#W.I.P.P.

[polarhorror]

I've been wanting to make a video game that involves W.I.P.P. (waste isolation pilot project) and exploring it.

What is W.I.P.P?

W.I.P.P. or waste isolation pilot project, is a plan to store all used nuclear waste in a facility in new Mexico.

Since nuclear waste takes thousands of years for it to not be radioactive anymore, they need a way to get people away from the area.

they decided the best way to get people away from a nuclear waste storage facility, was to make it terrifying and scary so that people would be too scared to come close to the dangerous nuclear waste.

This will hopefully get people away from the real danger by creating a sense of terror in the area.

Now, imagine a video game where it is set 200 years into the future. Imagine someone stumbling upon that place, it would be terrifying!

I really want to create a horror game around this place, I think it would be truly scary.

[femmemortes]

So a thing about me is that I’m an absolute nerd for stuff to do with nuclear disasters, science and history. It’s so amazing. Everything about it is. From the mere notion that chain reactions that create energy can just be made by placing radioactive isotopes near each other and the fact we can utilise that for our own benefit is so cool to me. It can deliver power to homes, towns and cities. It can provide power on a lesser scale too, but in much more remote areas in the form of RTGs. The possibilities are nearly endless and is best step we have for energy going into the future.

But if treated carelessly, it can destroy so much.

Talking to the Future

One of the things I learnt about while just going through videos and articles on anything to do with nuclear was a place called the W.I.P.P (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in the New Mexico desert. This place is a giant underground storage facility that will be used to store high level nuclear waste that is incredibly radioactive, will cause significant harm and lasts for a very long time. This means that the area that all this waste will be stored in will be dangerous if dug into, etc. This, for the most part is fine. We know today that we shouldn’t dig down and uncover the waste that is in there because we know what it is and how dangerous it is.

The problem is that this waste is planned to be stored for 10,000 years.

(Thanks, Plutonium-239 and your long ass half-life)

So then arises the problem of communicating with people of the future. Think about how much culture changes in 100, 200 years. Where were we as humans 10,000 years ago compared to now? Our languages now are nothing like the ones we had even 1,000 years ago. So how do we warn far future generations, other civilisations of the danger the WIPP holds without words or significant use of current language?

Simple symbols wouldn’t be enough because they face a similar issue. Meanings of symbols can changed, warped or entirely unrecognised. Who’s to say the the meaning of the trefoil sign, the symbol that warns against ionizing radiation, couldn't be lost so many years down the line?

We have to consider, what could this symbol possibly mean to someone who’s never even seen it before?

So a programme was put together to try and form a marking system for the WIPP that would be enough to last 10,000 years to effectively warn the future of the danger that the site held. There were are variety of ideas pitched and devised by different people and here are some of them:

General warning messages with images of horrified faces, comic-like depictions of people becoming contaminated by radiation and the consequences of digging at the site.

A written message giving a background and warning, I imagine this wouldn’t be very efficient at all the further we get into the future but it is still interesting to read. Here it is as follows:

“This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention to it!

Sending this message was impotant 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 is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location...it increases toward a center...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

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

Below I’m linking an artistic representation of the message I found on YouTube, which is also how I initially found out about the WIPP, it activated my fight or flight like crazy and was pretty unnerving:

Hostile and threatening looking infrastructure was also an idea that was raised to ward people away from the site, if anything, these are probably the images you've seen before whether or not you had prior knowledge of the WIPP:

“Spike Field” view 1 and 2:

“Spikes Bursting Through Grid” view 1 and 2:

“Landscape of Thorns”:

“Menacing Earthworks” view 1 and 2:

I believe this one in particular pertained to the idea of not having anything significant at the "centre" as humans throughout many cultures have placed a sense of holiness or importance on the centre of places, "the middle". This is a place that is meant to be shunned, so to have nothing of significance in the centre, the largest point of danger, would work to deter people from investigating as there is seemingly nothing there of interest:

“Forbidding Blocks” view 1 and 2:

There are more infrastructure ideas than these but I will link the WIPP info website, a website created to summarise the Sandia Report titled "Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" written in 1993, and leave you to read about them if you so wish. All screenshots in this segment were also obtained from there also.

Some other more out-there ideas were also put forward, one being an "Atomic Priesthood." Which sounds metal as fuck. According to their website, The Atomic Priesthood Project : "The Atomic Priesthood was a proposed system of communicating the history, infrastructures, and science of nuclear waste materials on geologic timescales through the use of ritual, allegory, and superstition."

As insane as it sounds, I do believe this would be a good option the only problem is is that we can't be for certain whether this priesthood would last. After all, infrastructure would last a lot longer than humans.

Another proposal was to genetically modify cats so that they glowed whilst near radiation, create a legend that would be passed between generations which would then mean once people saw this actually happening they would know to get out immediately. I really like this one, I think it's silly.

I'm interested to see if these plans develop at all within my lifetime. I do personally believe that nuclear power is the next step and there are already ways we can reduce and even reuse a large amount of the waste but, thanks to public concerns and fears, these avenues aren't being invested into. That being said we do need a way to store this waste we have created and cannot recycle.

I feel like I should have something clever and poignant to say about this, but my brain is going flat, so I'll quote section 5.3 (c) of the 1993 Sandia Report:

"The very exercise of designing, building, and viewing the markers creates a powerful testimony addressed to today's society about the full environmental, social, and economic costs of using nuclear materials. We can never know if we indeed have successfully communicated with our descendants 400 generations removed, but we can, in any case, perhaps convey an important message to ourselves."

[bonding-mom-ents]

w.i.p.ped cream