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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: 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.