Expert judgment on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Page: 147 of 349

                                
Appendix F: Team A Report

In the three designs that use "fields" of spikes or thorns, these spikes or thorns come out of,
and define the Keep, so the whole area that is dangerous to drill down into is so marked.
"Menacing Earthworks" (Figs. 4.3-8, 4.3-9): Immense lightning-shaped earthworks radiating
out of an open-centered Keep. It is very powerful when seen both from the air and from the
vantage points on the tops of the four highest earthworks, the ones just off the corners of the
square Keep.' Walking through it, at ground level, the massive earthworks crowd in on you,
dwarfing you, cutting off your sight to the horizon, a loss of connection to any sense of place.
The large expanse of center is left open, with only two elements in it: the WIPP's existing
thick-walled concrete hot cell, left to ruin; a walk-on world map showing locations of all the
repositories of radioactive waste on earth and a 50-foot wide map of New Mexico (Fig. 4.3-16),
with the WIPP site in the geometric center of the Keep. The entire map is domed in order to
shed sand blown by the wind. Underneath the slightly domed map a Level 4 room is buried
(Fig. 4.3-17). Four other rooms are located under the four tallest earthworks. Reading walls
(Fig. 4.3-18) are strewn between the earthworks, encountered before the Keep is entered.
Shunned land...poisoned, destroyed, unusable:
"Black Hole" (Figs. 4.3-10, 4.3-11): A masonry slab, either of black Basalt rock, or
black-dyed concrete, is an image of an enormous black hole; an immense nothing; a void; land
removed from use with nothing left behind; a useless place. It both looks uninhabitable and
unfarmable, and it is, for it is exceedingly hot part of the year. Its blackness absorbs the
desert's high sun-heat load and radiates it back. It is a massive effort to make a place that is
fearful, ugly, and uncomfortable.
The heat of this black slab will generate substantial thermal movement. It should have thick
expansion joints in a pattern that is irregular, like a crazy-quilt, like the cracks in parched land.
And the surface of the slab should undulate, so as to shed sand in patterns in the direction of the
wind.
"Rubble Landscape" (Figs. 4.3-12, 4.3-13): A square outer rim of the caliche layer of stone
is dynamited and bulldozed into a crude square pile over the entire Keep. This makes a
rubble-stone landscape at a level above the surrounding desert, an anomaly both topographic and
in roughness of material. The outer rim from which rubble was pushed inwards fills with sand,
becoming a soft moat, probably with an anomalous pattern of vegetation. This all makes for an
enormous landscape of large-stone rubble, one that is very inhospitable, being hard to walk on
and difficult to bring machinery onto. It is a place that feels destroyed, rather than one that has
been made.
"Forbidding Blocks" (Figs. 4.3-14, 4.3-15): Stone from the outer rim of an enormous square
is dynamited and then cast into large concrete/stone blocks, dyed black, and each about 25 feet
on a side. They are deliberately irregular and distorted cubes. The cubic blocks are set in a

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