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NASA's Plan To Clean Up Space Program Launch Site Contamination
Elliot Chang tips a story about plans from NASA and the US Air Force to clean up the areas around the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, which have been contaminated with decades worth of carcinogenic chemicals from launching Shuttles, the Apollo moon missions, and other rockets. The KSC cleanup is expected to take 30 years, and will cost an estimated $96 million.
"By far, the most common contaminant is a chlorinated solvent called trichloroethylene, or 'trike,' and its breakdown products — substances known to cause birth defects and cancer and reaching concentrations thousands of times higher than federal drinking water standards allow. ... Kennedy's sandy, alkaline soils are thought to neutralize most metals and other contaminants before they become a problem up the food chain. But trike dies hard. And workers kept pouring it into the ground in the early years of the shuttle program, thinking it would evaporate."
So the disposal method was, let it evaporate? Then instead of evaporating it in a metal pan, they poured it on the ground?
WTF!?!
I live here in the space coast. Back in HS, a rocket blew up overhead and we all had to stay in doors while this crazy looking cloud floated above head. No idea what was in it or what it was, but I figure it lowered my life expectancy a few months.
No doubt in my mind there's some nasty stuff around those pads!
From TFA:
"They advised users to pour the solvent on "dry sand, earth, or ashes at a safe distance from occupied areas" to promote evaporation."
Wouldn't pouring it on porous materials cause it to get absorbed and not promote evaporation at all?
Basic physics would imply that to promote evaporation you'd want as large a surface to air ratio as possible, or am I doing it wrong?
The way the $96M will break down:
1) Hire 150 people from the unemployment line
2) Purchase 150 white jumpsuits, boots and hardhats off Ebay
3) Purchase 150 rolls of Downy (The Quicker Picker Upper)
4) Announce clean-up effort to media who roll the vans
5) CNN is ablaze for a week with pics of clean-up efforts and dirty paper towel
6) Next week, all is forgotten
7) Split the $94M three ways with other vampires running the corporation
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
But considering that's like 1/7th of what it costs to launch a single shuttle, it's really not that bad.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It seems to be a new form of trolling, pasting in a story that has no relation to the topic and see how many pick it up.
Sometimes the trolls are better than the stories.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
A prelude to selling off all that nice Florida beach front property NASA owns? Part of the debt deal that it is transfered into some tea party hacks name?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I thought that was basically every defense contractor the US military has that has an R&D budget?
What you should really ask is, what was the (health) damage suffered before they cleaned it up. The statement that they poured this stuff into the environment in the "first years" suggests that it hasn't been cleaned up for at least 20 years even though everybody knew it wouldn't be going away.
How is future contamination avoided? I skimmed the article and didn't notice anything. Better fuels, motors, handling? Or no more launches from these sites?
Tidy as you go.
Trolls of yesteryear were trying to provoke an angry reaction. While that was still pathetic, at least they seemed to have a goal in mind. And we liked it! We loved it! Gave you something to get your blood in a boil about if that's what you wanted, gave you someone to feel superior to if you didn't! "I may be a 22 year old virgin living in my mom's basement, but at least I'm not a 22 year old virgin living in my mom's basement and posting racist stuff online anonymously in a desperate attempt to feel like anyone takes any notice of my sad existence!!!"
Trolls these days seem to just be wasting electricity. And their computers are a lot more efficient than ours were, so they're not even doing THAT well.
But back to my point, which was: STAY OFF MY LAWN! And while you're at it, clean up that space launch crap you've got on yours.
About 25% die with cancer. Sure, chemicals play a role, but the true reason for such high cancer rates is that people don't usually die because of curable illnesses. And cancer is - so far - not curable. The more progress we have in curing other diseases, treating injuries and preventing accidents - the more cancer deaths there will be, it's unavoidable.
Someone having cancer after being contaminated with some chemical is *not* proof of the cancer being caused by the chemical. The normal rate of cancer is just too high to proof even the effect of highly carcinogenic substances this way.
On one of MIT Open Course lectures, http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/lecture-notes/lecture-2/ where Aaron Cohen (orbiter project manager in 1972) discussed history of the Space Shuttle, professor Jeff Hoffman said on one launch with family members 3 miles from launch pad had to get in the busses to leave the area 5 minutes after launch. Hoffman's brother was a "space nut" and wanted to watch the vehicle go over the horizon (and he was not happy about leaving early). Reason they moved everyone because afternoon launch had smoke from the SRBs drifting toward the viewing site. There's all kinds of nasty stuff and they didn't want people to get exposed to the smoke.
Thanks to Tekfactory for bringing these MIT courses to my attention.
mfwright@batnet.com
There's been a lot of work done in using microbes that already exist in soils to break a lot of contaminants down in situ. You just have to give them the right environment to do it in. Sometimes you have to add water, or hydrogen, or methane in the areas they're working.
Terry Hazen at the Department of Energy is one of the people involved in using it during the nuclear site cleanups. It's been pretty successful.
In the method outlined here, they do it directly by adding finely divided iron, letting it react with water giving Fe(II), hydrogen and OH-. It then breaks down chlorinated hydrocarbons without microbes.
(Though, my sneaky suspicion is that whenever you give some of the microbes that are already present in the soil iron(II) and hydrogen they'll do a lot of the work of reducing chlorine compounds too.)
Look for the total cost to be at least double that. You ever know a government estimate to be anywhere close to the final bill?
I use the manual colon cleanse method, and if that fails the "Enumclaw Equine Dilator" does the trick.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The headline is bogus -- reading the article shows the costs to be a billion, which to me means it will be much more and they don't really know how much it will finally cost.
...Why they've decided, after how many decades, to start cleaning up *now*? Are they never planning on launching any more missions...like, ever?
Makes me think they plan on completely shutting down any further NASA manned space missions (or even heavy-lift unmanned missions) for the foreseeable future, or maybe permanently.
Do they plan on turning it all over to private enterprise, or do they plan on simply halting all further US space exploration, outside of Earth-orbiting satellites?
If they do, is it simply a government funding/budget issue, or do they fear that possible future expansion of humans into space might threaten their ability to maintain control over every human, and are stopping any future human expansion beyond their ability to maintain control before it has a chance to truly begin?
There are more important questions than what exact compounds they are attempting to clean up.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
But it makes for great 50s style sci fi flicks.