Nuclear alchemy: physicists are developing a way to transform highly radioactive nuclear waste that would dramatically reduce the time it stays hazardous. (Radioactive Waste).

Engineer, The, October, 2002 by Rob Coppinger

SCIENCE FICTION has an uncanny knack of forecasting the future. In the early 1990s the US government employed sci-fi authors to dream up a 'forbidden zone . The writers, space science professors Carl Sagan and Gregory Benford, and an artist were asked to envisage a monument that could portray visually to anyone approaching it in 10,000 years' time that this zone should not be dug up, built on or tampered with in any way as it contained stores of decaying nuclear matter.

Ten years later we have still not found a satisfactory way of dealing with nuclear waste by-products besides burying them. Though the world's first nuclear reactor was built in 1942 in Chicago, high-level radioactive waste will, it seems, remain a serious threat to the environment for more than 10,000...