Steve Funk

This is a general thought experiment.  There are many possible scenarios where something like this might occur.

Maybe, you've found an amazing piece of land at a ridiculously good price, but:

- It shares a small property boundary with some kind of dump, and you want to put a minimal barrier in to have some assurance that contaminants won't bleed across to your land.

- Or, part of the land contains an old fuel tank that might at some point crack open and contaminate the land

- Or, the previous owner has buried school buses to create an underground structure, but didn't do anything to ensure that they were stripped of hazardous material.

All environmental regulations aside, is there a way to compartmentalise, and isolate, so that you can have confidence that the rest of the land will be unaffected by it.

I guess to some degree, you could interpret this question as asking: "Is natural building only for pristine environments, or can it be done in less than optimal environments with certain mitigation strategies?"

Thanks for your input on this.

I'll pose this as a thought experiment:

Let's say you are building an underground structure (a root cellar, fallout shelter, etc.)  This structure will require the use of some hazardous materials (plastics, etc).  What method would you recommend to isolate those materials from the environment and limit interactions as much as possible?

For example, a concrete sarcophagus was used to isolate the damaged reactors at Chernobyl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Confinement).  So maybe a hydrolic cement could be used to isolate the materials and prevent interaction with the environment.

Or alternatively, some kind of tar sealant might be the answer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealcoat).  This would protect against water interacting with the materials.

What about silicone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicone#Coatings)?

Assume that this material must be used, and you are forced to mitigate risks.  How would you do it?

I've been looking into moving to some land that is well into grizzly country (if everything pans out), and have been considering more or less the same problem. I've got some vague ideas floating around in my head that are untested, but might be worth development. They fall into two categories (big caveats at the bottom).

The first involves taking advantage of natural instincts as a deterrent. Many years ago I saw a documentary type show about a shark repellent that was derived from rotting shark corpses. The theory was that the shark would recognize the smell of other sharks decomposing and decide that whatever killed them might still be around to kill it. The demonstration was pretty impressive, a few drops in the water and they turned tail. So, I did a little googling and found a research paper that seemed to indicate you could deter bears by playing the sound of bears fighting at high volume. In theory the bear hears that others are fighting, figures it's wandered onto another bears territory and decides to leave before being attacked. I'd post the paper, but my laptop died a couple of weeks ago, and it's on there. But, some googling would likely find it.

The second involves annoyances. In theory, every animal has a frequency at which sounds are like fingernails down a chalkboard for us. Likewise, there is a frequency of flashing light that can cause nausea and disorientation. There are examples of the sound generating devices for bugs and rodents, and some flashlights feature a "tactical" mode that does the flashing as well. So, in combination with other, similar, devices it may be able to create a "zone of unpleasantness" such that the bears might choose to travel somewhere else.

The big caveat for these is that you're dealing with relatively complex behaviour from a relatively complex creature, so exhaustive testing should probably be done. For example, a worst case scenario of the first category might see the audio insighting a rage in the bear that spurns it to attack. So, testing a good idea.

I hope that helps.

That is a pretty sculpture, and with the one part missing it seems to capture the disenfranchised fragmentation of society in a post-modern...err...sorry.

Anywho, I was thinking more along the lines of a nano-scale version of something like the attached image (sorry, I'm still learning how to use the forms and embedding images currently exceeds my abilities).

Instead of focusing the light from many mirrors onto a single point to melt sodium (or whatever other design they use), a small number of mirrors might be able to deliver a less impressive, but still useful amount of energy. And with the ability to move the focal point it could be distributed to any line of sight location you'd like.

Hi All,
I would like to submit an idea for development at Wheaton Labs. Essentially the idea is to build a small array (3x3) of small mirrors (something like 2'x3') that can be freely adjusted by a microcontroller (an Arduino would probably do the trick, but a Pi or BeagleBone could provide more power if needed).

It could be developed in phases. The first being to simply reflect the light from the sun into an approximate location. This could allow you to, for example, hang a PV panel on the side of a building where it is relatively protected from the elements, and allow the cheaper mirrors to reflect the sunlight on to it. In addition you could reflect the light onto a thermal mass (like a cob block with a coiled tube running through it) where the heat could be retained (with the block possibly being insulated with something like slip straw).

The second phase could involve attaching a set of motors to each individual mirror. With the use of some trig functions (which are included in the core arduino libraries) it should be possible to create a focal point that can be moved in three dimensions. This would allow you to increase the intensity of the light such that 54 sqft (3x2ftx3x3ft) of light might be focused onto something like a 2'x4' PV panel, at 16sqft. If this worked you could push the PV output to near it's theoretical limit. In this way you could buy fewer expensive panels and get greater output from them.

In addition to the application for PVs, it could be used to store heat energy in a kind of thermal battery, it could be focused on a rock that's painted black to melt snow, it could heat up a kiln, or any number of other tasks. And, it could be automated such that the thermal mass is always heated in the last hour of the day, or you could set it up on interrupts such that fully charged batteries cause the mirrors to reallocate the heat energy somewhere else.

Well, it seems like I've rattled on enough. I hope it's of interest, and that it can be worked into something useful.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Steve