I guess I see this as a relatively temporary problem. You don't think in a hundred years we'll have some sort of tech that eats this stuff and craps sunshine? We're all looking at this stuff in today's terms, but a hundred years from now or even if it's a thousand years from now, this is going to be one of those things we look back at and say, "remember how worried we were about ____ waste? What a waste of resources and time."

I suppose it's always possible that the Malthus lovers get their way and human civilization just 'ends' in wake of something else (robots perhaps), but I've always felt humans get wiser with time as a trend and this won't be an issue.

So sure, let's put it in hollowed salt mine, fill it it some radiation absorbing material and mark the place with a giant skull-and-crossbones.... at least until our little nano-harvesters are ready to turn that death pile into marshmallows or something.

Firstly, the best way to protect future generations from deeply buried nuclear waste is to make sure there's absolutely NOTHING left to indicate its presence. The logic of this is as follows:

If a future human society has the technology to locate buried nuclear waste hundreds of metres below ground, then said humans will probably also have the means to detect radiation and the knowledge to avoid it.

If a future human society has gone feral then the last thing they want is signs saying 'dig here'.

Every time I read about this issue I have to laugh. Says something. Not sure what tho :/

Go spend a few days working with radioactive compound and you'll know that they are not as dangerous as the majority of population think. 99.9% of the waste can't even penetrate your skin. The radiation you receive from the sun and from the natural radioactive material used to build your house is more than 100 times stronger than swimming in the nuclear waste anyway.

Sylvie:

Disregard the naysayers and critics. Excellent article about an important topic.

Science seems to be free from the shackles of religion now.. For the most part. No more persecutions for theories. And take the dark ages for example. Rome was decaying and was brought down by less advanced civilizations which threw the whole area back hundreds of years. But a lot of that information was regained during the crusades from the middle east. These days, with information so readily available, nothing short of mass Nuclear winter would cause that to happen again. Even IF that happened their are millions of copies of books where once there would be a hand full. All this talk is pointless. If the labels get to old, we can replace them.

Anyone that knows about the history of the human race knows it's two steps forward, one step backwards. Sometimes two steps forward three steps backwards. Technological and social evolution don't go in a continuous line forward. 

Civilizations rise and fall, things are forgotten. It's very easy to imagine a relatively near future where because of energy depletion, climate change, and war where humanity has to go back to more primitive living conditions.

Obviously that wouldn't last forever, eventually progress would happen again. Still, during the dark age much information would be forgotten. It's happened before, it'll happen again. That's the contingency this planning is meant to address.

.. you don't have to worry about language changing that much in the short time this will be a problem. The human race went from first powered flight to landing on the moon in 75 years. One lifetime. Are people really stupid enough to think that we'll still be living like this in 10,000 years or whatever? Even 500 years will change our technology beyond what most people can imagine today.

Give it 100 years, 200 tops and it'l be cheap enough to lift things off-planet that we can just throw all the waste into the sun, even if we haven't cracked fusion by then.

Worrying about 10,000 year half-life's is just plain stupid. Do they think humanity will be taking a lunch break for the next 10 millenia and not inventing anything? Duhh.....

I don't believe in evolution. If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.

(BTW- This "How to label nuclear materials for future generations" thing has been a discussion for at least 20 years.)

Nuclear waste is much easier to handle than fossil fuel waste. Nuclear waste is solid and very easy to detect, after all. While most of the wastes produced by burning fossil fuels just disappear into the atmosphere with no feasible way to control them.

Of course, the very fact those wastes are invisible tend to make people feel better about them. Until you start reading how the north-pole could be ice-free in the summer just five years from now... Come to think of it, even that probably did not alarm nearly as many people as it should have.

Back to radioactive nuclear waste: one just needs to find a depleted salt mine away from tectonic plate boundaries and just bury the stuff as deep as possible.

Salt, you see, would not accumulate if ground water seeped through the relevant volume of earth since it is water-soluble. Clear?