SciShow explains 'How to Make a Warning Last 10,000 Years'

SciShow has been uploading videos about nuclear waste lately, the most recent of which explains How to Make a Warning Last 10,000 Years.

In the southeast corner of New Mexico, the United States is burying decades of nuclear waste. The storage site, and the earth above it, will remain lethal for millennia...perhaps as much as 300,000 years! How can we warn people that far in the future to "Keep Out!"?

It's time to be a good environmentalist and recycle.

As I point out to my students, the worst aspect of nuclear power isn’t the risk of meltdown, as in Fukushima. Very few plants melt down. All of them, however, produce radioactive waste, which is dangerous for thousands of years. Dealing with that is the big issue.

I reinforce that point with the Seeker video I embedded in Nuclear waste in cat litter, which is where I first heard about WIPP. I'm relieved to see that the Department of Energy is thinking ahead to its closure and how to protect people for millennia to come.

Working backwards, the next most recent SciShow video on this topic is So You Need To Dispose Of Some Nuclear Waste…

We all have to deal with getting rid of trash. But what do we do when that trash is radioactive? Here's a few of the weirdest solutions to the green glowy problem of storing radioactive waste for decades to come.

If this video were shorter, I'd gladly show it to my students. Instead, I'm planning on passing on the highlights the next time I lecture on nuclear power, which will be this December. May I remember it that long.

I close with the earliest of the three videos from the past few months, This Gorgeous Gemstone Traps Nuclear Waste.

This month's Rocks Box is the perfect combo of beauty and brains. Sodalite is a gorgeous blue mineral that has a superpower - its tiny pores can trap all kinds of molecules, making it the perfect sieve for everything from industrial practices to cleaning up pollution. And this month's Rocks Box subscribers get their own!

I had no idea zeolites like sodalite were so useful. Any day I learn something new is a good day, so today is already a good day.

That's a wrap for today's Commoner's Laws lessons about pollution, "Everything must go somewhere (There is no away)" and "There is no free lunch" about the problem and "Nature knows best" for the solutions. Stay tuned for a driving update, since Pearl will actually pass 70,000 miles today.