This is an electronic version of an article published in: Zygon ® - Journal of Religion and Science, Volume 51, Issue 3 (2016), p. 626-639. The Atomic Priesthood and Nuclear Waste Management - Religion, Sci-fi Literature and the End of our Civilization by Sebastian Musch 1 In 1980, the Bechtel Group, the conglomerate then and now in charge of maintaining and securing several of the nuclear facilities on US soil, commissioned a “Human Interference Task Force” (HITF), which would “investigate problems connected with the postclosure, final marking of a filled nuclear waste repository.” (Sebeok 1984, III/IV) The task of this report, which was later submitted to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission via the US Department of Energy, was “to devise a method of warning future generations not to mine or drill at that site unless they are aware of the consequences of their actions.” (Sebeok 1984, 149) As future civilizations might not be able to understand any of the human languages used today, or to decipher mathematical equations, nor to be perceptive to any other of our signs, the task boiled down to communicating danger beyond the confines of our own cognitive framework. Among the specialists involved was Thomas Sebeok, a noted semiotician, who proposed a disquieting idea: the foundation of a new religion that would ensure the transmission of the relevant information pertaining to the nuclear waste repositories. This 1 Please contact me at sebastian.musch@mail.com 1