What makes it even more absurd is that storing in a salt mine was considered the "best option" back then, backed by a scientific consensus. That consensus came

What makes it even more absurd is that storing in a salt mine was considered the "best option" back then, backed by a scientific consensus. That consensus came out of an international conference in the 50s in, I believe, Beirut. Asse II was supposed to be one of the experimental sites to prove the theory, but over the decades ended up being run much more like a "general dump" with extremely lackluster documentation habits.