Underground Caverns in Tectonic Settings

 I have brushed up on all my old papers.  Sometimes you need to excavate a cavern near an active fault, or under a glacial advance.  The glacial loading is greater.

This can be solved with Ruthless Rationality.  We can leave myth-making aside on this.  It's the same as nuclear waste at Wesleyville.  In 10,000 years, liquid waste against rock won't get more than a centimetre in, due to diffusion.  Is it politically acceptable?  Nope.

The big thing about glaciation or tectonic uplift is that every zone that is going to move, has moved.  Make a big multi-layer ice cream sandwich, with Dairy Queen soft ice cream.  Squoosh it around a bit.  All the displacement is in the cream.  You can't ever touch the hard bits.  

You can make this case, using AI, and advanced computing, in such a way to convince everybody.  You can't convince the hard mythies, but you can convince them to leave you alone, and they call you an idiot for going with physics.  

Canada needs to go with Ruthless Rationality.  Unfortunately, people still vote for the NDP.  For physics, China has my 'Gold Rationality Star'.  For their major projects, there has been nothing wrong.  And I buy all my physics toys directly from China.  Canada can't do major things, except for paving roads.

So, Mr Carney.  Go with my plan to raise Canada.  Then we can afford the dental plans.  

ps my science fiction reads include a high-speed tube system throughout the world.  I keep getting stuck on putting a tunnel through the Mid-Atlantic Rift.  I think it can be done dodging through the transform faults.

Back to Bathing in Rationality

 Early in my career, I lived and breathed in rationality.  Those were heady times.  My blog has been recently going against stupidity, but I may have a chance to dream of rationality again.

Since I knew that nobody reads me, and I had no chance in the preacher department, my style has been satirical.  But rationality beckons, and I'm digging up the old stuff.  

My greatest work was in the basic physics of rock.  We looked at stresses, and the response of undergound openings to earthquakes.  For that I needed a deep dive into the physics of earthquakes.  Most important, was the expected stresses propagated in seismic waves.

For the test cases in my papers, I concluded that, in granite, the stresses were below noise expected in a cavern, or below the expected safety factors in design.  There was heartbreak when the old company ignored all this with their Niagara tunnel.  Good thing that unstable creation was abandoned after building.

I also had to venture into the general stability of caverns.  This was all ignored when looking for underground nuclear waste storage.  I expanded into glacial loading for caverns, and lots of other things.

It was always my greatest dream to be 'not ignored'.  For Canada and our western world, this has to come at the expense of great disasters.  We are heading to those.  I would like to be in a position to prevent great disasters.

My blog now turns serious for a little while.  If you are one of my 3 readers, go along with this.  Thank you.

Cold air breakouts begin again

 

We are in full production of cold.  The Europe flow is stopped.

In other matters, I have always dreamed I would be Edward Deming, spreading basic physics to a place ready to receive it.  His was the math of quality, and Japan sucked it up.  I am looking at a similar chance now in the only rational country in the world.  Expect only 'gravitas' from me in the near future, but be happy in the knowledge I probably can't do it.