Humans are good little squirrels that bury their nuts then forget about them.
Humans do not have the mental foresight to prepare a long-term future. Squirrels, like many mammals, prepare for the winter by stashing food in dugouts, and fattening themselves up for the cold season ahead. Unfortunately for the Squirrels, they often forget where they stash much of their food and could lead to starvation when their food is right below them.
Humanity as a whole is no different than the average squirrel, burying information and ideas rather than acorns and nuts. They spend much of their time preparing for the future, but can often forget why they prepared something, or where that thing may be. A library may hold books, but if that library goes up in flame those preserved books are now lost to time.
Humans have terrible memory, which is not only notorious for being unable to rapidly recall information just learned, but also skewing the facts due to gaps in memory. While able to procure memories from long spans of time ago, the memories have deteriorated to falsehood, or complete nonsense.
In the very short span of written history, we have lost over 90% of all text even written down. The Smithsonian believes that the only surviving texts we have are estimated to be mere single digit percentages, with many examples of literature completely gone from certain cultures. Most surviving copies being, just that. Copies of the original, often having various changes made to them like.
The meanings of words and literature will change as the people who read them change. Overtime, the moral of a story will twist with whoever is acting it, to fit a narrative or idea that the storyteller wishes it to say. A change in the protagonist, or a change in the villain. Maybe even a change in the setting or the food.
But unlike acorns, books, or stories, nuclear waste doesn’t just decompose or disappear. It remains, taking hundreds of thousands of years to slowly decay into less volatile material. There is no way to fully lose nuclear waste, no way to change the way it functions, no way to change it’s meaning. There is truly only one way to see it, and what it does. It exists, it decays by itself, mattering not what is around it or how people see it.
There is no way for humanity to change nuclear waste like they do with everything else they touch. It cannot be made into a new tool to use, a path to follow. It has no sentimental value, no hidden worth, only harms, never helps. How are we to bury our most dangerous acorn?
The fact humans have terrible memory, and lose knowledge often, is a positive when dealing with nuclear waste. Does denial not breed curiosity? When will the adventurer turn back on their quest, when faced with ultimate danger? Or when they reach an empty cave, devoid of all signs, symbols, and regalia. Is it not ironic that warning against something only inspires trill seekers to do it?
Hiding nuclear waste is the only way we can proceed in the future. The facilities that hold waste are deep underground, surrounded by thousands of tons of concrete and dirt, practically immune to the elements and any excavation from above. Would it not be practical for any suspected end of the world result in this extremely safe, impenetrable bunker, to be forgotten? To disappear from the minds of the people, to be lost beneath the dirt and never dug up?
Knowing it is there is one thing, finding it is another. Squirrels obviously know they have buried nuts somewhere around their forest, but could as easily starve before they uncover their stash. Then what? Those buried nuts now end up forgotten about by any living being, even when only mere inches from the surface. Just like any nuclear storage site, it will be buried in dirt, maybe not even that deep below the surface, but nobody will be any the wiser of the complex beneath their feet. A featureless canvas only inspires creativity to make something new, yet when introduced to something already existing, the viewer look deeper in. They investigate, find the meaning of the art, the purpose of the exposition.
If there is no written record, who is there to share of pandora’s box. Like the bottom of the ocean, we are curious, there are things down there, but why are we to investigate besides the sheer curiosity to do so? There is no reason for someone to explore below the forest, the empty field. Humans love to see the face value of things. The tree’s in the forest, the animals that inhibit it, the flora and fauna. They don’t investigate what’s residing below, the worms and the roots. Why would they? They already know what is down there, there couldn’t be anything else. With nuclear waste, there is something else. But how are they to know that it is down there.
Keeping our incomprehensible danger away from the future requires forgetting it’s existence. As stewards of now apocalyptic power, we have to insure that the future generations after us are either informed, or denied the information we carry. Who are we to deny the inevitability of time, when time brings safety from the danger we posses. With enough time, any danger and wasteland will return back to it’s natural state.
The damage we cause to ourselves and the earth are only remembered because we choose to. From the river Somme to the streets of Berlin. From the sands of Trinity to the forests of Pripyat, without knowledge we are none the wiser of the danger they posed our past selves. Maybe we are better without knowing the horror’s we’ve inflicted upon ourselves.
References:
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
Here’s the deal, Mongoose.
I dream every semester of a student who will present to me a Hypothesis worthy of a class based on Counterintuitivity.
Fewer than a handful of times, in fifteen years or so, has anyone presented me with a topic that met the challenge.
The day you came up with this one, I was ready to award the A.
The FUCKING BRILLIANT idea that we need to come up with a way to communicate to an (any!) unknown (unknowable!) species the ABSOLUTE NECESSITY of NOT DISTURBING the contents of a hidden repository is SO COMPLETELY the essence of this course that, whatever ELSE you might accomplish in your assignment is almost meaningless, gradewise.
Still, your language use is pretty dodgy.
Want help after the end of the semester? Reach out.
As you probably know by now, Feedback is provided only on Rewrites, not on drafts.