This week the South Australian Royal Commission released "tentative findings" recommending the state take more than 100 tonnes of high-level radioactive waste and store it in the desert for hundreds of thousands of years.

A final report is due in May, but already there has been excitement around the proposal, which the Commission says could generate billions of dollars a year and thousands of jobs for the South Australian economy. The state has the highest unemployment in the country.

Australia has no nuclear power plants and doesn't generate high-level nuclear waste that needs to be stored for a very long time; it would be imported.

If the facility goes ahead, the designers may consider a problem that has baffled linguists and semioticians (sign experts): how to tell the distant future don't dig up the dump?

The report notes that the used fuel of nuclear power plants requires isolation from the environment "for many hundreds of thousands of years" and that many countries, including Finland, France, Hungary and South Africa, have developed purpose-built waste repositories.

This is true, but it's worth pointing out none of these already built repositories are for the final disposal of nuclear fuel. They are either for low to intermediate level waste, which needs to be isolated for several hundred years, or they are temporary, interim solutions to the problem of finding a final resting place that will isolate waste for tens of thousands of years.

Finland is building the world's first deep underground repository for high level nuclear waste and Sweden is close behind. The Finnish site is scheduled for completion in 2023.

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Whatsapp The illustration of the Finnish repository provided in the Royal Commission tentative findings report.

A better example of the kind of repository proposed for South Australia is the United States' Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), deep in the New Mexico desert. It's the only working long-lived nuclear waste repository in the world. It holds barrels of gloves and masks and machines and bomb parts contaminated by nuclear testing. The site is designed to last for 10,000 years.

WIPP is scheduled to close in the 2040s. It will be sealed up and left alone. Centuries will pass and become millennia. On the surface, civilisations will rise and fall.

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Whatsapp Machinery sits in one of the underground tunnels that will used to transport nuclear waste to be stored in underground chambers at WIPP in New Mexico.

China, the world's oldest continuous civilisation, stretches back about 5,000 years. The world's oldest inscribed clay tablets date from about the same time.

The half-life of plutonium-239, which can produce fatal radiation doses during short periods of direct exposure, is 24,000 years - the time it takes to decay to half its level of radioactivity. In 10 times that period, or 240,000 years, it decays to uranium-234, which is fairly harmless.

Homo sapiens began to evolve about 200,000 years ago.

Atomic priesthoods and 'ray cats'

In 1991, the US Department of Environment hired linguists, scientists and anthropologists at a cost of about $1 million to answer what is basically a conundrum of labelling. How do you warn far-off civilisations or scattered bands of post-apocalyptic survivors that invisible beams of energy emanating from the earth could kill them, and this was not a trick, there's no buried treasure?

The report runs to 351 pages and has the (rather dry) title: Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Wasteland Isolation Pilot Plant.

Here's some of the problems they identified:

Languages evolve too fast to communicate with the future: Few English speakers understand Old English, which was spoken about 1000 years ago.

The meanings of symbols is too ambiguous: For example, the physicist Carl Sagan was invited to join the researchers, couldn't make it, and wrote to suggest they simply use the skull-and-crossbones symbol to signify danger. But this symbol has only been current for a few hundred years, has meant 'poison' for the last 100, and is no longer very threatening. It's on 'pirate theme' drink bottles.

Even if they understand the warnings, future trespassers might not believe them. Curses associated with the burial sites of the Egyptian Pharaohs did not deter grave robbers.

In 1981 the US Department of Energy assembled a gun team of engineers, anthropologists, nuclear physicists, and science fiction authors to figure out how to prevent future access to a proposed deep geological repository at a place called Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

They were known as the Human Interference Task Force and they established the field of nuclear semiotics.

One of the team suggested creating an "artificial myth" that a certain area was dangerous and should be avoided. There was no need to explain radioactivity, but just convince people it was dangerous and they should avoid the place.

But how to ensure the myth was preserved? He suggested "a commission, relatively independent of future political currents, self-selective in membership, using whatever devices for enforcement at its disposal, including those of a folkloristic character."

This effectively meant, he admitted, an "atomic priesthood".

Another on the team, a Polish science fiction author, proposed engineering 'information plants' that would contain information about the dangers and location of radioactive waste coded into their DNA. He also suggested a network of artificial satellites transmitting this same data to Earth.

The problem with this plan was that future humans might not know how to decode DNA.

Two others, a French author and Italian semiotician, proposed finding a species of animal that has a long history of living alongside humans, and then genetically engineering this animal to change colour in the presence of radiation.

The species would become living indicators of danger.

They suggested the cat.

Fairy tales and myths would be created with the simple takeaway message: when your cat changes colour, get out of there.

'This place is not a place of honour'

The 1990s study for WIPP eschewed ray cats and atomic priesthood in favour of gargantuan architecture, message walls in many languages, and faces contorted in expressions of pain and sickness.

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Whatsapp 'Possible prototypes for facial icons'

The names of the enormous earthworks proposals are evocative: 'landscape of thorns', 'black hole', and 'rubble landscape', 'forbidding blocks' and 'menacing earthworks', 'leaning stone spikes' and 'spike field'. There are animated versions of these designs in the documentary Contamination.

The message walls would have the faces as well as simple messages in the six languages of the United Nations (Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese), as well as Navajo. There would be a blank area for the message to be inscribed in another language when these other seven languages grow too ancient "to read comfortably".

The authors boiled down what they wanted to tell the future to key points, including:

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

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

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Whatsapp Forbidding blocks design.

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

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Whatsapp Spikes bursting through grid.

This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

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Whatsapp Proposed site of Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

Global waste stockpile continues to grow

The cost of building these plans was roughly estimated at $68 million in 1994. Twenty years later, none of these proposals have been realised. The other proposed repository, Yucca Mountain, a couple hours drive from Las Vegas, was approved in 2002, but funding was stopped in 2011. By that point the US had already spent $12 billion on Yucca, which was estimated would eventually cost $96 billion.

The Department of Energy is now urgently looking for a new site.

The waste stockpiles continue to grow. About 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel is currently being stored in casks and pools near reactors in 33 states, and this amount is expected to double by 2055.

The problem of how to store and label nuclear waste remains.

In government and policy circles, the WIPP report and 1980s nuclear semiotics is generally seen as impractical and futile - a historical curiosity that says a lot about the grand ambitions of the nuclear age, but doesn't help much with explaining ourselves to the distant future.

"It's a waste of time," says Allison Macfarlane, former chairman of the US's Nuclear Regulatory Commission and member of the White House Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.

She spoke with Hack from Washington DC where she directs the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University.

"We have no idea how people in the future are going to talk or what's going to be important to them culturally.

"We don't know what the pyramids mean, so why should we bother? What we should do is put resources into finding a good place based on the knowledge we have now."

The White House Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future was tasked with finding another site after the failure of Yucca, which was ditched mainly for political reasons. Nevada had never wanted to host the nation's nuclear waste, with or without an atomic priesthood.

"Three states were being looked at, and they were all saying 'Hey we don't want this'," Macfarlane says. "The state that was politically the weakest was the one that got stuck with it."

"They call the 1987 amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act the 'Screw Nevada Bill'."

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Whatsapp Allison Macfarlane in 2014.

'How do we have any guarantee of stable government?'

Though it may have been discredited, nuclear semiotics has entered the popular imagination through movies like Alien, Mad Max, The Road, Terminator and even Waterworld.

If the South Australian repository goes ahead, it's likely it will play into public debate.

It popped up in Finland with the 2010 feature documentary film Into Eternity, about the construction of the country's new deep geological repository.

These visions of hell - landscape of thorns and walls of screaming faces - are a graphic representation of the fear inspired by nuclear waste, but also of the need to find the safest possible repository.

A potential 'scare campaign' cuts both ways.

Most of the world's high level nuclear waste is currently stored above ground in thick steel and concrete casks. Some say a relay system of these casks will be sufficient.

"The problem I see with dry casks technically is they last for some decades, maybe for 100 years even, but at some point they fall apart and we have to change out the waste into other casks," says Macfarlane.

"The problem is you're not sure of the control of this material. You can make the assumption you're going to have caretaker governments like we have now in the US and Australia, and they're going to monitor and make sure these don't leak."

"But do we have any guarantee of it?

"The institutional control side of things is unknown."

Temporary storage is only as good as the government responsible for monitoring and upkeep.

And as nuclear semiotics proves, you can't predict the future.