Experts are trying to come up with the best way to warn Earth's future inhabitants — whether 10,000 or 100,000 years from now — what precisely lies under their feet.
That's a fantastic video and more people need to watch it!
The biggest take away that people who don't feel like watching should know is that 99% of all nuclear waste actually decays to a completely inert state in 31 years or less. Plus, the amount of nuclear fuel used in every nuclear plant in the entire world since the beginning is a tiny, tiny amount and only about 1% of that will be potentially dangerous longer than 31 years. The 1% of spent fuel that is dangerous long-term could easily be stored in probably just one single deep storage facility where it's stored safely kilometers under the Earth's crust in a geologically stable region forever.
Storage of nuclear waste is a solved problem. The only thing holding the experts back from doing the correct thing with nuclear waste is public perception and unfounded laws forbidding it because of propaganda and scare tactics. There has NEVER been a single incident relating to improper storage of nuclear materials. But there have been loads and loads of incidents involving improper storage of oil, gas, and coal materials.
Nuclear is so, so, SO much safer and cleaner than oil, gas, and coal.
The terme d'art for this field of study, in case you want to research more, is "Nuclear Semiotics," and the bulk of the study I've seen about it was undertaken by the WIPP. I personally think it's amazing.
The idea here are very interesting to read, but I think I'm leaning most favorably towards the last group's idea to bury it with as little marking as possible. The plans modeled on Stonehenge seem odd to me. Stonehenge is famously a monument whose origin and purpose was a mystery, and that mystery enticed people from all over the world to travel to the site and excavate it. It seems more like a good reference for a method that would not work. How many people would have toyed around at Stonehenge if the monument weren't there?
At the same time, we have events with contaminated materials being used in construction within a matter of months or years, so it's not like these are abstract problems. E.g., look at the 1983 Ciudad Juárez Cobalt 60 incident. We have the technology to identify contaminated materials, but we'd only use them if we have reason to believe we should. It's probably fair to assume the same of future societies, so it makes sense to want to make sure they have reason to believe they should test the area.