by John D'Agata
“Where?”
“That low range.”
“Really?” I asked.
Yucca Mountain isn’t pretty. And it also isn’t large. From far away, the mountain’s just a squat bulge in the middle of the desert, essentially just debris from a bigger, stronger mountain that erupted millions of years ago and hurled its broken pieces into piles across the earth.
The Shoshone say that Yucca is the carcass of a snake, a giant desert creature that was trying to find a drink, collapsed there in exhaustion, rotted as it died.
“Better a cruel truth,” Edward Abbey once wrote, “than a comfortable delusion.”
So we climbed the mountain higher, and the spruce began to wither, and the bristlecones to gather, and the pitch of trail sharpened, and the edge of ridge straightened, and the soil whisked off limestone sheets and loosened them to shingles.
Joshua pulled my mother quickly in front of him and said, “Watch it here, the path is narrow,” as the path ahead began to fade, and then it disappeared.
Originally, the plan in the U.S. was to recycle nuclear waste. We’d reprocess all our fuel rods at individual plants, then reuse them over and over again, indefinitely, for power. But doing that would have also produced a pure form of plutonium, a byproduct of the process that’s inevitable and dangerous and ultimately was deemed too risky during fears of nuclear proliferation.
So the next plan was to bury the waste in trenches underwater, weighted down in teardrops that would sink into the Earth. In the late 1970s, however, a Soviet nuclear sub accidentally released three armed warheads while traveling near Alaska in the Bering Sea, nearly contaminating 187 square miles of international ocean. So a worldwide sea treaty outlawed that proposal.
Then, in the 1980s, a new plan was developed to launch the waste on rockets that would crash into the Sun. But when climatologists explained that a single rocket accident could permanently irradiate Earth’s entire atmosphere, that plan was also internationally banned.
There was a plan involving “garden mulch,” but no one took it seriously.
There was a plan to seal it in permafrost. But the permafrost is melting.
The Chinese proposed burning their waste in tunnels underground, vitrifying it permanently beneath that nation’s streets.
“We have a responsibility to the future,” wrote Helge Thue, a Scandinavian philosopher who spoke on the issue of disposing nuclear waste at a conference entitled “Ethics in the Age of Nuclear Power.” “Environmental regulations such as those being proposed for burying nuclear waste are fundamental to human society because what they do is protect the lives of future generations by prohibiting us from prematurely destroying their chance for an existence. The worldwide burial of this nuclear waste guarantees our descendants a right to their own futures.”
“Why are we assuming,” asked another ethicist, “that it’s better to make an investment in burying this waste than it would be to spend that money to help people now? Why is the life of someone not yet alive more valuable than someone who’s dying from poverty?”
An investment of $210 for an immunization could save somebody’s life in Indonesia, for example. Fifty dollars could prevent a measles death in Cameroon. And a ten-cent tablet to purify water could save someone from dying in Mozambique.
“A single dollar,” he said, “invested in a trust fund at 3 percent interest would yield more than $6 trillion in less than a thousand years. Why not send our descendants a giant trust fund, therefore, providing them with the resources to deal intelligently with this waste? Surely their technology will be more advanced than ours. And that way we can keep the majority of this money to spend on people now.”
In 5,000 years, that single dollar would eventually yield $4,004,537,935,765,068 in interest for our long-term descendants, a figure that is increased by another twenty-four zeros—
16 quatturordecillion, 358 tredecillion, 287 duodecillion, 111 undecillion, 891 decillion, 358 nonillion, 534 octillion, 699 septillion, 727 sextillion, 343 quintillion, 43 quadrillion, 255 trillion, 558 billion, 219 million, 536 thousand, and 75 dollars
—if invested for the full 10,000 years.
And if we hypothetically were to invest just a billion dollars of Yucca’s total estimated cost—or 1/100th of its overall budget—we would have a gift to give them that is 50 zeros long—
16 sexdillion, 358 quidecillion, 287 quatturodecillion, 111 tredecillion, 890 duodecillion, 364 undecillion, 266 decillion, 369 ninillion, 153 octillion, 4 septillion, 908 sextillion, 853 quintillion, 510 quadrillion, 524 trillion, 45 billion, 885 million, 440 thousand, 800 dollars, and 41 cents
—plus an extra $99 billion to spend on ourselves, thirty-three times more than the United Nations’ budget.
“The problem that we’re dealing with,” notes Peter Van Wyck, a professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, “is that the threat of buried nuclear waste doesn’t feel real to us. That’s why there’s a debate going on about whether this is even necessary. It’s the difference between experiencing a natural disaster and a technical one, which is the difference between having a story that we know how to read, and having one that breaks the rules of any narrative we know.”
In a natural disaster, Van Wyck explained, there is a rapid punctuation of events: a sudden rise of water during a flood, conventionally indicating a “beginning,” then a point at which the water crests in the narrative’s “middle,” and finally a period when the water recedes, which naturally signals an “end.”
“But a technical disaster, like Chernobyl’s meltdown,” said Van Wyck, “is much more difficult to follow because it doesn’t adhere to the conventions of plot. It has a definite beginning, and probably a climax, but its end is indeterminate because it’s hard for us to know when such disasters have concluded…. It causes the arc of these tragedies to feel incomplete. For the residents around Chernobyl, of course, the event that caused their suffering may never significantly end, but for the rest of us something like that is over as soon as we fail to remember it.”
To avoid this happening with nuclear waste, the conference attendees suggested disposing the waste that was headed for Yucca Mountain in a way that would cause it to “scream louder than anything we’ve ever done as a species…more profoundly, more symbolically…the kind of message understood by a whole culture at once.”
Which is when the idea of building a sign for Yucca Mountain first emerged.
“Planning a storage facility for nuclear waste that can last for approximately 10,000 years is one of the most pressing issues facing our country,” the Department of Energy wrote in a letter in the nineties. “Therefore, because inadvertent intrusion into this nuclear waste repository might result in an accidental release of radioactivity, the Department of Energy is creating a panel to study the implementation of a marker system that could deter people from intruding on the repository for the next 10,000 years.”
Dispatched in 404 copies, the Department of Energy’s letter was delivered to seventy-seven linguists, sixty-six geologists, fifty anthropologists, forty-one astronomers, thirty-nine historians, twenty-nine biologists, twenty-eight psychologists, twenty-seven ethicists, fourteen graphic artists, thirteen science writers, ten archival specialists, seven print librarians, four sculptors, two painters, a mayor, and MENSA, and explained that
“this panel will identify the effectiveness of marker systems throughout human history, and will then be asked to design several solutions for the problem at hand.…The knowledge that is necessary to develop such a marker will be significant indeed. We are therefore assembling a panel of experts that will be multidisciplinary in nature, spanning the fields of materials science, astronomy, climatology, the social sciences, and art. Each panel member will help with questions that directly relate to his or her expertise…. A materials scientist, for example, may help identify from which materials the marker should be made,…a linguist may be concerned with what kind of language should be employed,…[while] a landscape a
rchitect may help arrange the placement of the marker,…etc.”
to which there responded fifteen geologists, fourteen engineers, thirteen linguists, eight astronomers, five anthropologists, four climatologists, four sociologists, three landscape architects, two historians, an ethicist, an archeologist, an artist, one wife of a famous dead cosmologist, the president of the League of American Women Voters, the executive director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the secretary of the American Society for the Advancement of the Study of Petroglyphs.
In the end, the Department of Energy chose thirteen of those candidates, assembled them into a group that soon became known as the Expert Judgement Panel, and gave them each a check for $10,000, a deadline of two years, and the challenge to design the world’s most important sign.
Before that group was ever assembled, however, the Department of Energy sought the advice of a man named Thomas Sebeok, America’s leading expert in the field of semiotics, the study of how signs and symbols communicate their meanings.
In his report to the Department of Energy entitled Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia, Sebeok explained that communication is a social function whose purpose is to ensure the continuity of society. It does this, he added, primarily through storytelling, something that can’t exist outside a network of social systems.
Indeed, while Sebeok believed that the universe is in fact composed of signs, he also claimed that this doesn’t guarantee that such signs are communicative. For while “communication” suggests an explicit understanding between a sender and a receiver, “signification” can exist without the intention of any message.
What Sebeok recommended for Yucca Mountain, therefore, was an active communicative system, one whose purpose and importance could be relayed and renewed throughout the future by messengers.
In his report, Sebeok suggested establishing “a long-term commission that would remain in service for the next ten millennia…self-selective in membership, independent of political currents, and licensed to use whatever devices for enforcement that may be at its disposal…including those of a folkloristic nature.”
Sebeok called this commission The Atomic Priesthood, an international institution made up of 200 individuals whose responsibility it would be to maintain the knowledge that Yucca Mountain is dangerous, while also laying a trail of myths about the place in order to keep people away.
“Each successive generation of The Atomic Priesthood would be charged with the responsibility of seeing to it that our behest is heeded by the general public—if not for legal reasons, then perhaps for moral ones—with the veiled threat that to ignore our mandate would be tantamount to inviting some sort of supernatural retribution.”
These days, there are 297 individual companies that specialize in creating signs for casinos in Las Vegas. The city even boasts the only full-time accredited sign-making school. And according to an industry magazine called Signs of the Times, Las Vegas is home to the “world’s tallest sign,” the “world’s brightest sign,” the “world’s heaviest,” “longest,” “most famous,” “most expensive,” and even, says the editor, the world’s “greatest” sign.
But long before experts started rating Vegas signs, merchants in the city understood their importance. In 1905, the year Las Vegas was founded, most buildings in the city were just wood-framed tents, but even then their canvas sides were covered with painted ads: BUTCHER, HOTEL, GUNS, GIRLS.
By 1930, when the population of Las Vegas was still under 5,000, the American Sign Company opened the city’s first professional sign-making store:
IF YOU NEED A SIGN BAD…AND YOU WANT IT GOOD, CALL US!
Back then, gambling halls were confined to a single city block. Their buildings were often just two floors high, but their signs could be as tall as five and a half stories.
Today, just the base footings of the average Las Vegas sign can require excavations almost two stories deep. They take 100 truckloads of concrete to anchor. Twenty-four thousand individual light bulbs. Forty-seven thousand feet of neon. A hundred fifty miles of electrical wiring. And an average construction cost of $13 million.
One morning, Sandra Harris, the executive director of the Las Vegas Neon Sign Association, a private organization dedicated to preserving the city’s oldest signs, took me on a tour of what she called the Las Vegas “neon boneyard,” a full square block of outdoor storage with a wire fence around it.
“This is where signs used to go to die,” Sandra explained as she pulled open the gate. “But not anymore.”
Two women in bikinis and a man without a shirt leaned over and straddled a giant rusted X.
“Hey, guys!” Sandra said.
“Hey, girl!” yelled the models.
Sandra explained that the models were taking photographs for an ad.
“I think they’ve started a new business. A party-filling service.”
Party-filling? I asked.
“Like if you want to get some buzz going for an opening you’re having, you can hire these guys and they’ll send over attractive people to mill around.”
The two women stood in front of a giant red O, their breasts pushed together, their mouths opened wide.
We stepped into the lot.
There was LADY spelled in cursive against the boneyard’s fence. There was a yellow and black W that was taller than me. A red and white bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken lying on its side beside a fleur-de-lis.
Beside that was a VACANCY.
Beside that a NO.
There was a pink double S from Sassy Sally’s Casino, DEBBIE from Debbie Reynolds’s, NUGGET SINCE from the Golden Nugget of 1979.
Also GOLDEN NUGGET from 1962.
GOLD from ’48.
A piece of D from ’16.
There was OTEL and ASINO and OYAL and ARK. There was MECHANIC ON DUTY FREE ASPIRIN TENDER MERCY. There was a bearded and bald leprechaun facedown on the ground, his arms sprawled in front of him with gold coins in each hand.
“That’s Mr. Lucky,” Sandra said.
“Can we shoot him?” asked a model.
“Can’t,” Sandra said. “Wish you could, but he’s copyrighted.”
I walked over to Mr. Lucky to sit beneath his shoulder’s shadow. He was fiberglass and shiny and smelled a little like piss. I stood up and walked around him, looked behind him, climbed on top. In the area of Lucky’s anus was a wide and jagged hole, inside of which were shirts and socks and a jar of Icy Hot. Underwear, a magazine, a basket of chili fries. In the winter, Sandra said, a homeless man lived in Mr. Lucky with a cat.
“Hope he’s all right now,” Sandra said. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“All cities communicate some sort of message,” noted three art historians in Learning from Las Vegas, the first serious study of Las Vegas and its signs. “But in this city, the signs hit you immediately once you cross the Nevada border, and then they don’t let up until you’ve reached the other side.”
They’re persistent, unsubtle, the most successful illustration of “full-immersion messaging”:
“Like when the facade of a casino becomes one big sign, or when the shape of a building reflects its name, and the sign, in turn, reflects the shape. Is the sign the building, or the building the sign? These relationships, and the combinations between signs and their buildings, between architecture and symbolism, between form and meaning, are deeply relevant to the significance of this place…. These little low buildings, grey-brown like the desert, separate and stand out because of their signs. They are false fronts that engage as you pass them on the road. If you take away these signs, there is no Las Vegas.”
The city, they concluded, is a sign.
“That’s why I thought we should have a say in designing the marker for Yucca,” explained the organizer of the Yucca Mountain Warning Sign Design Contest, an event Las Vegas held for amateur local artists. “I figured that if we had to live with this waste in our own backyard, we might as well try to help design the mark
er for it.”
Inside the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Research on the campus of the University of Nevada, 300 people mingled on the exhibit’s opening night. There was cheese, square crackers, red carbonated punch. There was a reporter from a local TV news station—YOUR 24-HOUR UP-TO-THE-MINUTE LAS VEGAS NEWS SOURCE—walking around with a mic in hand and a camera screwed into a tripod. There was a line leading to a curtained room with an “online conceptual model.” There was a couple debating in front of “Shit,” and then in front of “Phallus.” There was the reminder, twice, by two guys in tank tops, that if I wanted to go to the afterparty it was “BYOB or forget it.”
There were black cardigans, black berets, black eyeliner, dyed hair.
There was a short man in his twenties in a white diaper and bib.
“My design,” explained the man, “is a performance piece about the childishness of this whole Yucca thing.”
Indeed, the most popular designs at the exhibit that night tended almost exclusively toward the performatively rhetorical, those with titles such as “Bio/Mechanical Hazard,” a proposal whose design was powered by the mountain’s own waste—
“At the core of my warning sign is a magnetic generator which creates a force field wrapping ten miles around the site so that any living creature that penetrates the field will create a disturbance that will produce an electromagnetic discouragement, a reminder of just how lethal this nuclear waste is”
—or “The Poppin’ Fresh Universal Sign”—
“The Poppin’ Fresh Universal Sign is an extremely large and durable plastic device based on the popular popup timer that’s found in frozen turkeys. These devices are released when the internal temperature of a turkey reaches 183 degrees, which is the melting point of the metal that’s used in the device. The metal melts, a spring’s released, and the action signals to housewives that their families will soon be sitting down to a wonderful turkey meal. In much the same way, the Poppin’ Fresh Universal Sign will let the future know when Yucca’s waste is safe”
