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posted by cmn32480 on Monday February 15 2016, @12:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the why-are-we-glowing-green dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 16 2016, @03:02AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday February 16 2016, @03:02AM (#305026)

    We seem to face more and more of these questions lately.

    I think we do merely because outrage is a business model these days. We're past most of that in the developed world.

    I think it's just a sign of the rate of progress. In the 1800s, we (mankind) weren't as capable of anything, so we screwed up less - sure, nasty cesspool cities, killing most of the whales, various forms of slave labor, the 1800s were no picnic, but most problems were slow to appear (and disappear.)

    Today, we can create whole new classes of problems in a matter of months.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday February 16 2016, @02:21PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 16 2016, @02:21PM (#305179) Journal

    Today, we can create whole new classes of problems in a matter of months.

    I noticed that one can merely write a book and create whole new classes of problems. A recent example is the sudden whining over corporate personhood. There's also the microaggression fad which wasn't even a thing before about 2007 or so.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday February 16 2016, @08:42PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday February 16 2016, @08:42PM (#305379)

      Today, we can create whole new classes of problems in a matter of months.

      I noticed that one can merely write a book and create whole new classes of problems. A recent example is the sudden whining over corporate personhood. There's also the microaggression fad which wasn't even a thing before about 2007 or so.

      Meta-problems, social structure, appropriate behavior, whiners, I suspect these have been around since the hunter-gatherers learned to speak and travel in groups of more than 5 people for more than a week at a time.

      There are actual, novel existential problems that have presented themselves in the last 100 years or so:

      * Near extinction by global war (conventional style)
      * Near extinction by global epidemic (made possible by rapid global transport, brought to you in no small part by global war)
      * Actual extinction by global thermonuclear war
      * Collapse of entire ocean ecosystems, extinction of major fish stocks
      * Measurable rise of sea level, with possibility for dramatic acceleration within decades
      * Interconnectivity and acceleration of global economy making the whole system subject to bubble and crash events
      * Infrastructure dependency upon information systems that may be one day taken over by hostile AI

      These things (and many more) were relatively unthinkable before 1900. They pulled off continental scale genocide with biowarfare in the 1600-1800s, but it never seemed conceivable that the whole species could go down before the Spanish Flu following WWI.

      These are just the big problems, there are plenty of new problems more important than whether or not people's feelings are getting hurt cropping up all the time.

      Of course, if you follow the highly enlightened Dalai Lama, you might rate people's feelings as equally or more important than most non-lethal concerns.

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 17 2016, @09:09AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 17 2016, @09:09AM (#305679) Journal

        * Actual extinction by global thermonuclear war

        This is the actual new one. The first two already existed (such as your discussion of continental-scale biowarfare, given that there are only seven continents) and global warfare was a thing for a few centuries (such as the conflicts between the UK and France prior to the Revolutionary War).

        The three after nuclear war aren't existential threats and the last isn't a threat at all.

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 17 2016, @02:18PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday February 17 2016, @02:18PM (#305777)

          Depends on how histironic you want to get... Global war between UK and France was kind of a pathetic joke, nobody was getting wiped out unless they were on a ship that went down, and even then there were usually survivors taken prisoner.

          Starting around WWII, it was seeming conceivable that the Axis powers might actually roll over the entire globe and they were much closer to genocide by bombs, bullets, gas and whatever else they could come up with.

          As for the last one, given total control of our electronic dependent infrastructure, a nefarious agent could probably kill over 50% of large city dwellers within a month. Combine cyber attacks with a few dozen well coordinated "two guys, and a pickup truck full of hand-grenades" style attacks on vulnerable infrastructure (which self-driving vehicles are already capable of) and lots of people are going to be dying of starvation, weather exposure and panic in a big hurry.

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          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 18 2016, @03:12PM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 18 2016, @03:12PM (#306345) Journal

            Depends on how histironic you want to get... Global war between UK and France was kind of a pathetic joke, nobody was getting wiped out unless they were on a ship that went down, and even then there were usually survivors taken prisoner.

            In the Seven Years War, somewhere around a million people died. Sure, it's light compared to the Second World War, the Mongolian invasions, or any of the Chinese grindfests, but that's still a lot of people.

            As for the last one, given total control of our electronic dependent infrastructure, a nefarious agent could probably kill over 50% of large city dwellers within a month.

            I don't buy that. Most infrastructure is just too unreliable and the electronics too buggy to depend on electronics alone. Sure, at some point, I see overdependency on automated systems becoming a problem, but it hasn't arrived yet.

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 18 2016, @04:04PM

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday February 18 2016, @04:04PM (#306375)

              The electronic controls on the water supply to New York (and most other major cities) can be (with sufficient remote access and skill/knowledge of the system) manipulated to effectively destroy and meaningful volume of potable water delivery to the city. How long will people get by on boil water orders, when the electricity and gas are also out? Screw up the trains, flood the tunnels, blow some bridges, and you've got millions of people justifiably hyper-panicked that they're going to have to drink from the Hudson River or die, food stocks in the city run out in just over 24 hours without resupply from trucks (New York is especially bad on this front, but many other cities are similarly short on food warehousing.)

              Commercial air, ship and lately now train transport is almost entire dependent on the computational infrastructure to operate at anything approaching normal volumes. Once we're all transitioned into these self-driving cars, SkyNet will have an easy game of shutting us down.

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              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 18 2016, @04:14PM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 18 2016, @04:14PM (#306377) Journal

                The electronic controls on the water supply to New York (and most other major cities) can be (with sufficient remote access and skill/knowledge of the system) manipulated to effectively destroy and meaningful volume of potable water delivery to the city. How long will people get by on boil water orders, when the electricity and gas are also out?

                Longer than it'll take for the utilities to route around the damage.

                Commercial air, ship and lately now train transport is almost entire dependent on the computational infrastructure to operate at anything approaching normal volumes.

                Sorry, I don't buy that. They aren't that hard computationally.

                • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 18 2016, @05:12PM

                  by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday February 18 2016, @05:12PM (#306415)

                  Have you ever seen a major force-main break? Happened due to metal fatigue in Miami once, geyser shot up out of the street under a parked truck and turned it over, it wasn't repaired for weeks. Poor choices of valve settings can rupture pipes, often in places inconvenient to repair or reroute around. Some, non-potable, service could be restored quickly, but not enough to supply most buildings. A coordinated attack against major utilities and transport modes would take much longer to repair than a simple single point failure, think: Hurricane Sandy, but with all telephones and internet down nationwide - and if SkyNet is strategic with its zero day strike, it won't happen in a single city, it will go off everywhere all at once, probably at 5AM GMT.

                  If you cut air traffic rates by a factor of about 5, they might get by with "see and be seen" at a level of safety pilots are willing to accept. Current 30 second take off and landing intervals at major airports can't be handled by guys pushing little chits around on a map - they need their systems to ID the radar blips - hell, the radar itself is highly computerized by now, I doubt you'd be able to get a meaningful radar picture if the computer controlling it were compromised.

                  Trains have only recently (10 years) gone seriously computer controlled, the busier corridors would suffer carrying capacity without digital signalling, but not much on the lighter used lines. And ships can be manually steered into port, but no small amount of chaos (and thus, loss of throughput capacity) will ensue when they try to figure out where all those containers are supposed to route to without their digital systems.

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                  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 18 2016, @09:33PM

                    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 18 2016, @09:33PM (#306570) Journal

                    Have you ever seen a major force-main break?

                    Ok, how do you cause that with electronics? Without extensive physical damage, you're running these systems manually and that's just not that hard.

                    A coordinated attack against major utilities and transport modes would take much longer to repair than a simple single point failure, think: Hurricane Sandy, but with all telephones and internet down nationwide - and if SkyNet is strategic with its zero day strike, it won't happen in a single city, it will go off everywhere all at once, probably at 5AM GMT.

                    So you think it might take 12 hours to fix instead of 4 hours?

                    If you cut air traffic rates by a factor of about 5, they might get by with "see and be seen" at a level of safety pilots are willing to accept.

                    Sounds good enough then especially once they increase that rate with experience in doing it that way. Your bitty plane just won't land at JFK.

                    And ships can be manually steered into port, but no small amount of chaos (and thus, loss of throughput capacity) will ensue when they try to figure out where all those containers are supposed to route to without their digital systems.

                    Again, which is a short term thing. Someone will just have to figure out what bar codes mean.

                    The thing here is how do you manage to build up such a vulnerable system without have the pieces of that system prematurely self-destructing? My view is that there are already a huge host of failures testing this infrastructure and components right now. Any vulnerability that can cause a water main break in the hands of a sophisticated, electronically-based foe, can be triggered by more mundane means. And eventually they either fix the vulnerability or get used to the breaking down with alternate means of working around that problem.