This Place is not a Place of Honor

Hello there friends,

I hope you’ve had a good week and that you enjoyed reading my interview with Cornelius Holtorf. If you didn’t get a chance to check it out yet, here’s the link again:

As well as personal memories from around the time of the Chernobyl disaster (which had a particularly profound social impact in Germany, where Cornelius is from), it’s packed with ideas and insights from his work as an archaeologist into the monumental challenge of safely storing the high-level radioactive waste material produced by both nuclear weapons and nuclear power, over an almost unimaginably long timescale.

One of the things he references is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and the work done by a panel of experts at the Sandia National Laboratories, including social scientists, historians, archaeologists, futurists and climatologists convened to try to come up with a warning system to alert people many thousands of years into the future to the presence of this radioactive material.

The resulting report, first published in 1993, included a warning text and images of possible physical warning markers that could be left at the eventual waste repository (on the basis that language might have changed or even disappeared over such a vast time frame).

And back in 2010, I produced a brief animation inspired by this report, which I’m sharing with you here today.

It was the first time I’d ever worked directly with an animator and one of the earliest films I produced independently outside of my TV work and there are definitely things I would change about it if I made it again today. But it was a fascinating piece to work on. And fun fact (which will probably only make sense to readers of a certain age) it was narrated by none other than… the Man from Del Monte!¹

Here’s the text of the Long Term Nuclear Warning Waste Message in full:

This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

Do let me know what you think of the video and I’ll look forward to being back in your inbox with more guests sharing their atomic experiences with you very soon.

And don’t be shy in clicking on the ❤️ or re-stacking in Notes if you enjoyed this - it really does help others to find it too.

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1. Brian Jackson starred as the white-suited businessman in a Panama hat in a long-running series of adverts for the processed fruit company in the 1980s & 90s, famed for the catch phrase ‘The Man from Del Monte, he say yes!’ I was definitely thrilled when he said yes to me to voicing this film and he was a joy to work with. He died a couple of years ago at the grand old age of 91. Here he is in his prime enjoying some orange juice. RIP Brian.