The inevitable betrayal of materials: Corrosion and the civilizational challenge of nuclear permanence

“ Neither are there traces of European ideas embodied in the shapes or in the decoration of the objects—a circumstance that argues strongly in favor of native origin. An equally convincing argument is found in the fact that all the alloys liable to corrosion exhibit marked evidences of decay, as if for a long period subject to the destructive agents of the soil. In many cases the copper alloy base crumbles into black powder, leaving only the flakes of the plating. ”

“ Iron and steel are of no use now; the corrosive power of our atmosphere is so great, that the heaviest and strongest structure if made of these metals would soon be eaten away. The great war ships of the ancients and their great merchant fleets soon became useless by corrosion. ”

“ Civil nuclear energy programmer worldwide have already generated many thousands of tons of spent fuel and high-level waste. Many governments have embarked on large-scale programmes to develop ways of isolating these from the biosphere for the many hundreds of thousands of years that they will remain hazardously radioactive. ”

“ The first observation that must be apparent to all men is that our dominion has been mostly destructive.
We have been greatly engaged in digging up the stored resources, and in destroying vast products of the earth for some small kernel that we can apply to our necessities or add to our enjoyments. We excavate the best of the coal and cast away the remainder; blast the minerals and metals from underneath the crust, and leave the earth raw and sore; we box the pines for turpentine and abandon the growths of limitless years to fire and devastation; sweep the forests with the besom of destruction ”

“ The objection which petitioners make to the storage of gasoline and kerosene in tanks buried underground is that through the effect of electrolysis and corrosion caused by acid in the soil, and the possible 'floating out' of the tanks, leaks are likely to occur, difficult to discover, by which the gasoline might penetrate through the earth into sewers, wells, and basements, contaminating the water and causing explosions. ”

“ Nay, but how tortured is the frightful seed The spark intense within it, all without Mordant corrosion gnashing and champing hard For ruin on the naked small redoubt. Bitter, to fold the issue, and make no sally; To have the mystery, but not go forth; To bear, but retaliate nothing, given to save The spark in storms of corrosion, as seeds from the north. The sharper, more horrid the pressure, the harder the heart That saves the blue grain of eternal fire Within its quick, committed to hold and wait And suffer unheeding, only forbidden to expire. ”

“ Water, urine, wine, or any other simple liquid you can get in reasonably large quantities will dilute gasoline fuel to a point where no combustion will occur in the cylinder and the engine will not move. One pint to 20 gallons of gasoline is sufficient. If salt water is used, it will cause corrosion and permanent motor damage.
(5) In the case of Diesel engines, put low flashpoint oil into the fuel tank; the engine will not move. If there already is proper oil in the tank when the wrong kind is added, the engine will only limp and sputter along. ”

“ They are still childish and primitive. Our blast-furnaces are mere adaptations of the prehistoric pits, changed into hollow columns and enlarged according to requirements. And one continues throwing in the ore and the combustible pell mell, and burning them together. One might take such a furnace to be some infernal animal, down whose throat one is for ever pouring food compounded of coal and oxide of iron, which the beast digests amidst a hurricane of fire, and which it gives out down below in the form of fused metal, whilst the gases, the dust, the slag of every kind goes off elsewhere. ”

“ Each thing jostled and damaged the other things about it, each thing ignored the other things about it; the smoke of the furnace defiled the pot-bank clay, the clatter of the railway deafened the worshippers in church, the public-house thrust corruption at the school doors, the dismal homes squeezed miserably amidst the monstrosities of industrialism, with an effect of groping imbecility. Humanity choked amidst its products, and all its energy went in increasing its disorder, like a blind stricken thing that struggles and sinks in a morass. ”

“ In the manufacture of white lead processes which create dust are specially dangerous, namely, emptying the corrosion chambers, drying and grinding, transport of the material in the form of powder, and packing. The following measures are called for: emptying the chambers should only be done by men wearing respirators or equipped with breathing helmets after preliminary damping of the corrosions by means of a spray. Use of a vacuum cleaning apparatus suggests itself. Drying should be done as far as possible in stoves charged mechanically, the temperature in which can be watched from the outside ”

“ Where there is much dust in the working of close quarries, the effects of it are almost as destructive to the lungs of the operatives as the knife-grinding to the operatives of Sheffield who do not guard against the steel-dust. “It is scarcely conceivable,” Dr. Arnott states, “that the immense quantities of granite-dust pounded by one or two hundred thousand pairs of wheels working on Macadamised streets, should not greatly injure the public health. ”

“ Millions daily bathed in the poisonous damps and destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and arsenic, to say nothing of those other employments, those stations of wretchedness and contempt, in which civil society has placed the numerous enfans perdus of her army. ”

“ The prodigal squandering of our mineral fuels proceeds unchecked in the face of the fact that such resources as these, once used or wasted, can never be replaced. If waste like this were not chiefly thoughtless, it might well be characterized as the deliberate destruction of the Nation's future. ”

“ Heavy metals from coal-burning plants and some industrial processes also reach the oceans via the atmosphere. The amount of oil spilled annually from tankers now approaches 1.5 million tons. [3] The marine environment, exposed to nuclear radiation from past nuclear weapons tests, is receiving more exposure from the continuing disposal of low-level radioactive wastes. ”

“ It is manifest that unless some unity of purpose can be achieved in the world, unless the ever more violent and disastrous incidence of war can be averted, unless some common control can be imposed on the headlong waste of man's limited inheritance of coal, oil, and moral energy that is now going on, the history of humanity must presently culminate in some sort of disaster, repeating and exaggerating the disaster of the great war, producing chaotic social conditions, and going on thereafter in a degenerative process towards extinction. ”

“ And so we're working with other nations, like Japan and France and Great Britain and Russia and China, to form this energy partnership, the purpose of which is to help developing nations secure cost-effective and proliferation-resistant nuclear power, and at the same time to conduct joint research on how to deal with the nuclear waste issue, through positive, productive reprocessing. ”

“ This policy not only addresses commercial spent nuclear fuel but also advances our non-proliferation efforts by providing an option for disposal of surplus plutonium from nuclear weapons stockpiles and an alternative to reprocessing. It supports our national defense by allowing continuing operation of our nuclear navy, and it is essential for the cleanup of the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons complex. ”

“ We have made considerable progress in the scientific evaluation of the Yucca Mountain site and the Department of Energy is close to completing the work needed for a decision. It is critical that we develop the capability to permanently dispose of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, and I believe we are on a path to do that. ”

“ The congressional defense committees. (B) The Committee on Energy and Commerce of the House of Representatives. (C) The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources of the Senate. (2) Covered defense nuclear waste.— The term "covered defense nuclear waste" means radioactive waste that resulted from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel that was generated from atomic energy defense activities and that— (A) contains more than 100 nCi/g of alpha-emitting transuranic isotopes with half-lives greater than 20 years ”

“ The U.S. government has also systematically used Indian reservations as toxic or nuclear waste dumps through the means of deception and coercion, subjecting them to long-term exposure to uranium and other radioactive materials. As a result, the cancer incidence and fatality rates in the communities concerned is significantly higher than in other parts of the country. Indian communities have effectively become the "garbage cans" in the development process of the United States. ”

“ Capricious as lightning, the explosion had preserved some shaky, nearby hovels that a breath could have swept away, and even spared a part of the cartridge plant, while it had overturned and pulverized buildings several kilometers off, reduced to jelly torpedo-proof masonry, broken like a wisp of straw the piles and the joists of docks, converted iron into filings, and rumpled like a piece of silk the galvanized sheet-iron roofs of the warehouses.
Ruins leaned in an unstable state of equilibrium and slashed themselves into fabulous profiles and unheard of styles of architecture. ”

“ Iron, once solid, now a viscous red liquid, was sluggishly flowing in an ever-thickening stream up that intangible crimson duct and into the capacious storage tanks of the Nevian raider; and wherever that flaming beam went there went also ruin, destruction and death. Office buildings, skyscrapers towering majestically in their architectural symmetry and beauty, collapsed into heaps of debris as their steel skeletons were abstracted. Deep into the ground the beam bored; flood, fire, and explosion following in its wake as the mazes of underground piping disappeared. ”

“ Those who had been unlucky enough to live through the attack thus far were now so nauseated by the odors of mankind's collapse that they stumbled among the shattering streets, retching and vomiting, as eager to escape the yellow hell-cloud's stink as they were to avoid the crumbling steel and cement. ”

“ Everywhere there are ruins and unburied dead, and shrunken, yellow-faced survivors in a mortal apathy. Here there are robbers, here vigilance committees, and here guerilla bands ruling patches of exhausted territory, strange federations and brotherhoods form and dissolve, and religious fanaticisms begotten of despair gleam in famine-bright eyes. It is a universal dissolution. The fine order and welfare of the earth have crumpled like an exploded bladder. ”

“ If you turn up the sod in the plain where the wild herds graze, you will find numberless fragments of rusted or corroded metal, bits of glass and strange plastic substances, debris of artifacts still showing the marks of their shaping—the scattered wreckage of the things they made. And we—we too are a remnant, the descendants of the few out of all humanity that survived when the Ryzgas' world went down in flame and thunder. ”

“ The military power may be constructive in times of peace, but its end, if it uses the tools it invents, is devastation and the inflicting of injury. When the civil power is subjugated to the military power, society is headed toward calamity.
To keep and to waste are opposite processes. Not only are we able to despoil the earth by sheer lust of ravage and by blighting the fields with caverns of human slaughter, but we shoot away incredible supplies of copper and petroleum and other unrenewable materials that by every right and equity belong to our successors ”