Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Monday August 08 2016, @01:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-gets-the-bill? dept.

Buried below the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, there's an abandoned U.S. Army base. Camp Century had trucks, tunnels, even a nuclear reactor. Advertised as a research station, it was also a test site for deploying nuclear missiles.

The camp was abandoned almost 50 years ago, completely buried below the surface. But serious pollutants were left behind. Now a team of scientists says that as climate warming melts the ice sheet, those pollutants could spread.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century in 1959, an Army film touted it as an engineering marvel — a cavernous home dug into the ice sheet, big enough for up to 200 people. Some sections were more than 100 feet deep. "On the top of the world," the film's narrator intoned, "below the surface of a giant ice cap, a city is buried. Today on the island of Greenland, as part of man's continuing efforts to master the secrets of survival in the Arctic, the United States Army has established an unprecedented nuclear powered Arctic research center."

[...] The climate computer models say the camp could be uncovered by the end of this century.

Now, that's a worst-case scenario, based on an assumption that the world's governments won't do much to further reduce greenhouse gases that cause warming. But other things are happening that could spread that waste sooner.

Source: NPR


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @12:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @12:57AM (#385571)

    I can tell you that the sawdust DOES reinforce the ice significantly. However you really do need even sized sawdust boiled into a thick soup to have it come out uniform or maximize strength.

    The sad part is water temperatures have risen so much that constructing such hulls would not make sense even in the far polar regions, since short of a massive wind array, nuclear reactor, or huge quantities of dense liquid fuels (ideally low viscosity unless you want to have to waste energy heating the fuel as well as cooling the hull) it would be completely economically and logistically infeasible to keep such a vessel maintained and fueled at this point in time due to both the ambient and unknown variability of temperatures in those regions today (see the permafrost melt in Siberia for an example of what those ships would have to contend with!)

    That said: You might be able to use this technique for special purpose/disposable hulls if you had a method to rapidly fabricate the outer cooling loop and a thin inner hull and either outer hull or mold to fill and freeze the structural ice with.