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Company Offers Disaster-Proof Storage For Records
Makarand writes "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting that a Utah company,
Perpetual Storage, is
offering
disaster-proof commercial storage space
deep inside a granite mountain
for companies looking to store their most important records.
The company claims that their vaults are protected
and safe from "any force known to man", including a nuclear blast.
The vaults have gained popularity
recently after hospitals, government agencies and universities have started using them to keep
their computer records safe."
take a look at mount10 (http://www.mount10.ch/index-e.html). they offer their "data fortress" for some years now here in switzerland (where every mountain has holes like swiss chees ;).
Well, not as far-fetched as you might possibly think..
It happened before already..
For example check out this site:
perl -e 'printf("%x!\n",49153)'
You cannot block the EMP of a nuclear explosion.
For blocking EMP you need a Faradays cage to trap incoming electromagnetic waves. However, the holes of the cage must be small enough to block the waves from getting in. That means that the holes can have at most one half of the wavelength in size. But the wavelength of electromagnetic waves depends on the energy. So with a nuclear (or even nuclear fission) blast you would have extremely low wavelengths in the gamma range. That means that your cage can have only very small holes. But for the gamma range this means that even the distance between atoms is too big - you can't just block them. That's why all these military stations are so deep in the earth: they don't aim to block gamma rays, they just want to get away from them to decrease the incoming energy (=less harmful). This works because you have cubic decay of the radiation intensity. Note that there is still no full protection: after WW III all these military bunkers would be full of cancer ridden mutants away.
The only working way to protect equipment from nuclear blasts would be to increase the wavelength. This could be e.g. done by exploiting the Doppler effect. That means that you would have to accelerate your equipement away from the radiation source. While this is problematic of Earth, you could perhaps do this in space.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Arrgh, armchair geologists getting modded Insightful.
Granite forms at depth in the crust, not in volcanos. It is typically indicative of igneous activity a long time ago -- sometimes billions of years. Its presence is not any kind of indicator of potential for volcanic activity.
When it is exposed at the surface, it usually indicates there has been tectonic activity that moved it upwards. Again, may have happened a long time ago.
In the Salt Lake, there is extremely low potential for volccanic or other igneous activity. What Utah DOES have is a potential for strong seismic (earthquake) acitvity. How safe things are getting bounced around by a magnitude 7 is a matter of question. Would depend on how well engineered the structure is to isolate it from ground movement. Building structures on solid rock is more easily engineered that unconsolidated materials because there is no potential for liquifaction and the high-amplitude, low frequency surface waves (Lova, Rayleigh) are not much of a design factor.
Building inside a granite mountain is a pretty good choice for isolating a structure from seismic waves. Just requires a good isolation system.
This is informative? I am not a physicist, but here are a few responses that come to mind:
- You're trying to apply the concept of a Faraday cage to stuff on an atomic scale; that just doesn't work.
- You can "just block" gamma radiation; even water makes a decent shield in sufficient quantities (each 24 inches of water reduces the indicent radiation by a factor of 10, IIRC). I googled for a bit but couldn't find the half or tenth-thickness for granite; even if it's 10 feet, these vaults should be very safe.
- Gamma radiation is emitted by the fission reaction and resulting product nuclei, not by the EMP mechanism. IIRC, EMP is actually caused by asymmetric gamma flux in a nuclear device accelerating electrons in an asymmetric pattern.
- Falloff of radiation with distance is (I believe) inverse square, not cubic.
Even if the very low-frequency components of an EMP can get into the storage vault, keeping a magnetic tape or hard drive in a conductive magnetically shielded box would most likely be enough to keep them safe.So there's my 2 cents. Merry Christmas.
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