Interestingly, in real life there are no salt mines in Upper Michigan, where the main Enrichment Center is located. There are plenty of other mines, though.
Maybe all of those old test chambers were vitrified in salt instead of just concrete, come to think of it...
There's a 14 mile underground submarine communications system in upper Michigan. Despite being hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, it could contact submarines all over the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine
At it's peak the system used ~3MW power plant to run the system.
Just a note that while there are[1] 3 transmission lines of 14, 14 and 28 miles in the UP, the lines themselves were mounted on (essentially) telephone poles. The end of each line does have 1 to 3 miles of buried horizontal ground wire though and an array of 100 to 300 foot deep bore holes.
[1] or at least were; the project was shutdown in 2004 and while the paths of the antenna lines still seem to be visible on satellite photos[2] it looks like the lines themselves may have been removed.
[2] The transmission station itself is at https://goo.gl/maps/q5BwduBqbBpAaf1L9 with the 28 mile antenna segment running roughly north south just to the west, one 14 mile segment running east-west a little to the north of the facility and the second to the south.
I played Portal 2 for the first time while working on my MS at Michigan Tech, in Houghton. It was a memorable moment to listen to that Cave Johnson audio log and then turn away from my monitor to look out the window at the nearby defunct copper mines.
The convenience of the location is great. Lots of salt is needed to deice all the roads in the Detroit/Michigan area.
The main purpose of the salt there is for deicing. Saves a bunch on transport costs.
What is the alternative? Roads that become icy probably destroy cars as well, although in a more pinpoint kind of way. At least road salt doesn't cause a lot of fatalities.
As a sibling points out, these systems use process heat, not electricity. U of M has a steam tunnel system in Ann Arbor, which I believe only covers sidewalks, not roads.
It does, but skidding off the road destroys them too.
And throwing sand down really doesn't do much.
Across the lake in Wisconsin we reuse the leftover brine from the cheese industry. Its more effective and more effective per unit used than straight salt.
Takes the freezing point down to 0°F or lower. Combine that with how dry it gets here in the winter and you get a powerful combination of melting and sublimation.
Once you get far enough north in Michigan, like the Upper Peninsula, they switch from salt to sand for the most part. It gets so cold up there so regularly, salt doesn't work as well.
I went down to these mines on a school field trip as a child 30+ years ago. I can almost remember it like it was yesterday, even the smell, and the surprising warmth despite it being the dead of winter outside. I kept a chunk of salt I brought back under my bed for years after that.
Well, I was about 8 years old, so it was just ... neat I guess. In a creepy movie kind of way. I remember it being very yellowish but maybe that was the color of the lights.
It was a common "field" trip for kids in the Detroit area. I went as well, and yeah, there was something very pleasant about the trip. I imagine it was notable for the fact you didn't get a ton of field trips, much less to one with giant machinery down a rickety elevator with an element of danger.
The elevator car was very small, and we were packed in, nose-to-buttcheek, since I was quite small myself at the time. Oy. It was only closed at the bottom -- it was shaped like a hot air balloon basket, with the upper sides open. We kids were strictly admonished to not even try to touch the sides of the shaft as they went by, though I don't think I could reach that far up anyway.
Our ears popped several times on the way down. The ride to the bottom took over a minute, which seemed very long for an elevator not stopping at any other floors!
The ride down was dark, which gave our eyes time to adapt. Once we reached the bottom, the mine seemed bright, although the light level was probably quite low in absolute terms. I remember the light fixtures being attached to the ceiling, drilled straight into the salty rock.
There were vehicles down there! This blew my mind, and even at the young age, I recognized them as older style vehicles, Jeeps and such which had been down there for years. I have no idea how they were kept from rusting immediately. The air tasted of salt. Everything was covered in salt dust.
We were given a ride on a vehicle of some sort, I don't remember if we were in the back of a Jeep or on a trailer hayride-style, but we covered quite some distance into the mine. The room-and-pillar system was pointed out, and we got to see the conveyor bringing salt from the active face being mined at the moment, though we didn't get close to the active room itself.
They let us grab some lumps of salt to bring them home. Whatever you could fit in a backpack to ride the elevator back up, is what I was told. Some of those samples made it into my rock collection, some are still in my memory-box. I don't know what became of the others, but I was using one as a paperweight in elementary school.
I don't know why they closed the mine to tours, but it's a great loss to education. Obviously experiences like that are transformative to a young kid!
In the years since, I've oft wondered if the exceptional stability of that geological formation might make it good for other sorts of uses. Archive storage, or perhaps it's the "secret undisclosed location" where important people scuttle off to when bad things happen.
The size of the mine, several miles and with extents under four cities, is remarkable. It's surely expanded further since this map was made:
Do you happen to use CloudFlare's DNS (1.1.1.1)? They have quite a long-standing [1] issue with archive.is. (or the other way around depending on your opinion)
If you're using Firefox, also check whether you're using DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) with Cloudflare. It's in Settings -> Network Settings -> Enable DNS over HTTPS.
could somebody please share the link with outline.com? I have archive.is blocked because sometimes they redirect to dodgy Russian domains. Maybe we could use outline in future? In the hope that outline works for everyone including those of us using cloudflare?
I tried submitting the link to Outline and it didn't work on Chrome or Edge from EU... the site might be having an issue of some kind or it's just this particular link. Recently I tried it for something else and it only worked on Edge, strangely enough. It's annoying that it doesn't "just work", like it did before.
The article mentions that the salt was originally used for food. I'm curious how, or if, they prevented contamination from things like machine oil or other artifacts of mining.
Salt is often purified by dissolving it in water and precipitating NaCl back out.
This process doesn't always make sense economically, so it's understandable that Detroit uses their own salt for deicing and imports food-grade salt from places where it's cheaper to make. Or maybe in the past they just didn't care about a bit of contamination.
I am honestly amazed at all the inane crap that the media throws at us. I guess a generic redirect to a generic "EU-page" is still better than putting up 5 popups in my face asking me to subscribe and set "cookie preferences" (which takes me to another 3 levels of windows with sleazy anti-patterns, and clicking "Save" displays a spinner for 3 minutes).
That "three minute save spinner" is the most puzzling of all. There is absolutely no upside for the site owner in making the user wait pointlessly and it seems to be exclusive to US sites. European sites tend to be content just having that little unobtrusive "yeah right, it's fine" footer/header, perhaps with some color button trickery for steering users to the non-minimal option. Which isn't exactly nice but surely not a hill to die on. My guess is that those "three minute spinner" implementations are expensive third party compliance plugins that deliberately make the problem they solve look much harder than it actually is.
I suspect the spinner and the wait, like the wild labirynth of confusing "options" you have to wade through, are all a part of a strategy to discourage people from clicking anything else than "yes, I agree to everything, use me in any way you desire, just show me the article".
I think people who design and implement these sleazy dialogs should be ashamed of themselves.
Seeing those pictures makes me feel so sad. My Dad worked in sales for Morton Salt. Morton's mine was across the river in Windsor, Canada. Dad went there on a regular basis taking clients down for tours. As a kid growing up I heard so many crazy stories about the place and I was intrigued.
But you had to be sixteen to enter the mine so my Dad said I'd have to wait. I was so interested that when I turned fifteen I told him that I wanted to go down in the mine on my sixteenth birthday and he agreed.
However that year there was a big collapse in a mine in Louisiana that was under a lake. An oil company got mixed up and drilled down into the mine. The water entered through the hole draining the lake. Though the workers miraculously survived the payouts by the insurance companies were huge.
So then the insurance companies, stunned by the large payouts, banned anyone who wasn't an employee from the mines. Seeing those pictures just brings back all the disappointment.
In Colombia there's a great big salt mine just an hour outside of the capital city Bogota, Zariquipa, that has tours, they're ~$15. Highly recommend. It is low quality, darker salt, but it's pretty neat. Tickets to Bogota often run sub-$500 usd from the US if you shop around.
I visited the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland and it was incredible. It's full of sculptures and they have 2 chapels and a series of rooms to accommodate weddings. Well worth a trip if you're visiting Kraków as it's very nearby.
From the link it appears there were no deaths in this disaster. I'm genuinely surprised everyone managed to escape, I would expact that a lake draining into a mine is not escapable.
The hole was only 14 inches across at the beginning, and grew larger as the flow eroded away the surrounding rock. I remember reading elsewhere that it took a few hours for the lake to drain.
The drill had penetrated one of the lower levels that protruded further underneath the lake, not the top of the mine as one might assume. This gave workers on the upper levels more time to evacuate. The fact that it happened very early in the morning might also have helped.
Fascinating story, even more amazing nobody died when you realize barges were sucked down into it and the ocean water ran miles(?) inland to fill the void. Saw this documentary on TV a decade or so ago.
It didn't sink them permanently. The whole story is just one crazy thing after another.
> Days after the disaster, once the water pressure equalized, nine of the eleven sunken barges popped out of the whirlpool and refloated on the lake's surface.
Reminded me when I wanted to visit Battersea Power Station.Until a few years ago it was shut for decades and just before they were planning to start development on the site,they opened it for a couple of days to public.I thought 'OK', how popular can it get? Will go there in the morning, queue a bit and get in.When my GF and I arrived there, there was a queue of at least a couple of miles..It looked like the whole London came to visit it..
The good news is that you don't have to go terribly far: there is a salt mine in Hutchinson Kansas that is open for tours. It's massive. I took my kids down there last year and it was a lot of fun. You could walk for days in this place if they let you stray.
85 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadMaybe all of those old test chambers were vitrified in salt instead of just concrete, come to think of it...
At it's peak the system used ~3MW power plant to run the system.
[1] or at least were; the project was shutdown in 2004 and while the paths of the antenna lines still seem to be visible on satellite photos[2] it looks like the lines themselves may have been removed.
[2] The transmission station itself is at https://goo.gl/maps/q5BwduBqbBpAaf1L9 with the 28 mile antenna segment running roughly north south just to the west, one 14 mile segment running east-west a little to the north of the facility and the second to the south.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_salt_mine
The drawback with sand is that it doesn't dissolve in water, so silts everything up.
Make America Detroit Again?
https://www.mlive.com/business/west-michigan/2016/02/why_hol...
And throwing sand down really doesn't do much.
Across the lake in Wisconsin we reuse the leftover brine from the cheese industry. Its more effective and more effective per unit used than straight salt.
Takes the freezing point down to 0°F or lower. Combine that with how dry it gets here in the winter and you get a powerful combination of melting and sublimation.
Salt has a sweet-spot where it works. Too warm and you don’t need it. Too cold and salty water freezes anyway.
The rust belt is just right for using salt.
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/01/20/PDTN/dd7f14d1-...
https://youtu.be/ybSzoLCCX-Y
Also I've never been in a mine since then.
The elevator car was very small, and we were packed in, nose-to-buttcheek, since I was quite small myself at the time. Oy. It was only closed at the bottom -- it was shaped like a hot air balloon basket, with the upper sides open. We kids were strictly admonished to not even try to touch the sides of the shaft as they went by, though I don't think I could reach that far up anyway.
Our ears popped several times on the way down. The ride to the bottom took over a minute, which seemed very long for an elevator not stopping at any other floors!
The ride down was dark, which gave our eyes time to adapt. Once we reached the bottom, the mine seemed bright, although the light level was probably quite low in absolute terms. I remember the light fixtures being attached to the ceiling, drilled straight into the salty rock.
There were vehicles down there! This blew my mind, and even at the young age, I recognized them as older style vehicles, Jeeps and such which had been down there for years. I have no idea how they were kept from rusting immediately. The air tasted of salt. Everything was covered in salt dust.
We were given a ride on a vehicle of some sort, I don't remember if we were in the back of a Jeep or on a trailer hayride-style, but we covered quite some distance into the mine. The room-and-pillar system was pointed out, and we got to see the conveyor bringing salt from the active face being mined at the moment, though we didn't get close to the active room itself.
They let us grab some lumps of salt to bring them home. Whatever you could fit in a backpack to ride the elevator back up, is what I was told. Some of those samples made it into my rock collection, some are still in my memory-box. I don't know what became of the others, but I was using one as a paperweight in elementary school.
I don't know why they closed the mine to tours, but it's a great loss to education. Obviously experiences like that are transformative to a young kid!
In the years since, I've oft wondered if the exceptional stability of that geological formation might make it good for other sorts of uses. Archive storage, or perhaps it's the "secret undisclosed location" where important people scuttle off to when bad things happen.
The size of the mine, several miles and with extents under four cities, is remarkable. It's surely expanded further since this map was made:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/solstice/sum99...
Rust isn't a huge problem because the environment is very dry. Salt doesn't cause rust, it just makes it worse.
> Welcome to The Detroit News’s EUROPEAN UNION EXPERIENCE
Anyone got a link working outside the US?
https://eu.detroitnews.com/EU-learn-more/ has more info. Apparently, they claim/think they can’t show you a direct URL without setting a cookie.
Well, it _is_ progress relative to “can’t let you in”, but where do these kind of policies come from?
[1]: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-...
This process doesn't always make sense economically, so it's understandable that Detroit uses their own salt for deicing and imports food-grade salt from places where it's cheaper to make. Or maybe in the past they just didn't care about a bit of contamination.
I think people who design and implement these sleazy dialogs should be ashamed of themselves.
But you had to be sixteen to enter the mine so my Dad said I'd have to wait. I was so interested that when I turned fifteen I told him that I wanted to go down in the mine on my sixteenth birthday and he agreed.
However that year there was a big collapse in a mine in Louisiana that was under a lake. An oil company got mixed up and drilled down into the mine. The water entered through the hole draining the lake. Though the workers miraculously survived the payouts by the insurance companies were huge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur#Drilling_disaste...
So then the insurance companies, stunned by the large payouts, banned anyone who wasn't an employee from the mines. Seeing those pictures just brings back all the disappointment.
(My mother was born there.)
GIS link: https://tinyurl.com/yx5amaux
The drill had penetrated one of the lower levels that protruded further underneath the lake, not the top of the mine as one might assume. This gave workers on the upper levels more time to evacuate. The fact that it happened very early in the morning might also have helped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_iZr2-Coqc
> Days after the disaster, once the water pressure equalized, nine of the eleven sunken barges popped out of the whirlpool and refloated on the lake's surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur
https://www.underkansas.org/
https://www.underkansas.org/
It was run since 13th century till 1996
Also another salt mine that was also used across many centuries lies just around the cordner: Bochnia Salt Mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochnia_Salt_Mine).
I'm not sure how well that would work alongside the existing salt mining operations, though.