The principle is quite simple: Electrodes stuck into the soil pull water--and contaminants--into buried containers about half a meter wide and a few meters deep.
A cargo ship bound for California has altered course for an emergency stop in Alaska because crew members heard a pounding noise from a deeply buried container, raising fears that stowaways were trapped inside.
(When it comes to this decision, follow the dictates of your conscience, then bury the containers).
The department's plan is to take the uranium made at Indian Point, now stored in 403 stainless steel tubes at a plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and bury the containers at a low-level waste dump that consists of trenches that are up to 40 feet deep at the Nevada National Security Site, where nuclear weapons were tested until 1992.
It may even help to bury the container in a little bit of snow.
The current plan is to interpose three barriers between the waste and human beings by first encapsulating it in a solid material, putting that in a metal container, and finally burying that container in geologically stable formations.
By 1997, the department was burying metal containers in the rock, and heating them up to simulate nuclear waste, to study the effect on water and rock in the immediate area.
But Polk had further plans for the devices: Lt. Isaac Brown, one of Maury's associates, not only mined the waters of southwestern Kentucky but also buried iron containers loaded with explosives to be detonated electrically along two routes leading into Columbus.
Karim Agha, chief of the Hammond tribe, whose people straddle the border region at nearby Chamchamal, said that earlier this fall a smuggler who often passes through the lines saw Iraqi soldiers with heavy equipment digging holes at night in remote gullies, and burying metal containers.
Also buried are containers of white phosphorus, chlorine, smoke bombs, tear gas and incendiary bombs.
