See the way I see it, that's asking the wrong question: who cares what civilization is doing 10,000 years from now, if it's lost sufficient record and technology to comprehend nuclear waste?
Even a language change, if accompanied by a technologically advanced civilization, would remember to change it's signs.
Whereas, it is much more likely that if we don't use nuclear power, we'll create catastrophes that lead to that problem to begin with. I'm much more concerned with what happens over the next 10,000 years then at the end of it.
who cares what civilization is doing 10,000 years from now, if it's lost sufficient record and technology to comprehend nuclear waste?
It's possible to retain a knowledge of what nuclear waste is (at least in a mythic sense of "very bad juju") while 1) losing track of where that waste is and 2) being unable to detect or determine where it is.
Humans have no senses which detect radioactivity (one possibility is that such a sense evolves, though I suspect this is unlikely and would take a very long time). Radiation detectors require some level of technology -- silver nitrite films which fog on exposure, cloud chambers, Geiger counters, exposure badges. It's fairly easy to lose track of where radioactive products are; there's already history of radioactive decay products being incorporated into building materials and otherwise going astray (the Mexican truck hijacking this past week is only the most recent of many civilian-use accidents).
So: a future civilization, which does have a written or oral history of nuclear waste and its hazards, but no means of determining what is radioactive, could definitely have some issues going on. What the outcomes of that might be are an interesting question. It's possible there could be a civilization reboot, or humans could make a long-term slide to obscurity and/or extinction.
Even a language change, if accompanied by a technologically advanced civilization, would remember to change it's signs.
Whereas, it is much more likely that if we don't use nuclear power, we'll create catastrophes that lead to that problem to begin with. I'm much more concerned with what happens over the next 10,000 years then at the end of it.