Comments on: this place is best shunned and left uninhabited

By: landscapes of quarantine - mammoth // building nothing out of something

landscapes of quarantine - mammoth // building nothing out of something — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:46:30 +0000

[...] and quarantine economies), as well as two posts more generally related to matters of quarantine (this place is best shunned and left uninhabited, on designing the landscape of nuclear waste repositories, and pueraria lobata, on invasive [...]

By: faslanyc

faslanyc — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:48:32 +0000

check this out- http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/

just recently profiled in wired.

By: faslanyc

faslanyc — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:19:52 +0000

an interesting post on places today regarding this topic and cities in the mojave desert in general.
http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=10807#comments
The John Beck quote about the significance of the desert in judeo-christian tradition is especially poignant. I like the thought of Las Vegas and its surrounds as alternately an “escape from modernity, an elemental alternative to the rational order of ‘civilized’ life,” and “the chaos of an unordered primal ‘nature’ that must be resisted and expunged. . . .” which they go on to expound upon a bit in an interesting way.

By: rob

rob — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:36:52 +0000

Simultaneous posting… technological and political reasons, both, I think.

Politically, from the article in my last comment: “The United States officially banned reprocessing of spent fuel for power reactors in 1977, during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, who feared that proliferation of reprocessing technology would make it too easy for wayward nations or even terrorist groups to obtain the raw material for bombs.”

Technologically, I can’t say I really understand the problem, but it has something to do with “breeder reactors”, which would use reprocessed fuel more efficiently, but haven’t been implemented successfully on a commercial scale yet.

By: rob

rob — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:31:45 +0000

I think that there’s little doubt that the French attitude — recycling spent fuel as much as possible — is better than our “one-and-done” attitude, but while it massively reduces the amount of final waste produced (this article suggests a potential 100-fold reduction, though that relies on technology that hasn’t been implemented yet), recycling still doesn’t eliminate the need to store nuclear waste on a geological time scale. Which isn’t to endorse the WIPP approach; I blogged it because I thought it was interesting, not right.

By: faslanyc

faslanyc — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:30:57 +0000

great tip, nice piece. love me some beth myer. any idea why we are going to such great lengths, whereas the french handle the issue differently, seemingly more pragmatically? I question our policy, after reading stewart brand.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:04:33 +0000

faslanyc:

what does france do with its waste?

Rob had a great post on this topic a while back, near the beginning of the life of this blog: http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2009/04/the-most-sublime-room-in-the-world/

By: faslanyc

faslanyc — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:25:21 +0000

what does france do with its waste? they get most of their energy from nuclear. can’t it be refined? seems like an awesome landscape, but unnecessary. i was struck by how over-the-top the whole project seemed when reading bldg blog’s discussion with the guy from the dept. of energy. Stewart brand characterizes the whole project as the essentially the bastard love-child of nimby-ism and cold war paranoia.

By: rholmes

rholmes — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:59:13 +0000

Topical indeed, with a diametrically opposite approach.

By: Andrew Liebchen

Andrew Liebchen — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:34:35 +0000

I ran across a topical RIBA President’s Medal nomination in a fortuitous “random entry” search:

http://www.presidentsmedals.com/Project_Details.aspx?id=2366&dop=True&year=2009

Eternally Yours : Human[Ity] Shield by Claire Jamieson of the Royal College of Art