Management of Commercially Generated Radioactive Waste - U.S. ...

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2. Monitoring--including observation of seismic, thermal, and radiological conditions
to detect any releases or significant changes in site integrity.
3. Information transfer--including maintenance of records and data about the reposi-
tory and its contents. Such information would be needed to effect repair of a
site, to warn future generations about the dangers of the wastes, to inform
people about the resource value of the contents, and to prevent an intrusion into
the repository at some time in the distant future.
It has been suggested that human institutions could provide an increment of safety if
monitoring, surveillance, and security operations are carried out during the first few cen-
turies after a repository is closed. Human activites would provide a backup to the engi-
neered system. This backup system would have the function of predicting the occurrence of
natural hazards, preventing human intrusions, and responding to any anomalies that occurred
at repository sites. These last two functions were seen by some to be especially signifi-
cant in the mitigation of repository accidents.
Predictions are very difficult to make with certainty about whether future societies
would find the task worthwhile to support institutions to carry out the functions noted
above. It has been argued that it is up to future generations to decide for themselves
whether to carry out these functions. Predictions are also impossible to make on whether
information can be conveyed across millenia, or whether organizations can be established
that could last for such time periods. The focus of assessment has been to analyze any evi-
dence to suggest that if organizational and institutional continuity were necessary, could
institutions be established in the present that might survive long enough to carry out their
tasks?
The analysis of these issues is, of necessity, purely speculative, and based on histor-
ical examples that provide no firm basis for making predictions. However, some examples
suggest that complex information in abstract form can be maintained over thousands of
years.(a) The sacred books of major religions and the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt are
examples. Furthermore, many functional organizations, such as the U.S. Government, have
survived for a century or more while carrying out roughly the same tasks. A few, such as
the British political system, have survived for nearly a millenium. Of course, how much
information has been lost in historical times is not known.
The principal conclusions of this analysis are:
* There are no reasons in principle to indicate that human institutional functions
cannot survive for hundreds of years, given reasonably stable political systems.
However, no strong evidence exists that such functions will, in fact, survive.
* Technical information can be maintained for a very long time if a culture remains
literate and the information has a continuing utilitarian value.
* Waste management systems adopted in the present time period should place minimal,
if any, reliance on any human management after the repository is closed.
(a) Additionally, no prior known civilization has had both the mass education and communication
systems that presently exist.