JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 868
On Zero: “...a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit – almost an amphibian between being and non-being. ” — Gottfried Leibniz
Zeros come in all shapes and sizes, at all places in the dictionary, formulary and levels of mind. The zero can denote the finite, infinite and the transfinite, as simple beginnings and endings. In set theory zero is the least cardinal number, in propositional logic it denotes falsity, in abstract algebra it is a neutral element. It has a funny place in describing temperature: in Kelvin it is really the end of cold, while in Celsius it sort of means the end though there are negative numbers below it—in Fahrenheit it is just another plain number, not really marking anything particular at all in the scheme of temperatures. It is the name of a plane, comic book character, fictional folks in books (one of my favorites being the appropriately-named “Zero” in the book Holes) or a Smashing Pumpkins song. In digital speak, it can simply be “off”. Zero is ancient and has different birthplaces, and has a long, varied and complex history.
We’ll leave differentiating “zeros” and “holes” and “nothing”—a problem that I’m already having in my thus far Zeronaughtless series of posts on “The History of Nothing” and “The History of Holes”—for another day.
Today for the first post in this series I’m interested in the Zero on a door—or, rather, the zero for a room if it had a door right on it, which it doesn’t, or didn’t. (And not the door behind which the Room Zero serial killer hid out.) The door to Room Zero is 875 away from its identifying point, and the door—-doors, actually—-can withstand 10,000 pounds of pressure per inch. The doors closing off the way to Room Zero are massively massive affairs, and can be explosively closed in .03 seconds.
Those are some doors.
But Room Zero is no ordinary room. It belongs to an idea that also carries a very weighty agony/ecstasy association. The “agony” part is the Room, which is where a nuclear warhead is exploded. The ecstasy part is the name of this particular explosion, one of 985 of such explosion documented in the Nuclear Weapons Archive in the Nevada desert. In this explosion Room Zero belonged to a test called “Misty Rain”.
The 875’ long tapered pipe—which was just a few inches in diameter at the explosion point, gradually becoming 10’ at the end—was fabricated into a thousand-foot long tunnel dug into the side of Rainier Mesa in Area 12 of the Nevada Test Site. It was basically a collection/direction device against which military communications/weapons/etc components were tested for the effects of radiation generated by the weapon exploded in Room Zero (which was also referred to as the “point room”, pinpointed at 37.120299 116.122583).
Reading about Room Zero and its tunnel and muffler and doors and shockwave and etc., I cam across something that braked my attention and rolled right into my imagination—on page 43 of The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions we read:
“After the experiment [detonation], parts of the bypass drift will be reexcavated to permit access to the tunnel system to recover the pipe and experimental equipment.”
The pipe? 875 feet of massive piping?
It was hard to imagine pulling out all of that metal—metal that was already, basically, buried. I called the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation and spoke to its Archivist, Ms. Karen Green, who said, that, well, yes, in most cases the piping was removed. The pipe would then be decontaminated and buried, or recycled. This is massive, horizontal piping that we’re talking about here. Since there were 985 shots at NTS, that means that 500+ and more of them had piping of about this size that were not only installed, but removed and either cleaned or destroyed. The tunnels were rarely re-used (said Ms. Green) so there are something like 900 tunnels criss-crossing their way underneath the surface out there, most of which were lined with massive pipes that had to be taken out. The image of removing the hundreds (?) of miles of massive pipelines crystallizes the enormity of the experimentation going on out there in the desert.
Notes:
This is an example of what an underground nuclear explosion looks like topside.
Data from: The Containment of UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT U.S. Government, 1989. (U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions, OTA-ISC-414 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1989). http://www.archive.org/stream/containmentofund00unitrich/containmentofund00unitrich_djvu.txt
List of underground nuclear explosions in Nevada
Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation
A Fuller Description of the Closing of the Room Zero Doors:
From The Containment of UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS Chapter S — "Containing Underground Nuclear Explosions • 43 "
“The entire pipe is vacuum pumped to simulate the conditions of space and to minimize the attenuation of radiation. The bypass drift (an access tunnel), located next to the line of sight pipe, is created to provide access to the closures and to different parts of the tunnel system. These drifts allow for the nuclear device to be placed in the zero room and for late-time emplacement of test equipment. After the device has been emplaced at the working point, the bypass drift is completely filled with grout. After the experiment, parts of the bypass drift will be reexcavated to permit access to
the tunnel system to recover the pipe and experimental equipment.
The area around the HLOS pipe is also filled with grout, leaving only the HLOS pipe as a clear pathway between the explosion and the test chamber. Near the explosion, grout with properties similar to the surrounding rock is used so as not to interfere
with the formation of the stress containment cage. Near the end of the pipe strong grout or concrete is used to support the pipe and closures. In between,
the stemming is filled with super-lean grout de- signed to flow under moderate stress. The super-lean grout is designed to fill in and effectively plug any fractures that may form as the ground shock collapses the pipe and creates a stemming plug.
The working point room is a box designed to house the nuclear device. The muffler is an ex-panded region of the HLOS pipe that is designed to reduce flow down the pipe by allowing expansion and creating turbulence and stagnation. The MAC is a heavy steel housing that contains two 12-inch-thick forged-aluminum doors designed
to close openings up to 84 inches in diameter. The doors are installed opposite each other, perpendicular to the pipe. The doors are shut by high pressure gas that is triggered at the time of detonation. Although the doors close completely within 0.03
seconds (overlapping so that each door fills the tunnel), in half that time they have met in the middle and obscure the pipe. The GSAC is similar to the MAC except that it is designed to provide a gas-tight closure. The TAPS closure weighs 40 tons and the
design resembles a large toilet seat. The door, which weighs up to 9 tons, is hinged on the top edge and held in the horizontal (open) position. When the door is released, it swings down by gravity and slams shut in about 0.75 seconds. Any pressure
remaining in the pipe pushes on the door making the seal tighter. The MAC and GSAC will withstand pressures up to 10,000 pounds per square inch. The TAPS is designed to withstand pressures up to 1 .000 pounds per square inch, and temperatures up to 1,000T.
When the explosion is detonated radiation travels down the HLOS pipe at the speed of light. The containment process (figure 3-8(a-e), triggered at the time of detonation, occurs in the following sequence to protect experimental equipment and contain
radioactive material produced by the explosion…
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