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Many are going to ask, "What's so weird about this one corner?" and I'm here to answer.
The end of Irving Avenue, where it meets Moffat Street, in Ridgewood, Queens, is the most radioactive spot in the entire state of New York, and would be the northeast's if not for NJ's McGuire Air Force Base in Burlington County (called "the most contaminated base" in 2007 by the United States Environmental Protection Agency).
In 1918, chemical engineer Alcan Hirsch, and his brother, mining chief Marx Hirsch, opened a chemical plant where today sits most of the businesses on Irving Ave's north side. In 1920, they christen it Hirsch Laboratories, and later added the mining company Molybdenum Corporation (aka Molycorp). The Hirsch brothers sold the lab in 1923 to Harry Wolff and Max Alport, who renamed it Wolff-Alport Chemical Company, but continued their mining operations, and supplied W-A Chemical with the rare-earth metals needed to produce a huge list of products.
The plant processed Monazite sand, which, when treated with Sulfuric Acid, separates into the rare-earth Sodium Sulfate, but also the radioactive waste known as Thorium Pyrophosphate.
It wasn't till the United States' nuclear weapons program in 1942, known as the Manhattan Project, that Thorium became useful. Until 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission began to purchase the fertile heavy element from Wolff-Alport, and for the full 20-years prior, the Thorium waste was simply dumped into the area's sewers.
"Thorium waste dumped into the area's sewers." Amazing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @05:01PM
Since when is thorium particularly dangerous? It's used to alloy with tungsten for filaments and electrodes and used in gasoline lantern mantles.
The daughter products are gamma emitters, but the rate of decay of natural thorium is so low you don't have much of them at a given time.
TA is anti-thorium propaganda. Thorium is still currently a waste product, still discarded by coal miners. If all the cities adopted safe Thorium reactors for energy production, then we would have an energy independent world. We would also
So, just like Fukushima was used as scaremongering propaganda against the cold war era nuclear plants, thorium reactors must also get their fair share of scaremongering. You see, true energy independence frees the people from another level of control by the nation-states and the power producers. It eliminates such a huge amount of political clout, that we are not to have safe clean thorium nuclear energy, that actually eats nuclear waste and can not have a "melt down" or "runaway" reaction. Gets too hot, stops reacting. Loses power? Cold salt plug melts, drains itself into an underground vessel rather than leaking into the environment.
A demand for energy produced by thorium would also allow us to reopen US rare earth mines -- which, as TFA points out, are otherwise littered with thorium and hamper the mining with prohibitive "environmental" regulations (ignoring that coal mining releases more radioactivity into the environment than rare earth mining, and also that thorium reactors would vastly reduce the environmental impact). There is a concerted effort on every side to attack cleaner nuclear energy, and especially thorium. The new nuclear reactors, e.g. on submarines, are nothing like the cold war era monsters.
Would you like to know more? [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @05:09PM
TA
*TFA
Sorry for any typos, I have no time to proofread. My code is almost done compiling.