fossil wrist watches and lab gear could appear in fresh

mountain ranges.) Finally, the highest-tech solution would be launching it

into the sun.

All these have good features and bad, but the more active solutions seem

politically impossible. Law of the Sea treaties, opposition to launching

anything radioactive, and a general, pervasive Not In My Backyard-ism are

potent forces.

The only method to survive political scrutiny is the Pilot Project, sitting in

steel buildings amid utter desert waste forty-five minutes' drive from

Carlsbad. The Department of Energy regards it as an experimental facility, and

has fought endless rounds with environmentalists within and without New

Mexico. Should they be allowed to fill this site with eight hundred thousand

barrels of low-grade nuclear waste -- rags, rubber gloves, wiring, etc.? It is

to be packed into ordinary 55-gallon soft-steel drums, which will then be

stacked to the ceilings of the wide alcoves which sprout off from the ample

halls.

We climbed out of our carts and inspected the chunks of dirty salt carved from

the walls by the giant boring machines. Everything looks imposingly solid,

especially when one remembers that 2150 feet of rock hang overhead.

But the point of the Pilot Project is that the walls are not firm at all. This

Euclidean regularity was designed to flow, ooze, collapse.

We trooped into a circular room with a central shaft of carved salt. Meters

placed around the area precisely recorded the temperature as electrical

heaters pumped out steady warmth. The air was close, uncomfortable. I blinked,

feeling woozy. Were the walls straight? No --they bulged inward. There was

nothing wrong with my eyes.

Salt creeps. Warm up rock salt and it steadily fills in any vacancy, free of

cracks or seams. This room had begun to close in on the heaters in a mere

year. Within fifteen years of heating by radioactive waste left here, the

spacious alcoves would wrap a final hard embrace around the steel drums. The

steel would pop, disgorging the waste. None would leak out because the dense

salt makes perfect seals -- as attested by the lack of ground water

penetration anywhere in the immense salt flat, nearly a hundred miles on a

side.

"Pilot" is a bureaucrat's way of saying two things at once: "This is but the

first," plus "we believe it will work, but . . ." Agencies despise

uncertainties, but science is based on doing experiments which can fail.

Often, scientific "failure" teaches you more than success. When Michaelson and

Morley searched for signs of the Earth's velocity through the hypothetical

ether filling all space, they came up empty-handed. But this result pointed

toward Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which assumed that such an

ether did not exist, and that light had the same velocity no matter how fast

one moved, or what direction.

An experiment which gives you a clear answer is not a failure; it can surprise

you, though. Failure comes only when an experiment answers no question --

usually because it's been done with ignorance or sloppiness. The true trick in

science is to know what question your experiment is truly asking.

Bureaucrats aren't scientists; they fear failure, by which they mean

unpredictability. They tread a far more vexing territory: technology. The

Pilot Project has been held up because equipment did not work quite right,

because there are always uncertainties in geological data, and of course,

because environmental impact statements can embrace myriad possibilities.

Ours was the furthest-out anyone in government had ever summoned forth. No

high technology project is a child of science alone; politics governs. The

pressure on this Pilot Project arose from the fifty years of waste loitering

in "temporary" storage on the grounds of nuclear power plants, weapons

manufacturers and assorted medical sites -- in "swimming pools" of water which

absorb the heat (but can leak), in rusting drums stacked in open trenches or

in warehouses built in the 1950s. The long paralysis of all nuclear waste

programs is quite probably more dangerous than any other policy, for none of

our present methods was ever designed to work for even this long. Already some

sites have measured slight waste diffusion into topsoil; we are running out of

time.

Of all sites in the USA, the Carlsbad area looked best. Its salt beds laid

down in an evaporating ocean 240 million years ago testify to a stable

geology, water free. The politics were favorable, too. Southern New Mexico is

poor, envying Los Alamos and Albuquerque their techno-prosperity. Dry, scrub

desert seems an unlikely place for a future megalopolis to sprout -- ignoring

Los Angeles.

So we members of the Expert Judgment Panel split into four groups to

separately reach an estimate of the probability that someone might

accidentally intrude into the sprawling, embedded facility. We had some

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Gregory Benford - Ten Thousand Years of Solitude

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