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
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @02:14PM
Now, that's a worst-case scenario
But other things are happening that could spread that waste sooner.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @02:54PM
Just wait till you hear the most worstest case!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @03:24PM
But what if there will be an even moster worstest case?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @05:06PM
Better get Captain Planet on the horn!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 08 2016, @02:19PM
Could Expose Serious Pollutants
Technically not wrong in that its quantum theoretically possible, however unlikely, that monkeys could fly out of my butt.
However reading the articles, the pollution doesn't seem any worse than if they were stationed 100 miles away at Thule, or back home at Ft Polk.
Its a cool story and an interesting location but the mass meda, well, NPR anyway, is going unrealistically enviro fearmonger.
The TLDR of why it failed, to save you all the time of researching it, is environmental damage like snow accumulates with horizontal area, so naturally they made their minecraft-like base by making it as flat and horizontal as possible. They got to the point of moving a ton of snow per person per week before they gave up and said "F it" and went home, taking their nuclear reactor with them.
You gotta boil about a gallon of water for a KWh of electricity (to one sig fig) and reading between the lines they dumped tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive waste (aka condensed coolant) which is too high for casual accidents and leaks and too low to run a nuke plant that size open loop the whole time, maybe 10000 KWh per day. Must be an interesting story behind that level of leak. Maybe whenever the filters were clogged or WTF they'd run open loop till someone could obtain some new filters. Maybe inattentive operators would freeze up the condenser so they'd open loop until they defrosted the condenser. Interesting to speculate.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday August 08 2016, @04:45PM
Not quite sure what you're getting at about moving snow. To keep the ceiling from collapsing?
The somewhat brief Wikipedia article says
Within three years after it was excavated, ice core samples taken by geologists working at Camp Century demonstrated that the glacier was moving much faster than anticipated and would destroy the tunnels and planned launch stations in about two years. The facility was evacuated in 1965, and the nuclear generator removed. Project Iceworm was canceled, and Camp Century closed in 1966.
[...]
Although the Greenland icecap appears, on its surface, to be hard and immobile, snow and ice are viscoelastic materials, which slowly deform over time, depending on temperature and density. Despite its seeming stability, the icecap is, in fact, in constant, slow movement, spreading outward from the center. This spreading movement, over the course of a year, causes tunnels and trenches to narrow, as their walls deform and bulge, eventually leading to a collapse of the ceiling. By mid-1962 the ceiling of the reactor room within Camp Century had dropped and had to be lifted 5 feet (1.5 m).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday August 08 2016, @05:05PM
OK interesting I had googled up and mostly looked at
http://gombessa.tripod.com/scienceleadstheway/id9.html [tripod.com]
Maintaining the tunnels at Camp Century required time-consuming and laborious trimming and removal of more than 120 tons of snow and ice each month.
And they only had 200 people there at absolute peak, usually less. And there's a note early in the article about four feet per year of snow.
I suppose the exact mechanism doesn't matter as much as regardless of the story behind it, apparently snow is not an ideal building material. My impression was the annoyance scaled horizontally so if they built what amounts to a buried skyscraper it would be somewhat less annoying. But either way...
Also I suppose no glacier means you could build a facility there again, soon.
Then I found Project Iceworm and looks like I have google reading for hours if not days. Interesting stuff.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday August 08 2016, @06:12PM
You think that's interesting, you should check out the British plan to build aircraft carriers out of ice [wikipedia.org] back in WWII :)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @12:57AM
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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Monday August 08 2016, @05:26PM
Yeah, some low-level radioactive cooling water probably isn't to worrysome (though it does make a better headline). Unknown quantities of PCBs [wikipedia.org] is much more concerning.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday August 08 2016, @05:58PM
Didn't see any mention of a leak. I suppose it might have been.
Your own article says:
While the power plant was designed to provide 1560 kilowatts of power, Camp Century's power needs peaked at 500 kilowatts, and gradually declined from there. During the reactors operational life, a total of 47,078 gallons of radioactive liquid waste was discharged into the icecap.
Sounds like it might have been planned as part of the reactor removal to just DRAIN the low-level contaminated water (or whatever it was) down through the glacier.
They used steam to melt water for the base. Seems unlikely they would have run that open-loop, because they needed steam to obtain water, which means at start up and shut down you'd not have enough water to supply coolant in an open loop plan.
A sister reactor [bellona.org] was operational in Antarctica at about the same time. That one, built by a different company had a serious leakage problem over its life, and some soil and rock had to be excavated and shipped back to the US for burial.
Maybe the same problem existed in Greenland, but since the water perked down through thousands of feet of ice, nobody worried about it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @02:39PM
Er, what DID they do when they abandoned Hoth? Did the Empire bring in a HAZMAT team?
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday August 08 2016, @03:37PM
I'm sure the Death Star could deal with it, no need to send in an expensive hazmat team when you can just fire up the planet destructing laser. After all it was infested with rebel scum and all ...
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday August 08 2016, @04:55PM
They killed all the humans, thus ensuring that Hoth would never get a bad case of global warming.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Monday August 08 2016, @03:18PM
Collectively, the chance that the world's governments will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions is approximately zero. Even if the US and Europe significantly reduce their emissions, what will happen is that India and China and other developing nations will increase their emissions (possibly lying about it, as China is almost certainly doing). In other words, we're collectively screwed.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by schad on Monday August 08 2016, @03:38PM
If you want something to hope for, hope that the West decreases CO2 emissions faster than the East increases them; and hope that before the East "catches up," clean energy is cheaper than dirty. Basically, hope that we're able to buy enough time for technological advancements to save us.
It's not a terribly realistic hope, because the West isn't actually decreasing CO2 production. We're just outsourcing it to the East. And because we have stronger environmental protections, I suspect that every 1 kg of CO2 eliminated here results in more than 1 kg of CO2 created in the East. (Plus a bit extra to ship the goods literally halfway around the world!)
Maybe you can just hope that climate change is all a lie spread by "climate scientists" bought and paid for by radical leftist environmentalist whackadoodles. I can't really think of any other internally-consistent explanation for how we'd be able to avert disaster.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday August 08 2016, @03:56PM
I'll put it this way: I'm basing my decisions about basic stuff like where I live on the assumption that we're basically screwed, because global warming is slow-moving enough that by the time anybody really cares it will be too late to fix the problem.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @05:08PM
It is so sad to see how fervent religious belief takes over otherwise rational people.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday August 08 2016, @06:02PM
Tell me about it. 1.6 billion Muslims, at least 2.2 billion Christians of various stri--oh, wait, you're conflating climate change acceptance, which has actual evidence for it, with religion, which has much AGAINST it. Stop that.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @06:58PM
What do you mean by "climate change acceptance"? There is evidence for the existence of climate change?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday August 08 2016, @07:09PM
Ye ken well what I mean, lad. Dinnae play the fool wi' me.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @08:00PM
No, I really don't know if what you are referring to is well defined enough to beany more testable than various religious beliefs.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday August 08 2016, @08:14PM
You choose not to. In this era of the internet, with information widely available, there is no excuse. Bloody well go look up the archives of any university's climatology department you care to.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @08:41PM
Wow... pointless to continue then.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday August 08 2016, @09:09PM
And that just proves my point. You never had any intention to educate yourself. Short of someone tying you down Clockwork-Orange-style and figuring out a way to make your brain speak TCP/IP, that information is not getting in there. Because you don't WANT it to.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @10:22PM
You sure seem to be fond of initiating violence against other people. "You don't believe [subject]? Well, there's information about [subject] on the internets! Go read! What, me, provide any assertions or links to try to back up what I say? No! Also, someone should tie you down, brainwash you, kidnap you, and/or kill you."
Or, in your own words:
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday August 08 2016, @08:41PM
Right, a good example is the science paper [wiley.com] this NPR article is based on, which says:
The [Greenland ice sheet] lost 75 ± 29 Gt a−1 of mass between 1900 and 1983, and recent anthropogenic climate change has accelerated this mass loss, especially since circa 1990 [Kjeldsen et al., 2015]. The ice sheet lost 262 ± 21 Gt a−1 between 2007 and 2011, with the majority of this ice loss due to declining surface mass balance (SMB), meaning enhanced melt and runoff, rather than increased iceberg discharge [Andersen et al., 2015]. Ice loss due to recent climate change is readily observable in northwestern Greenland. The ice drainage system downslope of Camp Century (“Basin 8.2”) lost 14 ± 2 Gt a−1 of ice between 2007 and 2011, and the majority (80%) of this ice loss was due to decreasing SMB [Andersen et al., 2015].
So the claim is that more ice was lost between 2007 and 2011 than between 1900 and 1983. Because we can't travel back in time to take measurements, it's not testable.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday August 08 2016, @10:12PM
Unless, of course, some people in 1900 and 1983 had thought to draw maps [davidrumsey.com] that included where the ice was. Which would be those measurements you claim couldn't possibly exist.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @05:38AM
Thank you for clarifying. Now that we agree that "climate change acceptance" means believing that "more ice was lost between 2007 and 2011 than between 1900 and 1983", something which was apparently not established until this paper was published, it is sure that continuing the conversation will be productive.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday August 09 2016, @08:03AM
Thank you for clarifying. Now that we agree that "climate change acceptance" means [...]
I don't, of course, speak for the other posters.
[...] "more ice was lost between 2007 and 2011 than between 1900 and 1983", something which was apparently not established until this paper was published [...]
That paragraph summarises other people's work, not their own.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Monday August 08 2016, @05:20PM
Even if the US and Europe significantly reduce their emissions, what will happen is that India and China and other developing nations will increase their emissions
Renewable energy surges to record levels around the world [bbc.com]
It's not all doom and gloom. Those Commies are allowed to think more than 1 quarter in advance.
For the first time, emerging economies spent more than the rich on renewable power and fuels.
I actually think it's the opposite. It's the US with our anti-intellectualism and short-term thinking that will cause us to drag our feet on this issue.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Monday August 08 2016, @07:50PM
It's not all doom and gloom. Those Commies are allowed to think more than 1 quarter in advance.
As the Chinese invest and develop the green technology to take them into the 22nd century, the US will likely still be squabbling about getting access to more fossil fuels and trying to put up barriers to adoption of green tech, thus insuring that the Chinese beat our pants off in another area.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday August 08 2016, @09:14PM
It's not all doom and gloom.
The 147 GW mentioned in the article you linked works out to around 21 W per person. However that, I'm assuming, is peak capacity, so actual output will be markedly less.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday August 09 2016, @04:18AM
Countries like China and India, as well as African countries and other developing nations, have only begun their significant investments in renewables, and those investments are rapidly increasing every year. Meanwhile, there are millions of households in those countries where they use almost zero electricity. It's 21W per person right now. Within ten years, or even five years, it will be much higher.
I don't believe you've made a supportable point. Every year that goes by you will find it more difficult to be so dismissive of the advancement of renewables, even here in the US where we are dragging our feet and each household uses as much as eight times what a European household uses.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday August 09 2016, @07:44PM
Meanwhile, there are millions of households in those countries where they use almost zero electricity.
Those people are going to want electricity. A great deal of it will be needed if electricity is to replace fossil fuels and wood that those people--and the rest of us--use for cooking, heating, and transportation. Wood is often harvested in an unsustainable manner, so it may be inaccurate to call it "renewable."
The world's population is still increasing, so new housing will be needed; the manufacture of cement emits a great deal of carbon dioxide.
A U.S. government report (which only considers forms of energy that are bought and sold, and excludes cement) predicts rapid growth in renewable energy production globally through 2040. However, it also predicts increasing demand for energy. The rates at which oil and gas, and coal are burned are predicted to increase from their current levels.
https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/images/2016_01_figure2.png [eia.gov]
https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/table9-1.cfm [eia.gov]
Because of that, the rate at which carbon dioxide is emitted is expected to increase:
World energy-related CO2 emissions rise from 32.2 billion metric tons in 2012 to 35.6 billion metric tons in 2020 and to 43.2 billion metric tons in 2040 in the IEO2016 Reference case–an increase of 34% over the projection period. Much of the growth in emissions is attributed to developing non-OECD nations, many of which continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels to meet the fast-paced growth of energy demand.
--https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/exec_summ.cfm [eia.gov]
https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/ [eia.gov]