2 14 03

About
the time I get to thinking that this country is beginning to
become somewhat of a saner place to live, my entire thought
process just get blown away. Take, for instance, an article,
which I stumbled across this past week. As most of you know, our
government has spent something in the order of four billion
dollars to research and build a storage facility for nuclear
waste out in Nevada.

 

Now, they’ve
done almost all of the studies necessary to make certain the
soil and rock is stable enough to contain this toxic waste for
all eternity. The place is designed to be open for the next
three hundred years or so and will eventually store some 70,000
metric tons of radioactive nuclear waste. I’m not certain how
much a metric ton is exactly but if it cost us four billion so
far, it should be somewhat huge in my opinion.

 

The problem
isn’t the facility or storing the stuff, it isn’t the
transportation or handling of these deadly materials…no, it’s
something even more horrible. The problem these folks are
dealing with at this time is how to word the warning signs
around the property. Yes, that’s right friends…as we speak there
is probably a room with four or five highly educated people
making big bucks working for our government sitting around
trying to think of some way to warn people that this waste site
is dangerous in words that will be understood 10,000 years from
now. I am dead serious about this.

 

One senior
scientist at the site was quoted as saying…”How do you
communicate with people 10,000 years from now? You can almost be
certain someone will drill into it with something. It’s human
nature.” They considered some type of picture showing perhaps
people experiencing pain of one sort or another. I’ve seen those
kinds of pictures in the pyramids in Egypt. Those were made
about 4,000 years ago and I don’t think anyone has ever
considered that the pyramids might have been a nuclear waste
storage facility. So, I think that suggestion is out. Therefore
in the interest of public safety and possibly saving some more
major bucks for the ever-increasing federal deficit, I have a
few suggestions I’d like to pass along for them to consider. So,
if you know anyone working on this project, you might want to
send them this column so they can take these points into
consideration.

 

First
recommendation is a giant “KEEP OUT—YOU WILL DIE HERE” sign. I’d
put this in English and Latin since it’s a dead language, which
is still around after a number of years. You might write this
with one of those indelible markers that we confuse with the
ones we should use on those dry erase boards. You can’t ever get
that stuff to fade or go away. Oh yes, and I’d make those signs
out of plastic. I keep reading that plastic won’t decompose in a
landfill for at least 10-15, 000 years. It looks to me like this
might work.

 

Second
recommendation would be to hire a family to just live there at
government expense and the jobs be passed down from generation
to another. Kind of like a legacy or an American version of
English royalty of some kind, only with rednecks. The government
could take some good old boys and give them some nice
accommodations with the provision that they must stay out there
and watch the place until Jesus came back. Just sit on the porch
year after year, collect your check and make certain the gate is
closed and locked. How hard would this be? Put an ad in the
paper in several parts of this country and I’ll bet you’d have
hundreds of folks willing to move tomorrow. “Yep, Junior one day
all this land will belong to you and Joe Bob…..it’ll be your
responsibility to look after it and care for it as I did and
your grand pappy and his daddy and his grand pappy
did…especially that big old hill over yonder that glows at
night.”