Bittersweet Infamy - #102 - Waste 'n' Time

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

Josie tells Taylor about humankind's attempts to communicate the dangers of nuclear waste to our descendants in the very distant future. Plus: the declassified truth about Acoustic Kitty, the CIA's ill-fated attempt to engineer a feline spy.

Are you a business owner or marketer looking to reach highly engaged podcast listeners just like you? Advertise Cast can help. Whether you are looking to promote a national brand across Canada or a regional event or service, we've got you covered. Reach out today to Bob at AdvertiseCast.com. That's B-O-B at AdvertiseCast, as in podcast.com. Welcome to Bitter Sweet and Food. I'm Taylor Basso.

And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on in infamy. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic. The bitter. And the sweet. Summertime. Wow. It is. It's July, baby. Well, it's June 30th when this comes out, but that's practically July. That's July. We're calling it July. It's July. Julio Iglesias. What is your favorite thing about July, Josie? What's my favorite thing about Julio Iglesias?

Well. Well. We'd be here all day. Oh my god. My favorite thing about July, I think my favorite thing is that it's like full on full tilt summer. It's as summery as summer gets, really. But you've had a little summer behind you and you have a little summer ahead.

So you're just like, you're just floating. Like, you don't even have to think about that. You don't think about this. You're floating. That's true. You're as far away from snowflakes as you get. You're as far away from autumn leaves. You're as far away from these rainy showers. It's it's just it's just high summer. It's it's the height of summer. Yeah. You hear that? That's the that's the summer police. They're coming. Oh, it's just high summer. It's the height of summer. Yeah.

You hear that? That's the summer police. They're coming. Oh. That's Donna Summer. You know, bad girls. What's your favorite thing about July? What's my favorite? You know, mine is much the same, I would say. I'm a summer baby through and through. I was born in the summer and I like it. The summer's my favorite season. I like the endlessness of it, the possibility, the summer fling, the horniness, the, you

know, the hotness, the... Those long days in BC! Yeah, I don't like the forest fires now. I will say that they've really put a crimp on summer such as it is. Yeah. Are there fires right now? Are y'all having any issues? Uh, not like major ones yet as of taping, but like we're taping in June so kind of giving them the show away here. It's not actually July yet. Whaaaaat? I know. That's the summer police coming for you. Speaking of the police coming for you,

you should join us over at ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy for the Bittersweet Film Club where we are going to be covering in July. We're going to be covering May, December. We probably should have done it in May or December. It wasn't my decision. The fans voted. We put it up to the Film Club subscribers. That's true. This is the film that they chose and spoiler for what's to come. If you want to hear us review a movie of your choosing, you should definitely think about becoming a monthly subscriber because you may have the opportunity to make proposals such as those. Wow, that was so seductive, Taylor. I'm trying to seduce people into joining the film club, Josie.

I know! Maybe I'll become a member of the coffee club. You, me, Mitchell Collins, and the monthly subscribers who are welcome to come and join us over at ko-fi.com slash be a student for me. And in the meantime, this July, we're going to be discussing May, December. Nellie Portman. Yeah, it's got Nellie Portman. It's got Julianne Moore. It's got Charles Melton. The hot guy. He's the one. It's loosely based on the real life teacher-student sexual assault scandal of Mary Kay Letourneau. Very famous and influential teacher scandal.

The teacher scandal. The, I would say, the teacher scandal. And this is like a fictionalized treatment of that. It takes some interesting twists and turns and really does talk a lot about the nature of infamy and we'd like to talk about it with you so join us. And also I mean maybe I'll just save it for the sake of it. Yeah save it. I really liked it. I thought it was good. Oh save it! You're gonna give this away for free!

This is for the subscribers! K-hyphen-f-i.com. FitterSweet Infamy. You want to dive right into where I'm infamous? I'm ready to dive baby. I'm hopping out of that plane, off the diving board. Yep, where else? Dive into a big cake of Minfamous.

A submarine. Yeah, I'm in a submarine. Dive into the cake. Dive into the cake. Yeah. Oh wait, there's someone in there! Oh no, okay. Alright, let's hop to it. So, bitter sweethearts who listened to our 100th episode, which hopefully is everyone by now,

because we really plugged the hell out of that. So, if we missed you on that one somehow, you should really go back and listen. It's a hell of a thing. And in that episode, we got some feedback from our Bitter Sweethearts, all of it very nice, but there was one anonymous suggestion that we needed to do more cat-based stories.

Very anonymous, very anonymous. Very anonymous. I have no idea who that is. A noble. And so that comment, I would say, triggered a real monkey's paw situation here. Be careful what you wish for, I guess, is maybe the moral going into this,

because I have brought a cat-based minfamous, minfamous is of course the little infamous story to start the episode off, the little opening act. Warmer ever? Yeah, I brought something for the feline persuasion, so... Ooh, sexual? This one's for you. Anonymous?

Sexual? Well, well, well... I don't know if you're gonna want this gift once you've actually heard it. But I would say this is not maybe...cat lovers? I don't know how you're gonna feel about this one. But it is a cat story, undeniably. Is it violins? Are we going? No, you're getting...it might as well be.

Oh no. It might as well be. It's violence towards not towards... let's just hear it. Okay. It's not known who in America's Central Intelligence Agency, also known as the CIA, first made the observation that cats, in all their unobtrusiveness and curiosity might make ideal spies. Oh! No? Do you think? Does that make sense to you?

The cat, the feline spy? They have that like... They have the aesthetic. James Bond. Yes! Yeah. I want my catnip shaken, not stirred. Yeah.

Totally. Great time to use the Sean Connery impression that I taught you, by the way, if you wanted to. In cat form. Meow. I've got nine lives. Octopussy, is that you? There you go, it's already in the title.

But yes, a slinky aesthetic, the black cat with the big yellow eyes. You can see a spy in here, yes. Yeah, sneaking in and out of the dark. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Flea to foot always lands on its feet, right? All of these qualities that you'd love in a spy. The agency has worked with all species of potential assets

from dolphins to ravens to even bugs. Okay. According to Robert Wallace, who headed the CIA's Office of Technical Services in the 1990s, the CIA has for many years experimented with the use of animals as spies. Quote, animals can go places people can't.

Animals are unalerting. The other side of the coin is that although animals can be trained, they have to be constantly trained. The upkeep, care, and maintenance is significant. Right. Also, allegiance? I guess that's part of training, right? So you're saying that we need to make the animals more patriotic so they don't flip for like a bowl of tuna.

Yeah. Is what you're getting at. Is it America or a bowl of tuna, baby? What are you? What's on the line here? And obviously I would go for the bowl of tuna, so. that's why they call them Bolsheviks that bowl that bowl of tuna Writing in the book spy craft the secret history of the CIA spy text from communism to al-qaeda Along with H Keith Melton and Henry Schlesinger Robert Wallace tells us that the idea of a cat spy First emerged when the CIA was targeting an Asian head of state for surveillance. They noticed that as the target conducted long strategy meetings with his aides, Katz wandered in and out of the meeting area with impunity, seemingly unnoticed. Adorable. Adorable, and unobtrusive, and just lay there in a sunbeam and leave, right? Lay there in

a sunbeam, catching like peak strategic audio audio and then leave. So began what would become known as Project Acoustic Kitty, the creation of a feline super spy. Research for Project Acoustic Kitty was carried out for five years around 1962 to 1967, a joint project between the CIA's Office of Technical Services and Office of Research and Development, says Bob Bailey, an accomplished animal trainer best known for training dolphins for the CIA. Quote, we've, okay, let's, okay, then let's stop there. What's so funny about that? The cat feels like a much more domestic creature that like could be infiltrating different

areas. Dolphins are smart! Dolphins are very smart, but what, the dolphin goes up to the submarine? Dolphins can retrieve things. You can retrieve things from shipwrecks. Okay. Okay. How about that?

Yeah. How about that? Yeah. I mean, it all just feels very Austin Powers, like the sharks with lasers. I mean, what is Austin Powers like based on if not this though right? Here I am telling you about Operation Acoustic Kitty which is kind of the same it's just cats instead of dolphins. It's the same basic thought same vibe. So anyway it says our boy Bob who's training the dolphins, we found that we could condition the cat to listen to voices. We have no idea how we did it, but

We found that the cat would more and more listen to people's voices and listen less to other things That's great. The cats are good listeners, but it does us no good unless we can hear those secret conversations, too Yeah What do you think we might need to do here? Create a piece of hardware a recording piece of hardware that the cat can wear. Wear or? Ingest? Yeah, or?

We need to turn these cats into remote controlled radios through surgical implantation. Okay, yeah, there we go. I mean that was like a very like loose use of the word wear, but okay. Yes, sure, and ingest, you were in the ballpark. You're in the ballpark. Quoting Matt Soniak from a 2011 Mental Floss article, for the cats to be effective spies, the implants couldn't affect any of their natural movements lest the spies draw attention to themselves or cause any irritation that would prompt the cats to try to dislodge the equipment by rubbing, clawing, or licking it. Right, yeah. All the

components, a power source, a transmitter, a microphone, and an antenna, would also need to withstand the cat's internal temperature, humidity, and chemistry. Oh my god, because this is the 1960s, so any type of this technology is like- Oh, computers are the size of a room! Ginormous! Yeah! Computers are the size of an entire room! Oh no! No, those poor kitties!

of an entire room. Oh no, those poor kitties. So we run some non-surgical tests, first using dummies and then live animals. We consider the possible negative publicity if the truth comes out, because this sounds weird and I think even then we know that this sounds weird. And you know, people are going to feel bad for the cats, right? Yeah. And then we say, fuck it, let's go full frank and puss. We've weighed out our circumstances, we ball.

Enter California otolaryngologist Robin Michelson, one of the inventors of the cochlear implant, the human cochlear implant, to help us turn this cat into a remote controlled radio transmitter and receiver. We run a microphone and a wire from the cat's inner ear through a three quarter inch long battery at the base of the skull. Oh God. I'm sorry, yeah, we are getting into cat surgery

and implantation. But that's just big. Cat sci-fi body horror. Yeah, that's just big to me. We need big cats, I'm sure. To an instrument cluster implanted in its rib cage through which we can direct its movements with ultrasonic sounds.

So if you imagine you can kind of control this cat left, right, up, down. We build an antenna of fine wire and weave it under the fur all the way to the tail to conceal it. So the tail becomes this cat's aerial basically. The antenna! Yeah, it's really sad. And I'm sorry to keep saying it's, we have disagreement on whether it's a boy cat or

a girl cat, so I've like kind of put it down a little bit. This cat is, it's a robo cat now. It's a robo spy. It's a half robot spy cat now. Oh god. I'm sorry. No, no, I'm just like... Okay, I said that you would regret asking for this cat story whoever you are, right?

Yeah, oh my Says former special assistant to the CIA director Victor Marchetti They slit the cat open put batteries in him wired him up. They made a monstrosity So you're gonna be floored to hear that the tech around this was not perfect Oh really? The small battery size restricted the amount of time the cat would be able to record limiting its usefulness It was hard to hear that the tech around this was not perfect. Oh really? Hmm. The small battery size restricted the amount of time the cat would be able to record, limiting its usefulness.

If the cat got bored, distracted, or hungry, it would just wander off. Because it's a cat. Amen, sister! They did some sort of operation to address the cat's hunger, which makes me sad. I don't know what that's about, but we can move swiftly on. And by the time Acoustic Kitty was finished with its surgical operations and ready for its field operations, the CIA was allegedly 15 to 20 million dollars deep in this experiment. Oh my, that's a lot of catnip. And so we take Acoustic Kitty out for his, her, their first real field operation. And the most popular story, this is the one circulated by Victor Marchetti, who seems

to be responsible for the most cartoonish interpretation of the story. So his version of it goes like this. They're waiting in the van, the operatives are in this van. So you imagine the stereotypical sliding door fake FBI van. And they put the little cat out to whoever. I don't even know where we are. I don't know if we're in America. I don't know if we're in the USSR. I don't know what city we're in. But they let this cat out like in this urban area to like go to this be like go. Here's your moment. Yeah. Let's make these five years count, right?

They release the kitty and the story goes that it starts to cross the street and is immediately hit by a taxi and killed. Oh my god. Which is not funny. That is so sad. Quoting Marchetti, there they were sitting in the van with all those dials and the cat was dead. Oh, that poor kitty. In this version of the story a CIA operative then retrieves the agent's remains in order that the tech should not fall into Soviet hands. Of course, Robert Wallace disputes this account.

He claims the project was merely deemed ineffective and the cat surgically decommissioned one last time to live a happy and healthy kitty life. I don't know. Another one of those sounds quite right, right? So maybe they're both true. Maybe there's like two cats, one immediately got squished and the other they're like, you know what, let's just decommission baby. Honorable discharge. Honorable discharge. Yes, yes. No, I wonder if maybe though, maybe it's the opposite and maybe like actually the cat was very successful, but like this is like the obfuscation story that we're now telling the public. The cat espionage program is actually thriving, but like this is like the obfuscation story that we're now telling the public. The cat espionage program is actually thriving, but you know Al-Qaeda can't know about this, right?

Fair. Either way you can read a declassified, though heavily redacted, CIA memo entitled Views on Trained Cats held in the National Security Administration Archive at George Washington University. The memo concludes, "'Our final examination of trained cats convinced us "'that the program would not lend itself "'in a practical way to our highly specialized need. "'However, the discovery cats can indeed be trained "'to move short distances is in itself

"'a remarkable scientific achievement.'" So... You mean the short distance between the van and the taxi? Listen, and it would have moved further had fate not... That's an act of God. That's an act of... Yeah, that's a...

Manhattan Transit, right? Yeah, that's an asteroid coming in and... Yeah. A checkerboard asteroid, baby. That's what that was. So ends the brief foray into feline espionage that came to what looking at it now is its inevitable conclusion Cats are ultimately poor intelligence assets because they're easily killed by that most key thing to the spying trade Curiosity they probably wasted all those lives that the cat had by like all these like various surgeries

You think it died on the table when they were turning it into a remote controlled car, okay? I know yeah, if they had the ability to control where it was going with the sonic Vibrations that's what they're saying. That's what they're saying is and isn't that something in the end? Isn't that something it almost that's worth 20 million dollars that we we turned a cat into like a toy robot So but they didn't whoever was maneuvering the cat didn't see the taxi? Maybe they were in like a blind spot or like around, you know, these corners. Maybe they just thought it hadn't quite started yet. Yeah, yeah.

It's a dude. It's a poor kitty. It's true of people too. Anyone, anywhere is just prone to getting randomly taken out by a random taxi cab. And so we should really look both ways when we cross the street. That's the lesson here.

And train our operatives to do so as well. Yeah. That's what I would say. Oh, poor little kitties. OK, but then they stopped that we know of. Oh, yeah. That we know of, as far as we're aware. Well, now I'm like, the technology

is probably small enough. They just like hook a little thing. Yeah but now we don't need to. Now we don't need to. Like now we have other better... yeah the technology has come far enough. Exactly. There was like someone saying like you can like just point something at someone's back and like hear what they're saying now. Like it's you don't need a cat. Okay. You don't need a cat. I mean but you need a cat. Cats are for companionship and keeping us honest. You need the cat for that. Yeah.

To remind you that spying is stupid. Just chill out. Go to the beach. Yeah. Josie, for the 102nd time, what do you have to say to me with your filthy mouth? Aw! It's really heartwarming. Okay. You know, looking back, as you just did with so much sentiment, I got pulled into the story

and only kind of after I had put all the pieces together, I realized that I had barnacled onto a theme that I've already brought up. Feral hogs, scary holes. Uh huh. What else? What else we got? Dolphins. Dolphins, often, frequently, I feel.

Yeah, dolphins are in there. Animals. You always end up inphins often frequently I feel. Yeah, dolphins are in there. Animals. You always end up in the animal kingdom I feel like. Water, survival stories in the water. Okay, I'm glad to hear this because it kind of took me surprise. I was like, oh my god, this is my third story about blah blah blah, and it wasn't any of those things. Full war? Adjacent nuclear power. Okay, Rabbit Island. Ok Okunoshima. Oh no, Rabbit Island was different. Was that nuclear power? That was like mustard gas. That was a mustard gas thing, but it was kind of like adjacent in some ways.

It was an offshoot. Yeah, it was an offshoot. But certainly number 61 lost in translation. Talking about Godzilla and nuclear war. So I don't know what it is about nuclear power that gets to me. Maybe it's all The Simpsons I watched as a kid. TG The Simpsons was very big in the pop cultural depiction of nuclear power and I also feel like it evokes a very 90s anxiety around nuclear power which is that like it's just this unknowable

big tank of green glowing goo and one person pulls the wrong lever, we're all irradiated forever. Homer Simpson who works there. And also in my own geography, the San Onofre nuclear power generator was just up the coast from us and we would drive by it anytime we were going up to LA, I would see these two big domes right on the beach and they looked exactly like boobs. They had little nozzle tops so they looked like exactly like boobs. They had little like nozzle tops so they just nips, boobs. Begged to be looked at by children. Well originally they had one and it was nicknamed the beach ball and then immediately when they put another identical one right next to it. Now they're titties. Now they're pradongas. It's not just a child thing. It's like that's a whole

world thing. Hey if there's one thing we've learned in previous episodes of Very Sweet Infamies, that like, young, older, in the middle, we all love Latatita, right? It's very true. So, you know, our other nuclear stories have maybe been a little further afield. So this is coming in touching base in North American soil. So we are a little closer to home in New Mexico. Geographically, we're close, but time-wise, we are way, way out on a limb here compared to where we are today. Okay. Taylor. Josie. I want you to have this question in your head as I tell this story, and we'll come back

to you towards the end. Okay. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. How do you communicate to a future human species that a nuclear waste disposal center is dangerous? So like the physical- Spray paint on the doors. Spray paint on the doors. Okay, spray paint on the doors. All right, right on the game.

Bury it in concrete. No bad ideas. You spray paint on the doors, you bury it in concrete. You, oh, you fucking, you give this place the full like Chernobyl fucking vines crawl, like you want this place to look like, you tell every child there, throw your doll down where you are and leave as though you've been raptured, because it needs to look like everybody's been raptured and nature is reclaiming this place. Okay. And fucking if you come in here you're gonna get three eyes. Like that is what it needs to be. But even like Chernobyl there's like Chernobyl tourists who go in cross the barriers and like Sick fucks. Sick fucks. Selfies. What, okay so I don't know that you can taboo prove anything.

Yeah. Honestly. Yeah. I don't, I don't think that that's possibleoo prove anything. Yeah, honestly. Yeah, I don't I don't think that that's possible I think our curiosity Curiosity kills the cat kills us too Even if you look at like South Park getting into shit for like drawing the Prophet Muhammad Well, why because that taboo existed and was there so they did it. Yeah, there's always gonna be trolls And there's always gonna be youthful thrill seekers and people with more sense of adventure than sense and all of these things. So I don't know that you can taboo prove any.

But you can sure spray paint on doors. That you can do. You can buy spray paint at the store. The one other element to consider here is that going way out on the time limb. We can't buy spray paint at the store. That's what I'm hearing. Okay. What if we are dealing with a danger

that is going to be around for thousands of years, specifically 240,000 years? Oh, we're not even gonna make it that long. Okay. Have you seen this shit? Have you seen this shit? Are we gonna make it to 2200? Let's get there first.

Right? Let's get there first. Oh man. An interesting question because I think what you're proposing, regardless of the solution that you implement, it relies on the stewardship of generations and generations and generations of people. There's nothing you can do that will absolutely

unequivocally still exist as a landmark 200,000 years later, unless people are willing to both take care of it and continue to pass along the story of why it's relevant. And you've already seen, we've already seen, like, I was telling you a story from the 1960s and we can even agree on how that cat died, what gender it was, da da da da da. Stories get lost real real quick. Or they get turned and switched and then all lopsided. Yes, or someone, all of a sudden we've decided decided someone again with more money than sense

has decided that oh actually this irradiated land is potentially worth a profit so I have to convince people that it's not actually irradiated through a campaign of misinformation or whatever it is yeah so yeah I don't I don't think it can be done I don't know what I would do and I don't think it can be done but it definitely involves burying things in concrete. That I know. Okay. Well, this is a question that the US nuclear safety entities have been asking for a very long time. And it's not just the US, I'll say. There are definitely other countries because nuclear power and nuclear warfare is all over the world. But this question is kind of a very naughty philosophical one. Naughty is like gnarly intense. In most

iterations of this question, whether they're from the US or France or Germany, Japan, there's always an assumption that we will be speaking to humans, we won't be speaking to extraterrestrials. We're speaking to humans that biologically are similar to us. So they have five senses. They have- Yeah, wait, wait, this is hard. Legs and feet and arms, hands and eyes and lips,

all of that. Well, they're not gonna eat. We're gonna have wheels by then, for sure. We're gonna have wheels by then, for sure. Yeah. Okay. Okay, you heard it here first He's heard it here first and typically The nuclear powers that be pick a date that isn't quite as far out With the idea of like, you know, we got a we got to make this at least a little bit simpler on ourselves Yeah

We can and if we pass this on to people a thousand years from now, then they can come up with a new one. Mm. And since, or give a check mark to the old one, or whatever it is. So the thought experiment typically hovers around 10,000 years into the future. How are you communicating to humans that are biologically similar to us in 10,000 years? Which, it's kind of funny because 10,000 years is completely arbitrary when you think about the shelf life of nuclear waste and its toxicity, which again, 240,000 years. So not even like

a teent of this like just really fucking things up. We're really fucking things. I think that's what this reveals more than anything. It's like, wait a minute. We have waste. We have toxic waste that is going to outlive every single person on the planet a hundred times. Oh, a hundred thousand times. Oh my God. I can't even. Okay. Now, as you pointed out, the waste will be buried underground.

But the issue is, is that if humans 10,000 years from now decide to dig deep enough that they run the risk of exposing these enormous amounts of radioactivity into the environment, right? So it's not like it's like on a silver platter being like, lick this radioactive lollipop. Like it is hidden and away, but you still can't have people. Humans are very good at finding things. Curiosity, curiosity.

The levels of radioactivity that we're talking about will certainly be fatal to anybody who unearths the waste before the end of its half-life. Again, 240,000 years. But even then the long range and long-term negative effects of exposing that radioactive waste, it'll concentrate at that center point of contact and then for miles and miles of a radius outward,

it will still be risky and horrible for other living matter. I want you to mull this over, okay? You gave me some spray paint, you gave me some varying. Thanks for giving me that to mull over. Yeah, yeah. Have a good night's sleep thinking on that one. I'm sure I can figure it out by the end of the evening if I put on some coffee. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Good, good. Perfect. That's all I wanted. Thank God. Another intense element of this scenario too, is that it's like, it's not a message of like,

like your school time capsule, where it's like, what did you do on Valentine's Day in third grade? What's your vacations like in the 90s? Yeah, no, it's like lethal high stakes into the world. Imagine your descendant is on the other side of this radioactive wall with a pickaxe and yours is the voice that has to stop them from striking through and irradiating the entire planet.

What do you say? Also, they might have gills and no eyelids. And wheels, wheels for legs. Yeah, and wheels. There's a lot to contemplate here in the crafting of the message. Okay, so here's another sobering thing to keep in mind. Oh, okay. Good. As of March 2023, according to the publication Scientific American,

about 880,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors remain stranded at reactor sites. And this number, so this is waste that is not properly being disposed of. Right. And this number is increasing by 2,000 metric tons each year. Cool. So we have essentially like... Yep. A time bomb.

A nuclear time bar. And a nuclear time bar stored 88,000 metric tons. And we've well, well, now it's 90,000. Because this was from March 2023. So at the rate that we are, yes, that we are creating nuclear waste, it's just like compounding and compounding. And I was saying like the the storage of it, right? So as of now as well, there is no designated proper storage area for all of this waste.

What that would be is a designated geological disposal site for high level nuclear waste in the US or Canada. I looked up Canada as well. Canada does produce nuclear waste. There's nuclear reactors in Canada, but they also don't have a secure location to store this waste. We should do that. As of this year, Canada has started the political proceedings of trying to determine where that space will be, who will be in charge of it. Like, yes.

Thank you Canada. It's good you keep going. Oh Canada. Keep doing that. Yeah. So there's a lot of things to define maybe in just those two statements I shared. First off, what is nuclear or radioactive waste? That's a good maybe place to start. It's the byproduct of the use of nuclear technology. It's the shit at the beginning of the ninja turtles that makes them into mutant ninja turtles.

There we go. As opposed to standard sewer going turtles of uh of ignominy of no note. Yeah exactly yes. Thank you the official that's the official. Yeah yeah yeah that's the official. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the Webster's definition, but people have all kinds of different thoughts about it. So the waste is generated during various stages of nuclear fuel cycle. So it's from the mining, the refining, the conversion, the fabrication of the nuclear fuel, and it's also in researching of nuclear...

yeah, it's a hard one. Yeah, you gave yourself the George W. Bush challenge on this one. Yeah, I did. Nuclear one time, you're fucked. Nuclear, yeah. We're gonna get all the letters about it. Well, you will, I'm not answering those. So it's all the research that goes into nuclear power, but also into the machinery and all

of the equipment that is needed to decommission a nuclear facility. So it's essentially like everything that nuclear power touches, which is kind of wild. They mark them into three tiers. It's the actual spent reactor or the innards of the bomb, of the nuclear bomb. It's that, but it's also the machinery that's responsible for moving the equipment, the cooling tanks that keep the nuclear rods from exploding, the metal shields used to protect scientists and workers who are working with these materials. It's the gloves and the suits that the workers wear to protect themselves. So you can't just send those to consignment, can you?

Nope. You can't just send those to like Maggie's pre-love. You know what I mean? Uh-uh, that's not gonna happen. Yeah, all of my references on this really are The Simpsons. Yes, really? Truly. It's really, yeah, yeah, I'm just seeing like a Homer's gloves. All of my mental images are like the green rod and the barrel full of green goo.

Yes. Yes. This is a troubling realization. I guess I'm learning more now. Thank you. It's kind of wild to think about that, that it's not just like taking a battery out of, you know, your alarm clock or something. It's like, oh, I gotta get rid of it.

Well, it makes sense though. Everything that nuclear waste touches is de facto, might as well be nuclear waste, right? It's contaminated. Yeah. That's why we need to bury shit in concrete and have kids throw their dolls on the ground. Yeah.

And then those dolls can grow clusters and shit and we can all just fucking back off. So when we talk about like a stable geological designated disposal site, that's for the high to intermediate level of nuclear waste. So the gloves, they can chill somewhere for about a century and they'll be okay. But we're talking about- Ready to wear. Yeah, ready to wear for your great great great grandkids. Everything comes back in these fashion,

these hundred year fashion cycles. They'll be right back in by then. Yeah, exactly. Your grandmother's nuclear gloves. They glow so pretty, I know, and they don't even hurt anymore. My fingernails just stay on now. But for that high level to intermediary level of radioactive waste, that's where it needs

to be in these deep, stable, geological disposal sites. So what do those look like? They look like fucking holes in the ground. Exactly what you're saying. That was what I was going to guess. Let's just find a big canyon that's not particularly thought of fondly by tourists and dump it there. Fill it in, yeah. Where's our ugliest canyon?

Yeah. So there were a few thoughts when there was some brainstorming done about how to get rid of this nuclear waste Which I will note again did not happen before we created the nuclear waste But yes, if so facto here we are. That's not really our style as humans, unfortunately Mm-hmm. We ask for forgiveness not permission. Yes So there was initial talk of sending this waste up into space, aim it straight at the sun and hope for the best. I mean the sun is... Fuck, wait!

Isn't that just sending a nuke into the sun? Am I being stuffy here? Call me old fashioned, aren't we just sending a nuke into the sun? I mean the sun is doing nuclear reactions all the time, so I think the idea is that I know very little about the sun. I will say that I know very little about the sun. But you're right, it is a little disconcerting to be like the one thing that like we know is kind of like keeping the planet alive is the sun and...

Yeah, why are we pissing off the sun now? Yeah. Well that's very old-school human shit, don't the sun yeah yeah don't fly too close my doggy let's embrace tradition so that idea got knocked off actually not because of that but because as humans we don't have a great track record of getting rockets out of our atmosphere there's quite a few failures that have happened routinely as well. And so if we shot up nuclear.

Elon, do something. Nuclear waste and just like, oopsies, a bird flew in front of the rocket. Kaboom. Hit the moon. All that nuclear waste spread far and wide. Yeah, then we would die. That's true.

We would die. That would be bad. You know, there was thoughts maybe we should just dig it into the ocean floor. Let it chill there. Yeah, again, this is very classic human up didn't work now down. Now down? Now down. Well, thankfully that didn't really take traction in the global community, international waters and all. People got pissed off. That's our ceiling, bud. Also though, I think there's quite a few examples where we could learn from in terms of...

Polluting the ocean? If you remember from Lost in Translation, Lucky Dragon number five boat? Yes, I do. Yes. It was this fishing boat that was paying attention to all the signs and everything that they were doing, exactly what they were supposed to do. And they were fishing outside of the fallout zone from Bikini Atoll, which is where the US tested the hydrogen bomb. And the way that the wind was working and the wave action, they were exposed to high levels of radioactivity and it

nearly killed these fishermen and it raised questions about the safety of the fish that everybody was eating in Japan. It was like a big horrible disaster. Theoretically was part of what birthed Godzilla. Yes! This giant metaphor of what happens when you irradiate the ocean and our collective fear about it, the same fear I imagine that has you revisiting the subject over and over, you know what I mean? Yeah. That kind of latent, it's unnerving. It's, you literally said, how would you advise people about this? And I was like, bury it in cement and have a child hurl his

doll down dramatically so no one comes here. Like it's very taboo. And as we say, we're very, we're attracted to taboo, right? We are as a species we are. So then there are also thoughts, okay, well where else could we store this? Maybe the poles. Maybe we just like stuff it in some ice. Oh my god.

Again, running into the same issues of internationally owned territory that wasn't going to fly. And global warming now. And those poles are melting and it would just create even more work for us later as we continue to overheat our planet. Sure. Okay. Now we're left with the terrestrial solution of just digging deep, putting that shit in, cementing over it, drop a doll and walk away.

Yes, yes. Exactly. Throw up some ivy. Throw up some vines too, please. Do we have like a creepy theme park that we can plunk down and then like reclaimed by nature? Like let's really make this place creepy. Fog machine always, always

on. Contiguous fog, yes. Yes. Okay. So there's been chat for almost 40, going on 50 years now around a site, a disposal site in Nevada called Yucca Mountain. Yucca Mountain is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, which is not far enough for me, but okay. Yeah, fair enough. And there was a lot of talk through different administrations, different presidencies, different iterations of the Senate about how this was going to be the radioactive waste disposal area for the US. They were gonna drill in to Yucca

Mountain and just lock it all in there and cement it up and call it a day. The community though that surrounds Yucca Mountain said, oh, apps are fucking literally not. That's not gonna happen. Of course, of course, of course. Well, we'll see. It's not always of course that a community's really like. Oh shit. Sometimes it's fuck you, pay me. Yeah. I feel that too. But there was a lot of back and forth between different administrations.

The communities were given the option to veto sometimes and then other times not. It's just not super clear all the time. At one point, the Department of Energy, the US Department of Energy created a little cartoon guy named Yucca Mountain Joe, who was this big-chinned miner who would tell all the kids that nobody lived at Yucca Mountain and storing nuclear waste is cool! And... Wait, wait, but he's... Why does he say... he's kind of tur... Wait, yuck a mountain Joe! Say it ain't sorrow! You're supposed to... don't you give a shit!

Yuck a mountain Joe, you should care! Even if they don't! Even if nobody lives there! You hypothetically live there! I don't think this guy's telling the truth! He was equated to like the Joe Camel of radioactive disposal. Joe Camel like the Joe camel of radioactive disposal. Joe camel, the smoking camel.

The smoking camel. The smoking camel. Yeah. Wow, wow, wow. What a scab. Total scab. Total scab. Shame.

Shame on you, Yucca Mountain show. So there's all these different iterations of support and like what that would look like. But the opposition stayed steady throughout all of that. In particular opposition from the indigenous folks, the Western Shoshone from that area, who have lived there for time and memorial, my friend. Right. And that's the thing about even the pick a fucking canyon no one goes to and put it there. Every canyon is somebody's home. Yeah. At the end of the day. Yeah. Right? There are very few, especially when you're talking about like continental America, there are very few like uninhabited

places. There's like no place that's not of like some significance to some community. Exactly. And they're not gonna want a bunch of nuclear waste poured there and fair fucks to them for that, right? Like that's very understandable. Yeah. Why is it that we can like toss out the 20,000 people that live near Yucca Mountain, but we are so concerned with future? You know, it's just kind of like the math is... the math is fuzzy. In any case, it suggests both that some physical places and that by extension the people who reside in those physical places are less important than certain other places because you wouldn't, it'll never be a wealthy white community that they're saying,

why don't you guys just clear out of your mansions? Yeah, yeah, come on. And we'll put it here, right? It'll always be, oh, there's some blue collar population of 1500 around here that no one will care about because they're poor and brown or something. You know what I mean? There's always usually some part of that in there. Oh, totally. Well, just because Yucca Mountain didn't turn out doesn't mean that there wasn't

a community that was willing to take on this endeavor. So that takes us to Carlsbad, New Mexico. Okay. That's in the southern half of the state. The site for the radioactive waste disposal isn't in town necessarily, but it's east of Carlsbad, about 30 miles. And yes, it is that Carlsbad that is the nearest town to Carlsbad Caverns, which is a national park, a huge, huge cave system. I've been there. I've seen the bats. And what did the bats have to say to you? which is a national park, a huge, huge cave system. Yep.

I've been there, I've seen the bats. And what did the bats have to say to you? Fuck nuclear. Yeah. They said, no, they didn't ask for us. They didn't ask for our signatures. Yeah. We wouldn't have said yes.

So the town, they did choose to support the facility being that close to them, citing how with the facility there, there would be jobs available for at least 100, 200 years. And that would ensure the stability of the town for generations to come. Honestly, yeah. If you're in a capitalist economy where like small town America is kind of being left to die, that makes that's a local industry and a half, right? That's and that's also explains how we end up getting gills and wheels in the long term. Good point. Good point

Yeah, but if you want to go the noble route as well This waste has to go somewhere. It has to be somewhere So, you know what? We will be the stewards of it and we will do it. If you pay us enough, we'll do it. If you give us our wheels and our gills. Yeah, good stewards for hire. We'll do it.

Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense. So the site itself is kind of close to a 1960s, 1970s nuclear testing site that did get closed in the 70s. It's called Project Gnome. But the reason that it was chosen specifically, and not just because the community was like, okay, we'll thumbs up it, but it's because 900 meters below the earth of this site is a massive salt deposit, which is about 3,000 to 4,000 feet of continuous salt underneath the ground. So like this huge band of salt.

This can provide a stable geologic formation to deposit the nuclear waste in. Okay. So that's always what they're looking for is something that's very stable. It's not susceptible to earthquakes, tidal waves. The thing about the salt deposit is that they can dig it out very easily. So it's 1999 and they start prepping the facility. While listening to Mambo Number 5 by Rebecca. Yes, I think so.

And Live in Lovita Loca by Ricky Martin. Yeah. Like we all were. The facility is called Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIP for short. W-I-P-P. Exactly. And it is run by the US Department of Energy. So they start by digging these four shafts that

go the 1,000 meters down. And once they can get gear and equipment down there, then they start digging away at the salt, which if you kind of imagine salt crystals, it's pretty easy to do. They just, it's almost like a sandpaper. Like it's really easy to, um, to move it around and, and get it going. And in fact, it's, uh, when I don't quite know why it's this particular salt, but it's pink. So apparently when you're down there, it's like these gorgeous like coral, orange and salmon colors when you put light on it.

Yeah. Nice. And it's like, that's where the little girl with the umbrella goes, right? Yeah. To get it. She just picks it out with her umbrella in her little basket. So they started down in these like, essentially the rooms that they dig out of the salt. And they start storing intermediary reactive waste there. So we haven't gotten to the

high level stuff. Just the intermediary, just like the equipment that has touched it. Everything is stored in these aluminum barrels. I want you to just imagine like trash cam barrels. Like that's what they look like. And they have lids on them. They are marked with the little like nuclear trefoil. And they're just aluminum. I don't know if they're aluminum, but they're like some metal barrel and they're just stacked upon stacked upon stacked and they fill these rooms. The idea and why the salt is so important, not just because it's easy to to get through and it's nice and deep down, but the idea is that they'll pack all of these barrels in there and then salt, barrels in there. And then salt, which is a crystal that forms relatively quickly in a geological sense, it grows and it grows really fast. And within the course of a millennia

or two, the salt will crush the barrel. It'll crush it. It'll eat it. That's their idea, is that it'll eat it. Okay. It'll consume quote unquote the radioactive waste, which we know that it's not like, like I think when we say eating it and consuming it, it means like it's gone forever. It's like, no, it's not gone forever. It just gets like pulled up into that salt deposit, right? Into the salt's tummy.

Into the salt's tummy, yes, exactly. I understand. But the idea is that it can get like squished and then that salt creates a barrier as well. So there's all these different, all these different good things about the salt crushing it. Problem solved, right? That's all you do. You just pack them in this little salt box and and make sure the girl with her umbrella gets up the mine shaft out of there. Yeah, before she gets crushed and eaten. Yeah, and then drops it off.

And gets out of there. But now we have 240,000 years to contend with. A lot of little salt girls. Of that radioactive contamination. And 240,000 years of an auspicious economy for the small town of Carlisle. That's true. Very true.

So that's when an organization steps in called Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia is essentially a think tank. And a watermelon. And it's true. I know, I don't quite know why they chose that name because they're just, they're like, one of these strange like government entities

that's like, I don't know if that's what's happening there. Okay. I don't trust the think tank because I don't, that's vague. Is a think tank like a lobbyist meddling organization? Right, yeah. Or do they just write papers? Like there's a big range a think tank like a lobbyist meddling organization? Right, yeah. Or do they just write papers? Like there's a big range in think tank, right? On their website, part of their mission is, we apply science to help detect, repel, defeat, or mitigate threats. It might be important to note too that Logheed Martin is their parent

company and Logheed Martin is responsible for company and oh Lockheed Martin is responsible for a lot of the US weaponry that's created. Yes, yes. They also work alongside NASA so that's fun. Fun. That's the country we find ourselves in, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. That's the country that has all of this nuclear waste and doesn't know how to properly store it. Doesn't know what to do with it, right? Mm-hmm. In 1991, Sandia invites some of the best minds they can to create some type of signage, some type of messaging, some type of architecture, anything really. Whatever these genius minds come up with to communicate

to the future of mankind, stay the fuck away. And especially, don't you dare fucking dig here. Don't dig here. What, what, okay. So now that I'm thinking about it in a more sophisticated way than just drop a doll on it. Yeah. I understand now. Listen. Okay. Is there anything that is both aesthetically striking as a landmark but that would also say stay away? Yeah. Like a big hand clawing up from the ground or something like a blue cipher thing. It needs to be like a... I'm basically saying like scary public art. Yeah. Scary public art I think might be the answer here. It's just Lucy. Scary Lucy. Scary Lucy. Dude, scary Lucy looks like she is

offering you like a spoonful of radioactive waste and you want to say no. It's true. Yeah, yeah, there you go. If you want to hear the full story of Scary Lucy, go back to, I want to say episode 40? I don't know. Look for the one that has, is about Scary Lucy. It's good. It's a, she's a, she's a... This panel that Sandia puts together, it, it's kind of all over the place, right? There's artists, there's a science fiction writer, there are architects, there are scientists. They are called the WIP Marker Panel. WIP being the name of the facility, right? Yep. W-I-P-P. Yeah.

Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. That's what I said. So they're tasked with this responsibility of proposing ideas for Sandia to choose from for this marker. Now for reference, if we go back in time the same length of time as these folks are meant to project into the future, so 10,000 years in the future, if we go 10,000 years back, the latest technology back then was farming. A classic.

A classic. It's true. We did the test of time in a lot of ways. Farming is rad, but culturally we share almost nothing with those folks, right? Like if farming is like the biggest thing on the calendar. They didn't put their iPods in in the bus to listen to podcasts. Yeah. None of it.

Something that got brought up a lot in my research was the solution to the Voyager Golden Record. Are you familiar with that? It's a record that went into space that had recordings of a greeting in all of these different languages, to include Esperanto, I believe. And there was more to it than that, I believe, and like had like,

there was more to it than that, but that was part of it. There's like photos on there that are supposed to be representative of Earth. Drawings of humans. Yeah. Things like that. Some music. Yeah, all these different things. It's a little sample platter of humanity. Exactly, yeah. sample platter of humanity exactly yeah packaged in a capsule and sent out into the cosmos for whomever whatever finds it and then they say we're gonna invade and we'll say good luck we'll already be fucking in a radiated wasteland by then bitches to our own hubris and stupidity and poor planning get wrecked. Exactly. Well, and that's the thing is like the Voyager Golden Record gets to show like the beauty

of humanity. You know, the single tier, the little baby being held in the sky, you know, like all these like, oh really sexy little things. But they didn't put the bittersweet infamy episode about sex kill on there. We want to ease our guests into that sort of thing. But the thing with this warning, which yes, we are meant to be using this warning on the nuclear waste disposal site as a communique with people who will be or entities who are very different

from us. But the thing is, is that it is sharing, like you pointed out, Taylor, something that's not very good. It's showcasing how short-sighted the human race is, how we made this huge mess that we couldn't figure out how to fix in the time, you know, like we'll speaking now, right? Maybe not in the, hopefully in the future or something, fix it, but.

Yeah, okay. But right now we have created lethal waste that we don't know how to properly dispose of or take care of and make it safe for humanity. And that's kind of embarrassing. Like I don't want to talk about. It's all pretty embarrassing at this point. Yeah,. And that's kind of embarrassing. Like, I don't want to talk about it. It's all pretty embarrassing at this point. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

It's all pretty fucking embarrassing at this point. Especially all of it to do with the environment and the treatment of other people. It's very embarrassing. Yes. Every aspect of it, every single aspect of it is a disgrace. Yeah, yeah, it's disgraceful.

It's shameful and it's disgraceful. Yeah. Yes. Welcome to WIP. But here we are. Shameful and disgraceful. And I think kind of on that note, I think it is really important to offer up that some of the thinkers and scientists, all these, you know, genius folks who were given this invitation to create this marker, considered that creating a safety measure for nuclear waste could possibly only encourage the production of more nuclear waste. And so

they declined. They chose not to partake in this thought experiment, for lack of a better word. Okay. I don't know. I kind of, I don't quite know where I fall on that because the fact remains that we have this nuclear waste that needs to be taken care of. I would think the opposite. I would think that sweeping it under the rug emboldens more people to create more and sweep it under the rug. That's true.

Because there's no consequence to it. But I guess there's just been so much of the messaging around nuclear power, specifically the power, is that it's like, oh it's clean, it's safe, it's a green alternative, and it's like, I'm sorry, that facility, a tidal wave hit it and then it exploded and then the entire 50-mile radius of that area has to evacuate for years upon years and people are dying. So, I'm totally safe. So your anti-nuclear power is what I'm hearing. You think it's bad under all circumstances. I think that until we can figure out a way to get rid of this waste and to more properly take care of it.

We should shut it down and put Carl's bat in charge of everything. Yeah, get the bats on it. That's all I'm saying. Fair enough, fair enough. Film them what to do. everything. Yeah, get the bats on it. That's all I'm saying. I don't know. I also do really like electricity and I like running a computer. Yeah, Tracy's sick. Remember, you've been out of electricity recently. How was that for you? Hot. It was really hot. Without electricity, there's a lot of places in the world that I don't think I know I couldn't live. Especially we're talking New Mexico. Yeah. Jesus. So part of the invitation that WIP sends out reads, the knowledge necessary to develop a marker system that will remain operational during the performance period of the site, which is they're calling 10,000 years, can be found across many of our traditional

disciplines of study. For this reason, we are constructing a panel of 8 to 10 experts that is multi-disciplinary in nature, spanning the fields of material science, climatology, communications, and the social sciences, including archaeology, anthropology, and psychology. Each panel member will answer questions regarding the marker system that directly concern his or her experience. For example, a materials scientist will help identify what the markers should be made of, or questions regarding the marker system that directly concern his or her experience. For example, a materials scientist will help identify what the markers should be made of,

while a linguist will be concerned with what kind of inscriptions should go on the markers. We got an interior decorator to match the drapes to the carpet, and we got a theremin player to do the score and you know all of it. Cross community. Really great, really great stuff. One of the invitees was homeboy Carl Sagan, who he couldn't make it to the meeting scheduling conflicts, but he offered in

a letter that he wrote to tell them that he couldn't be there. Sure. He pretty much said, this one's easy, it's going crossbones. You're welcome. We're done. I mean, yeah, this one's easy. It's going crossbones. You're welcome. We're done. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

I mean, classic. Yeah. Pretty classic. But it's not so easy peasy. So in our recorded history, that icon has changed meaning several times. And that's just in our recorded history. Really?

I think of it in its pirate context. Yes. And that's a big one. That's a really big one. in our recorded history. Really? I think of it in its pirate context. Yes. And that's a big one. That's a really big one. But even before then, it was used in a lot of religious iconography, specifically Christian religious iconography, to symbolize rebirth. So it'd be like a depiction of Jesus on the cross, everyone hanging, you know, chilling

around. I don't know if hanging is the right verbiage too. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, fine then. PC police, walk it in. Jesus. Right.

No, but fair enough. Interesting, interesting, yeah. And there would be a skull with some bones and bones crossed not in the X that we know, but in like the cross cross of Christianity. Right but also if we think of something like the swastika which in one form means something religious and you nudge it gently to the right and it means something that meaning that it very recently acquired that has to do with like hate right and very Yeah. And then like you say, that skull and crossbones image kind of

comes up later in piracy. Even before it was there, as shipping and navigating became much more of a technology in human existence, ship logs would draw a skull with crossbones next to any of the sailors who died on board. It was like a way of keeping track. But then, as shipping lines and and routes got more and more popular, and piracy began in earnest, pirates went ahead and said, well, if that means death in this context, then let's just slap it on a flag and intimidate these motherfuckers so that they give us all their doubloons or whatever, right? Right.

So then it gets up on a flag and the bones change to swords and it has this like swashbuckling Johnny Depp vibe. It's cool as hell. Yeah, yeah. It's tight, yeah. We all have syphilis, it doesn't matter. No, we don't eat fruit. What are you talking about?

Sorry, my mouth is bleeding. it's tight yeah we all have syphilis it doesn't matter no we don't eat fruit what are you talking about and now sorry my mouth is bleeding oh got a little got a little bit on there sorry sorry yeah if you think about it now like i have a shirt with skull and crossbones because it kind of looks like a little luke store mask that's yeah and like people have skull and crossbone tattoos, like you put it on almost anything. Oh, put it on toast, put it on and put it on a bumper sticker. It goes everywhere. It travels with you. Yeah. So then all of a sudden, like that as a symbol kind of gets tossed out the window. It's, it gets a little hard. So right. Once Disney is in there, it's, you know, yeah, we have to find a more intimidating thing to sail under.

Yeah. And even on the signage front, like there's an image for radioactivity, right? And it's, it has a central circle and around it are these three quadrangles that kind of shape a circle around it. Sure. It was developed in 1946 when radioactive substances were getting in on the scene and scientists needed an image to denote at like a safety image to denote toxic radioactivity radioactive materials. And so they came up with this it's kind of a variation of a tree foil. I've never heard this word. It's kind of a variation of a tree foil. I've never heard this word.

It's kind of like a clover design. It's this thing of like three. You taught me something about design today. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, you can see it a lot in like Celtic design and like the Girl Scout emblem. Yeah. The recycling logo.

Yeah, exactly. Originally, the radioactive image sign, they wanted it to be magenta on blue. So all the shapes were magenta. And the rationale with that is that magenta was the most expensive dye. It was like the hardest dye to get. So they thought, you know what, a lot of people won't be using this for other symbols. So we'll use it for radioactivity. And then that'll keep it kind of in this special space. And they chose blue because there was really no blue in the materials that they used.

Right. So the logic is that these two colors in combination look like abs- like they're jarring, they stand out, they look like nothing else in our materials. Yeah. They're very expensive, which we want for some reason. Yeah. Yeah. Keep them like special, right? No one else will be taking this. But then, you know, they did more and more studies on what that looked like. The blue is too calming. People don't see that as a no, it doesn't look it. It's not a good idea. No, it's not a good idea. It's not a good combo. Uh-uh. And they kind of fade into each other too. And then they changed out the blue for yellow.

And then when they did that, they needed something with higher contrast than the magenta. And so the black came in. And now we have the black on yellow. But even then, in 2007, it's been adapted yet again into this bigger image where they have the nuclear activity image in addition to a skull and crossbones and the image of a person running with an arrow in front of them

being run away. Get the fuck away from here. Fuck out, yeah, yeah. So apparently that image is meant to be used parallel to the other one. This intense image with the skull and crossbones and the running away character is meant to be on the actual items you're not supposed to touch.

Not just like this facility is a nuclear facility. It's like that rod will kill you if you touch it. So run the fuck away. Follow the arrow. Right. But even looking at that trajectory, that's 1947 to today. We're not even out of a hundred years and it's already changed so much. So it's kind of like that's not going to be a useful symbol for 10,000 years from now. The guy running the fuck out of there. I guess if we have wheels though. Yeah. So maybe it's language.

Maybe language is what the marker becomes. But language is not very reliable. It has, funnily enough, a very short half-life itself. If you think about, and this scenario is often used as an example, the English that Shakespeare used is very different from the English we use. The English that Beowulf used is even very different from what Shakespeare used to what we use. English wasn't the most widely spoken language in the world always anyway, right? Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah.

At some point we were speaking Latin. At some point we were speaking, you know what I mean? Yeah. And I, you know, part of me kind of balked against that example because I'm like, well, fuck high schoolers read Beowulf and read Shakespeare, study Latin. Like, I don't, like, why, why couldn't we try to kind of eke something out on that? Then I was thinking about it more. And it's like, this isn't a text that like you sit down and study. This is a sign that you're supposed to read and understand immediately to get the fuck away. Like it is not a

poem to kind of sit and work through and like, pull into your own life and understand the universe in a different way. And wow, it's not amazing. 10,000 years ago, people thought like this. No, it's get the fuck out. Right away. This is radioactive. Right away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, who knows who's going to be there with a shovel as well. Maybe somebody who wouldn't be studying ancient texts is going to be there, right? I mean you'd hope you'd hope that humanity would have evolved enough that we would study but I don't think so. Studying is gay. Happy Pride! So language probably won't work. Images, images are good. So the symbols, okay, maybe not. Maybe

they have too much, you know, history kind of packed into them. But what if we used images in terms of like a pictograph? Ancient Egypt, you can see those and kind of get an understanding of what's happening. Stick figures moving, that kind of thing. They can transcend language sometimes. figures moving, that kind of thing. They can transcend language sometimes. So I'm going to send you the pictogram that came out of this thought experiment. Sure. Okay, do you want to describe what you see? Okay. Oh damn. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Actually, you know, okay. So in a very simplistic black and white sketch,

we see a happy person who is touching a, we're outside and there's a big box with a radioactive symbol on it. And this happy person is touching this radioactive box. We get the second pictograph where he's just kind of like walking away from the radioactive box and he has the radioactive symbol on him now so we're to assume that whatever it is about this box that he's touched it is now true of him as well. And then we see him like slumped in front of a tree. Like he's in distress, he's on the ground.

He looks like he's in malaise. He's in the ground, he's got like one, he's supporting himself on one arm and like clutching at his throat with the other. And it's in three panels, so that's the whole thing. I would say that I understand the gist of like touching this thing will make you like this thing and that is not good. That will hurt you. Yeah. Like I get

that. Yeah. I don't even know that we need three panels. I think you could probably do this in two. That's that's kind of it. Yeah. That's kind of it. Do you foresee any issues that future folks might have with Someone might have with this? Yeah. Why is it a white man? That's a fact, that's a fact. Is that one? Well, I guess it relies on certain things being recognizable. It relies on like, I can imagine this tree element

being very easily confused. Yeah. I can imagine this tree element being very easily confused. Yeah. I can imagine like, cause if, what if trees aren't, it don't exist, what if they look different? What if someone misinterprets the tree as being an important part of the scene? Yeah. And really it seems only to exist, I guess,

to indicate that this guy has traveled a distance from the radioactive thing, but died anyway. It's not really that clear. I can imagine people not thinking it was well drawn, and I can imagine them being frustrated that he's white. Yeah, I mean, all of those things apply. I think another thing to think about is like, you're instinctively reading it top to bottom, they're stacked. Yeah, that's true.

But what if this person instinctively reads it bottom to top and somebody pointed out, well, in that scenario, then this guy's found the fountain of youth. He's like, and then he like, finds this, he touches it and then he's a little kid again or whatever. Yeah. I think there's something about the tree too, where it's like, he's supposed to be a little boy, and he touches it as a little boy. And then the tree is supposed to signify is that he that like this radioactivity might not kill you instantly. It might kill you over a long and slow and protractive painful death.

So stay away. And so the tree is the passage of time. See what I thought, I thought that this was a small tree in the distance that this man was walking back towards and that when he died, he was just nearer the tree. See? Nope, not perfect.

Next. It's next, exactly. Out the window. The second it can be misinterpreted by anybody in any way, next. I know, it's so intense and frustrating. So basically what we're getting, even when you get rid of the nuclear thing,

which is an important part of it, we're getting into how do you create a universally resonant and applicable and time-proof symbol. Yeah. Expressing a fairly complicated thought or series of thoughts. Well, that's interesting that you say, because the next idea is from a landscape architect who's on the panel. His name Mike Brill and he got to thinking probably as all these these things that we're having to communicate so much we're getting

tossed out he thought you know what we don't need to communicate why necessarily we just need to communicate go away no why do you say that that's the opposite of human oh Oh, we have to stay away. Why? Don't tell me what to do. Yeah. That's why. Easy. Next. Well, his idea that he rendered in drawings was to create a pretty much a large scale sculpture that would, over the entire site, that would, over the entire site, install these sharp, ginormous thorns that come up out of the ground. And they'd be at all different angles and pieces of metal. And he called it a forest of thorns. So the idea is taking this naturally occurring symbol of stay away, which

is a thorn, and installing it all over and huge, making it really, really big. So very threatening, very spooky. Cool. Kind of cool. But wait, wait, wait. That's not what we're going for. That's the problem though, because somebody brought up the point. It's, but. But wait, wait, wait. That's not what we're going for. That's the problem though, cause somebody brought up the point. It's like, this sounds ominous and scary, but kind of intense and intriguing. And like, I wanna go and look at it more closely. Like it looks like a piece of art.

So, I'm gonna go and take a peek at it. I might not dig into it, but I'm gonna set up a hotel or I'm gonna like set up camp and I'm gonna spend some time and study this. And that's not what you want. You want people to go the fuck away. So you're inviting the curiosity of, of go away. By marking a place in any way you invite curiosity though. Yeah, that's true. The answer here is stewardship. The answer here is that we have to like be better as a species, but that is too complicated

and hard so we just have to pretend that we can make like a sign. But how do we do that over such a protracted and long period of time? Oh I don't know, baby. I don't know. We ain't close now. There were some other ideas that were following this exact line of thinking and some folks from one of these groups said, well, let's look at an entity, a sense of stewardship, like a human institution that has spanned over many, many years. And they thought, you know what, the Catholic Church. Okay. Oh no. So what if we... Oh no. So they said, well, what if we created essentially a nuclear papacy? So a contiguous kind of sick role of somebody who is this steward,

who is in charge of this, and we build ritual all around it. Like they have to wear they have to wear like the the stuff that Oppenheimer wore when he was building the atomic bomb. There has to be like like ceremonies and and costuming and rituals and food and all of this built around it so that this gets continued year in and year out and century in and millennia in and... Because if you just make it a government department, well governments change, Donald Trump comes in deregulates, no more nuclear pope. Yeah. I know it's kind of like, why is this a good idea? I know it's kind of like, why is this a good idea? Because I see what happened with the Catholic Church is the thing.

And I'm worried about trying to directly replicate the Catholic Church. I don't think, yeah. I don't think it's a good idea. I think we should worry about the one that we've already got. That's, I think that's probably very true. This is another idea that kind of like sparks, perhaps similar, similar ideas of like continuity within culture. So this idea actually did not come out of, of whip.

It didn't come out of the whip marker panel because there was a similar panel for Yucca Mountain. This idea is probably like ten years earlier and that program was called the Human Interference Task Force and this idea was proposed by two philosophers Francois Bastide and Paulo Fabri and together they came to the conclusion that culture, meaning religion, folklore, belief systems, those are what stay. That's what will continue. It's not a physical object, it's not a physical marker, it's this cultural thing that will continue through time. It may morph and it may change, but it can hold a similar truth, like a seed of a truth for very, very long time.

And the truth is don't dig here because it's radioactive. Yes, yes. They come up with this plan. Okay, okay. It's in two parts, part one. See already, already there's a barrier to entry. It's two parts, okay. In part one, you genetically engineer a species of cats

that changes color in the presence of radiation, essentially a living Geiger counter. Okay, a couple of questions. That's just part one. Why cats? Okay. Why cats? Why cats? That's a good question. Has anyone explained why cats?

So they were intrigued were intrigued by the way that cats have stayed and have been alongside human development through millennia and they were particularly inspired by the Egyptian worship of cats and how we know that fact about Egypt because of the culture that is passed down So the logic is that if the Egyptians worshipped cats for thousands of years then it's the cats. It's the cat. It's to do with the cats specifically. Let's keep going with the cats. Okay. Sure. If it worked for them it could work for us. Let's see what we got. As our anonymous commenter said, more cat stories. Yes, yes. Okay, so that's part one. Part two is once

you have genetically engineered the Geiger countercats, then you create the folklore. You write songs, you tell stories, you create images of these quote-unquote what they call ray cats. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. I've got this at him very open-minded typically. Part of that story that gets built into the story is that when these cats change color you get the hell out. Like they are signaling danger to you so when you see them changing color you need to high tail it and get out of dodge. I do think that this is a really interesting this concept the ray cats to play's advocate, get on board with the ray cats. I think it's an interesting combination of science and story. You know I believe in the power of story and I do think

that we should work like, we should probably be working more closely with climate scientists to narrativeize the climate crisis in a way that's easily digestible, you know, things like this. So the logic is that we need our best scientists working on these color changing cats, and then we need our best storytellers like coming up with material about these cats. Yeah. It's kind of the combo.

Yeah. Cool, I'd do that. I'd volunteer for that. Yeah. Great episode for fans of genetically engineered cats, or I guess scientifically engineered cats. But I do have to say there's another element of this in the fact that it is like so far out there, so off the wall, and so kind of like endearing and wacky that as a story in here and now and today,

it is kind of intriguing and catching. So an example of that is that this idea was proposed at the Yucca Mountain Panel, and it got published in a very small obscure German scientific publication. Nobody really read it because the philosophers were French, the project was American, no Germans were kind of interested in Kiker Karr Kass. No Germans were consulted in the production of this nuclear project.

But a radio journalist with the 99% Invisible podcast, he did a story in 2014 on all these kind of wackadoodle ideas. He's one of the sources that I use. But when he when he was researching this, he found that obscure German article, and he didn't read German, but the abstract was in English. So he used that as a source, it got, you know, double checked and blah, blah, blah. And it entered the list of possible ideas that come up for marking radioactive waste sites. And he thought it was so kind of weird and clever

that he asked a friend to write a song about the quote unquote Ray cats. Okay. In the episode, they play the song. It's like this folksy, like, you know, Ray cats run away, Ray cats run away. We love the Ray cats change in color, you know, Ray Cats run away, Ray Cats run away, we love the Ray Cats change in color, you know, blah blah blah. And through the popularity of this podcast, the story proliferated.

And then all of a sudden, there's t-shirts, and all of a sudden, there's puppy mugs and frisbees and like little cat sweaters and like, woo, Ray Cats! This is so weird and funny. The podcast plays its own part in the infamy ecosystem, huh? And even one biochemical engineer in Montreal is like, well, I mean, we could start looking into the way that- It's doable.

Jellyfish change color underwater. What if we take that and then we can like apply it to these different species and kind of over time work our way up to cats. So it's already being like... But it's already so arbitrary that it's cat. But we're still we're just riffing on ancient Egypt with that. There's no other reason. But maybe that's why it's a good story though, because it doesn't need to be anything else. That's connection enough connection enough. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe perhaps. So obviously, nobody took that idea. Besides these crazy

public who wants to put it on, you know, like a travel coffee mug. But I have to say that is kind of like a grassroots crowdsourced solution. So, okay. Is that, maybe that's what this needs more than, I mean, that's the cultural approach, right? Is that it's not top down from a government that could disappear. It has to come from the bottom up and up through time. Memes come from the people. The memes, the memes come from the people. Memes are the language of the unheard. Well, we can say that when it comes to WIP, they went with none of these ideas.

They thought that, I mean, for obvious reasons, a lot of these wouldn't work. Some of them were just way too goddamn expensive. They couldn't find the funding for that. So what they decided to do, and this was in the early 90s when they kind of put this plan together to implement at a later point when the site had closed,

they are going to construct four monuments, almost like obelisks, at the four corners of the site to demarc the whole thing. They're going to build a story high embankment above the site. So we build a wall in true American style. We build a big wall. Build a big wall. In that wall are different, essentially kind of archival or library sites. And they, in those, in those rooms rooms in those storage areas of information they're gonna use language and have a warning that will be in the major

languages of the UN plus Navajo and Esperanto come on Esperanto come on I hope it's there if not now when it has to be a language that is universal. It has to be a language that everybody speaks. So there's these different chambers with this language and they're using Edward Munch's painting The Scream, like a face from The Scream. They think that will work as a pictograph enough to be like go away. It's not like there's not another fucking piece of art that has that exact face

that means something entirely different. True. I guess the idea is that that will be long gone. But- This is such a losing thought experiment because every approach you take has a flaw, right? This has too much information, this has too little information.

Now we're communicating explicitly what happened here, but it's too complex, and what if they don't know what this concept means? Well, and it's to cover our ass for something that we never should have done. You know what I mean? Yeah, we're gonna do other stupid things by the time anyone's gonna be able to read that message, which again, spoilers, we ain't making it. We're going to have fucked up so bad. We're going to have fucked up so bad. We're going to be missing the nuclear waste.

Oh, I hope not. Yeah. But, uh, I think, I think you may be kind of right on that Taylor because. Yeah, I think I might be too. So all of these ideas were being churned out specifically for whip in Carlsbad, New Mexico. This was in the early 90s and they haven't implemented their idea of the libraries and the monuments and stuff because they will do that when they close the plant. It doesn't need to be in place yet. It needs to be in place when the US crumbles or whatever, right?

Great. Yeah. So they, you know, they didn't, they didn't install any of this yet. But the idea is like, okay, we are going to start bringing in the really high toxic radioactive waste. They've taken the materials, the nuclear materials, and they can condense them down into glass, and they create these like 10 foot tall rods that if a human were or any living being were to touch them,

it would be immediately fatal. So these are very, very toxic. So the idea is like, okay, New Mexico's ready to start doing the hard work of like transporting all of these highly toxic materials from all the different radioactive sites in the US to this one spot and then we can put you know slam it down with the monuments and call it a day but Valentine's Day February 14th 2014 romantic a leak was found in the Whip facility in one of the storage areas that caused

radio contamination, radioactive contamination that affected a handful of workers on site. It was not a fatal contamination. Good. And they were immediately treated. everything was okay, but it was enough of an issue for this safe and airtight scientifically squeaky clean storage facility to go ahead and shut down operation. There still is radioactive storage there, but it is at the intermediary level and they haven't taken any of that highly toxic material, the advanced material, you know, the advanced toxicity materials into the site, meaning the whole purpose of the facility and the town of Carlsbad and all of these warnings... Colossal waste of time.

As of yet have not taken that into its next step. What a terrible ending, Jarrad. What's even more terrifying is that the sites that are around the country in 35 different states that are holding on to this highly toxic radioactive material, this waste, are doing so in storage facilities and in storage arrangements. We're not even gonna call them facilities. It's in the staff room under the microwave, folks. It is not in the best locale. So to give you an example, Santa No Fre, which is on the coast in San Clemente, California, which is like it's Southern California.

That whole coast is highly populated. That nuclear generator was the two of them were decommissioned in 2012 when there was a leak. They found a leak. So they shut the whole thing down, didn't turn it back on. Woohoo, it's a win for opponents of nuclear power for, you know, blah, blah, blah. But the nuclear waste is still there. It's still being held in the cooling tanks there. It's still inches away from the Pacific Ocean. It's still susceptible to tsunamis. inches away from the Pacific Ocean. It's still susceptible to tsunamis.

It's still in Southern California, which is along the San Andreas Fault, which is a major earthquake fault. It's still just sitting there in a thinned walled container. I'm glad, I'm so glad you've brought one of your signature nuclear episodes, Josie. That was such a good spirit leaving. Yeah, how do you feel about-

That was really, really resonant with hope for humanity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feeling good? Feeling good? I'm trepidatious. I think it is kind of fascinating to think about ourselves in the future, 10,000 years in the future.

Of course, that's a fascinating thing to do. That's why we read sci-fi. That's why Star Trek is so good. But there's something really disheartening, yes, about the fact that like the reason that we have to think that far out is because we have created a lethal toxin that we cannot control. Even better, we have like other more pressing problems of apocalyptic nature to deal with before we... we have to get to that at some point in the next couple hundred thousand

years but like in the meantime, let's see how far we can get. If the future holds color-changing cats, I'm ready. Ray cats, yeah. Bring them on. I feel that, I feel that definitely. Yeah. I feel that definitely. Yeah, I feel that definitely. So do you have any additions or adaptations to your version of the

marker, of the radioactive marker? You know, I think that in all of our discussion, and we really did go all over Hell's Acre from, you know, we have to set up a new Illuminati about this to, you know, to really, really all these different thoughts. It was metal thorns, it really, really everywhere. I don't think we got any more elegant or simple than pour a bunch of concrete on it and chuck a doll down. Like, I think that there is an elegant simplicity in the stay the fuck away message of it I'm a discarded doll and a concrete monolith. Yeah. Yeah dolls are terrifying I would say that I think that the entire experiment is somewhat doomed to begin with in that this is like This is a problem that you really need to check in on every I mean based on how

Based on how quickly it fell apart at this Carlsbad thing it seems like it's a problem you need to check in on at least every year. Yeah. And so that's gonna be hard to keep up. If I know humans that's gonna be hard to keep up over a couple hundred thousand years. Time just flies, dawg. Time flies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really it's a problem that you need to continuously return to and see if the way that you need to deal with this problem changes. That requires contingency, that requires stewardship, that requires all these things that we've established that humans aren't very good at. I haven't washed my car in like

two years. Oh god no. I can't find my wallet right now. So legit. And I think that it's one of those things that the problem is abstract because I don't care what happens 248,000 years from now I'm dead. Right? And that's like, without speaking broadly about entire generations, there are like older folks that you can't convince to do shit about global warming because it won't really affect them, right? Yeah. Yeah, true. Imagine, imagine that thought like not only will it not affect me, but it won't affect seven generations of my descendants. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's hard to make people take that seriously. And so we don't. That is really hard to think about like

in 10,000 years. Even just 10,000 years, a fraction of what we really need to get that message across is, it's really hard. But I do think that the cat scenario makes me think, okay, well, maybe a future generation will figure out what to do with it. And no, what, how does the cat scenario make you think that? The cat scenario makes me think the opposite. I'm like, oh, we're fucking screwed. This is the shit that we're coming up with. We're fucked. That's what the cat thing makes me think.

Yeah, I guess there is a question of like, wait, why are we genetically modifying cats when we should actually be spending all of that energy and resources on the waste? Yeah, why don't we figure out how to de-irradiate this land? We're genetically working our way up to color changing cats. We're starting on jellyfish.

Shut up. Idiocy, idiocy. But you gotta keep your sense of humor too. That much is true. Yes. You do need to keep your sense of humor. That's what we're here for. Yeah.

That's what we do. That's how we're helping. Yeah. A big dose of the bitter on today's bittersweet infamy. Oh dear. Wanna drop a doll on that one? It's time. Wrap up.

Drop a doll, walk away. Let the cement dry, drop that doll, get out of here. Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at bittersweetinfamy.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our Ko-fi account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinthemy. But no pressure, bittersweetinthemy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review,

following us on Instagram at bittersweetinthemy, or just pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet! The sources that I used for this episode include episode 114, 10,000 years from the podcast 99% Invisible. It was posted May 12, 2014 and written by Matthew Kitely. I read an article in Scientific American entitled, Nuclear Waste is Piling Up. Does the U.S. Have a Plan? Published March 6, 2023. Written by Allison McFarland and Rodney C. Ewing. I read an article in Hyperallergic entitled A Nuclear Warning Designed to Last

10,000 Years written by Allison Meyer, July 21, 2016. I looked at the website, theraycatsolution.com, how to send a message 10,000 years into the future. I looked at the website for the waste isolation pilot plant www.wipp.energy.gov. I watched a full-length documentary entitled Containment from directors Rob Moss and Peter Gallison. I was able to watch it on Vimeo. I also watched a short film called The Ray Cat Solution which came out in 2016 and was directed and edited by Benjamin Huguette and that is also available to watch on Vimeo. I read an article in the

BBC entitled How to Build a Nuclear Warning for 10,000 years time by Mark Pysing. Published August 3rd, 2020. I read an article from the Science History Institute entitled Speaking to the Future. Published April 19th, 2022 and written by Kit Chapman. I looked at Natural Resources Canada website for more information about Canadian nuclear energy. I read an article from NBC News entitled Yucca Mountain Johnny, a worthy character.

In the episode we refer to him as Yucca Mountain Joe, but he's also called Yucca Mountain Johnny. It was published May 25th, 2006. Source credited was the Associated Press. And lastly, I read an article from PBS SoCal entitled San Onofre, The Epic Journey to Close a Nuclear Plant, written by Elaine Lewinik, Tuivuodong, and Gustavo Arellano, published 7th, 2022. We want to give a shout out to our monthly subscribers Jonathan Mountain, Erica Jo Brown, Lizzy D, Dylan the Person, and Satchel the Cat. And we just got a very sweet little treat from our supporter Soph. Thank you so much Soph. If you too would like to be a monthly subscriber you can head over to our ko-fi.com slash bittersweet

infamy where you can access bittersweet exclusives like the Bittersweet Film Club. Upcoming for July we are going to be watching May December. It is July but it's May, December. Bittersweet Infamy is a member of the 604 Podcast Network. The interstitial music you heard earlier is by Mitchell Collins, and the song you are listening to now is T Street by Brian Steele.

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