How colour-changing cats might warn future humans of radioactive waste
by Donato Paolo Mancini from Environment | The Guardian on (#284J5)
As the UK gets ready to build more nuclear plants, scientists are looking for new ways to tell our distant descendants where we've buried our sludge
Plans for a new fleet of UK nuclear power plants are under way. Last month, for example, Hitachi and the Japanese government confirmed a plan to construct 5.4 gigawatts of generating capacity at UK sites. But what about the waste? And what happens when, in thousands of years, our descendants - who may not read any current human language - find a store, and put themselves in danger?
A panel of scientists and linguists asked this question in 1981 when the US Department of Energy commissioned them to find a method of ensuring that whatever is left of humanity in 10,000 years' time is warned off the sites we've been filling with radioactive sludge.
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