Ways Studied to Warn the Future of A-Waste Dangers : Environment: Descendants would face radioactive peril in 10,000 years. ‘Atomic priesthood’ could pass the word from age to age.

Nuclear wastes are dangerous and should be avoided--everyone knows that. But 10,000 years from now, when our descendants happen on a cache of nuclear wastes, how will they know to stay away?

Some type of warning is needed. In 10,000 years fences would rust, concrete would crumble, guard dogs would die. And who knows if anyone will be speaking English 100 centuries from now.

Communications experts say the odds improve if the same warning is delivered several ways: marking the burial site with a universal danger symbol and tombstone-like monoliths engraved with messages in several languages.

And others have proposed an “atomic priesthood”--a relay system to pass the word by mouth from age to age.

“The atomic priesthood is merely a fancy term for a self-perpetuating committee or task force. The worst way to do it is to entrust the government,” said Thomas Sebeok of Indiana University.

“The idea is that each generation should re-input the warning and relay it to the next, with the veiled threat that to ignore the mandate would be tantamount to inviting some sort of supernatural retribution,” he said.

Sebeok is a professor of semiotics, which studies the ways people communicate by word, symbol and gesture.

He figures that the priesthood--which he admits he has been roundly criticized for suggesting--should be made up of contemporary shamans and Druids, such as semioticians, physicists, radiation experts, linguists, anthropologists and psychologists.

Hopefully, they will have more success than ancient Egyptians, who tried to thwart grave robbers by attaching curses to Pharaoh’s tombs. Most of those alarms, unheeded by thieves who did not understand the words, were found in pyramids that had already been looted, plundered and quarried.

The responsibility for giving nuclear garbage a decent burial falls on the U.S. Department of Energy. The stuff must be isolated for 10,000 years before radioactivity decays to background levels. Some of the wastes will keep their potency for hundreds of thousands of years, unless modern-day alchemists can convert the mountains of deadly trash into something tamer.

The Department of Energy wants to encase tons of spent uranium pellets, heavy metals and other high-tech junk in a glass-like state so it can’t mix easily with water, then entomb it in catacombs burrowed from rock formation deep inside the Earth.

The first permanent graveyard for wastes from five decades of atomic bomb production is awaiting opening in the New Mexico Badlands. The Waste Isolation Pilot Project, as the final resting place for military wastes is known, cost $1 billion to carve out of salt beds. A legal snag has delayed the first shipments.

Meanwhile, no final resting place has been approved for tons of commercial nuclear wastes, now stockpiling at reactor sites around the nation. But tests are being done at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, where cooled lava formations are 12 times more dense than concrete.

Eventually, if the repositories ever open, people must be isolated from the lethal legacy. So in the 1980s, the Energy Department sought suggestions from a team of experts called the Human Interference Task Force.

One idea is a symbol that conveys the same message as a skull and crossbones, or a Mr. Yuk sticker, has on contemporary poisons. It would be a trefoil, colored yellow to stand out, that would mean: “Caution: Biohazardous Waste Buried Here.”

Cartoon panels have also been suggested because no words would be needed, something like a futuristic takeoff on the Ghostbusters logo, picturing a shovel with a line through it so no one will dig up the waste.

Engineers are advised not to use precious metals or valuable stones in the warning markers, because future generations will steal them--the way past pillagers looted burial sites.

The nuclear burial grounds should be marked on future maps and detailed scientific documents should be stored at several locations and libraries for future reference, the task force said. The recommendations were contained in a report titled “Communications Measures to Bridge 1,000 Millennia.”

At the very least, the future deserves a warning that it is inheriting dangerous substances such as cesium, plutonium, technicium and other exotic-sounding stuff. Then it becomes their problem, authorities say.

In 1980, the Energy Department adopted this policy: “Although this generation bears the responsibility for protecting future societies from the waste it creates, future societies must assume the responsibility for any risks which arise from deliberate and informed acts which they choose to perform.”