Yucca Mountain, a barren strip of land about 90 miles northwest
of Las Vegas, is revered by its native Shoshone tribe as a place of
deep spiritual and religious importance. But in 1978, Yucca
Mountain began to draw intense studying from the Department of
Energy, which has spent billions of dollars to date in determining
whether the region would serve as a viable dumping site for the
nation’s supply of nuclear waste.
The Shoshone tribe and the state of Nevada are facing
difficulties getting their land back, but Joshua Abbey, director of
the Desert Space Foundation, feels there may be a time when they
regain their territory.
“In Australia, they’re actually beginning to
repatriate and return lands to the native aboriginal people,
“ Abbey said. “My feeling is that if we ever get to
that point ““ where we’re ever able to return land to
the Native Americans ““ once Yucca Mountain is full of toxic
waste, it’ll probably be the first parcel we’d be
willing to return.”
That’s a bit of dark humor from the native Nevadan, just
one of the many sentiments employed by designers and artists
throughout the world to tackle this increasingly urgent issue.
Abbey’s exhibition, “Universal Warning Sign: Yucca
Mountain” showcases the work of students who have taken on
the challenge of warning humans 10,000 years from now of the
dangers of a site that has 77,000 metric tons of nuclear waste
buried under it. The exhibition, which features the “Best in
Show” entry of UCLA student Ashok Sukumaran, opens tomorrow
at Kinross in association with the Design | Media Arts School and
runs until Nov. 7.
Abbey received about 300 submissions, from artists as far away
as Pakistan, offering potential solutions. The ideas run a gamut of
possibilities: One is as simple as a sign displaying a stick figure
““ characterized only by the trefoil symbol for radiation
adorned on its chest ““ leaning over sickly as a giant
metallic spire neatly drills a hole into the ground. Another
proposal, by UCLA design student Fabian Winkler, suggests draping
the entire region with reflectors that would increase the
temperature and “thumpers” from the film
“Dune” to create artificial sound vibrations.
A panel of academics and artists whittled the field to about 50
designs and chose one as “Best in Show”:
Sukumaran’s proposal to blanket the mountain with genetically
engineered cobalt-blue Yucca plants. The cacti would reproduce by
themselves, leaving one mutation to stand guard over another, much
deadlier, one.
“I wanted to make apparent the darker side of
science,” Sukumaran said. “Science is always pushing
forward but its affects aren’t known until after the fact
because so much of it happens behind closed doors.”
Sukumaran, a half-Indian, half-Japanese who stepped foot on
American soil for the first time two years ago, came to the United
States from India to complete his MFA at UCLA’s Design |
Media Arts school. His work was inspired by his own role as a
cultural outsider, using the idea of a mutation to serve as a
monument. Sukumaran’s design serves as a commentary on the
unnatural signs of scientific progress, but it’s actually
quite beautiful in its otherwise organic construction. That
contradiction emphasizes the essential drive of Abbey’s
project: how do you shield a byproduct of scientific curiosity and
progress from future humans who will likely possess that same
wreckless temperament?
“That’s why this challenge is so complicated,”
Abbey said. “Most examples in history, such as the Great
Pyramids, had many warning signs threatening the most dire
consequences to those who would enter. But they acted more as a
beacon for human curiosity than as a deterrent. They actually
encouraged, motivated people to investigate.”
Such difficulties divided entries along two distinct lines: Some
tackled the problem from a practical standpoint, others served as a
philosophical commentary on the futility of the entire exercise,
suggesting that the problems of nuclear energy are deeply rooted
and require much more than an elaborate warning sign.
“When asked which ones are really the most effective,
there’s not one that really stands out as being the most
viable, and that may be because the challenge itself is
impossible,” Abbey said. “There may not be a way to
effectively communicate over 10,000 years. And even if you have a
very strong message, people in the distant future may assume that
it’s a decoy hiding something valuable.”
After a stint at UCLA, the show is expected to head to Europe
for an exhibition in Switzerland in association with Greenpeace.
The show has drawn interest from groups eager to stop the
proliferation of nuclear power plants in other countries, but now
may be the time that U.S. environmental interests could make the
most use of the exhibit’s thematic struggles. After more than
20 years of intensive research by the Department of Energy,
President Bush signed a resolution on July 20, recommending Yucca
Mountain for development as a nuclear waste repository. With many
states eager to unload the waste accumulated by their own nuclear
plants, the proposal had little trouble getting through Congress.
Now all that’s needed is a license from the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission. An application for that license is expected
for submittal in December 2004.
But Nevada residents remain nervous about the consequences of
the final approval. A green light for the Department of Energy
would mean truckloads of nuclear waste coming in at a rate of 7-10
shipments per day. Though precautions will be made to prevent any
leaks, detractors won’t rule out potential disasters and fear
of terrorist attacks.
“The reactors are going to continue to produce the
waste,” Abbey pointed out. “By the time they remove all
the existing waste that’s there now … we’ll be right
back where we started from. We’ve (opened) this
Pandora’s box that we really don’t know how to contain.
So essentially we’re just burying the problem and passing it
down to future generations.”
Detractors often pointed out the main alternative is to avoid
transporting the waste altogether and keep it above ground in dry
castes, saving the money for research toward finding a better
solution. But this option isn’t attractive to the states that
house large quantities of the waste and want it out. In the eyes of
the scientists and politicians, a more realistic approach to
dealing with the waste makes Yucca Mountain the best, if not the
ideal, choice. Of course, for Abbey and the contributors to his
exhibition, that rationale isn’t enough.
“Representatives of the project came to see my
exhibit,” Abbey recalled, noting the rift between the works
of his contributors and the realists. “One of them said to me
offhandedly that the most effective (symbols) will be the dead
bodies of whoever is foolish enough to ignore whatever warning sign
is put in place there … I thought that was a rather cynical
attitude.”
“Universal Warning Sign: Yucca Mountain” opens
tomorrow at 6 p.m. in Kinross South 152.