The most ambitious project undertaken by the Atomic Priesthood Project, Black Sun Rose, is an attempt to outline the material and design protocols for the sites of nuclear waste repositories.

Using the The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) as a test model, Black Sun Rose is a wide-ranging design proposal using the culture of the Atomic Priesthood Project and the SANDIA Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant report as guides.

Black Sun Rose provides solutions to the many problems of marking and communicating on the scale of 10,000+ years.

Any marker of deep-time, nuclear repositories must stand the test of time. The additional challenge is to discourage exploration, excavation, and easy dismantling.

A pyramidal structure composed of many thousands of interlocking, Penrose-style blocks satisfied many of the problems of scale and feasibility. All structures within Black Sun Rose would follow the same Penrose patterning, establishing deliberate, human design and a visual, genetic relationship between them.

All Penrose tiles would be cast out of black concrete. Concrete being the most readily available deep-time material for the physical scale necessary. Coloring the concrete black will allow the structure to absorb solar radiation from the desert sun, preventing humans, animals, or plants from making it a viable habitat.

Black Sun Rose must be no smaller than approx. 4 miles squared. This allows for total coverage of the buried WiPP site and will make the structure visible from space as a man-made blemish upon the Earth.

Glass is the most geologically stable, chemically inert substance made by humans that can be produced and manipulated at a large scale.

The unique qualities of glass allow for messages to be embedded with or within it to bridge the unfathomable gulfs of time necessary.

Glass must be used as the primary carrier of any linguistic or symbolic message to future generations of humans regarding nuclear waste.

In collaboration with Helen Lee. The process of stacking rods of colored glass together and fusing them into a legible, three dimensional font was chosen as the means by which glass could be used as the material to communicate the information of the WiPP site on geologic timescales.

In addition to it’s ability to remain unchanged over ten of thousands of years, glass is able to be formed into any shape and exhibits physical properties uniquely suited as a communication material within Black Sun Rose.

Glass is able to collect and transmit light. Using the same principles as fiber optical cabling, the font of Black Sun Rose signage is able to become illuminated if formed in the proper way. In this way, any message constructed with this font can become illuminated in darkened spaces due to its own material properties.

Following the logic of the Lee Font, thick panels of glass can be made to embed any linguistic or symbolic message necessary to communicate about the WiPP site and its attendant culture, the Atomic Priesthood Project.

Vandalism and erosion are mitigated by the thickness of the material and special properties of glass: the more the message is chipped away, the more of it is revealed.

Black Sun Rose is designed as a series of related structures within the four square miles of territory above the WiPP site it covers.

At the outermost periphery of Black Sun Rose are kiosks spaced at frequent intervals to the site. These kiosks will contain basic information about the site and warn the curious to turn around in various languages, pictograms, and diagrams. This information will be made of thick glass tablets embedded within a concrete structure following the same Penrose patterning as the total Black Sun Rose monument.

The secondary level of warning against exploring the Black Sun Rose site are an array of Deep Dolmen placed within the inner perimeter of the main structure.

These Dolmen act as a redundant, expanded archive of important information regarding the Black Sun Rose. Anticipating archeologists of the future, these structures are meant have much more detailed information regarding nuclear waste, the global initiative to mark buried waste, and the Atomic Priesthood Project.

This information is embedded in the same fashion as the Warning Kiosks; within panels of glass. The glass information panels within the dolmen are designed to collect external sunlight and illuminate their message in the same way that fiber optic cables are able.

Entry to these Deep Dolmen are by displacing one key piece of Penrose pattern tiling. A difficult project, but one that anticipates future curious humans.

As of 2020, the Black Sun Rose project exists only as a proposal by the Atomic Priesthood Project as a viable strategy for deep-time marking and communication.

Further details, designs, and conceptual renders for the implementation of Black Sun Rose are available upon request by contacting designentropy@gmail.com

Many thanks to Helen Lee, Cameron Klavsen, and William Everett for their generosity and creativity to bring this project alive.