The Greek word for ‘sign’, sema, is also the word for ‘grave’. Around 1990 the research field of nuclear semiotics was born. As plans developed for the burial of radioactive waste, so the question emerged in America of how to warn future generations of the great and durable danger that lay at depth. It became important, the US Department of Energy decided, to devise a ‘marker system’ that could deter intrusion into a repository ‘during the next 10,000 years’. The Environmental Protection Agency founded a ‘Human Interference Task Force’ charged with the imagining of such a system for the
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