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Made easier by all the waste being solid at least!

o.o

Photo taken from behind a lead shield through a lead glass window of a small radiation source in the lower half of its lead storage capsule.

Using a somewhat dented KT-10 type capsule from the 90s to hand off the source to the guys from the state waiting downstairs. It's so idiotic that they go through the expensive trouble of putting it in some big drum with other radionuclineds and then do... Well, no idea. Wait until there's a longterm storage solution. You could also just leave these in our storage cabinet until they have decayed far enough to be below the exemption limit, but if it was once formally a source, it's still one. If I'd find a rock with the same level of activity, it would be fine, but not with this thing. Laws are weird.

Photo of a pile of office junk, dead plants, boxes, stacked on a dolly in an elevator.

Photo of various bottles of Clostermann Appléritif, an alcohol-free fake champagne. It's essentially just fancy and expensive fruit juice, but a colleague once brought it for a celebration, and I loved it. Since my latest achievement (see previous post) warrants some celebration, and since I refuse to drink alcohol, it was time to stock up on this stuff.

Today's agenda:

- Hand radioactive source to disposal guys.

- Also dipose of junk a former colleague left behind.

- Heavy drinking.

On this ever-so-dreary Monday full of continued stress, there was a moment of brightness. So bright in fact that I had a hard time maintaining my composure.

My DFG grant proposal for a large machine was accepted.

I secured 1.1 million € to acquire a new magnet cryostat system for my group.

*dies*

I'd notice! :<

My last visit to London in 2012 did have the successful side quest of photographing and riding the last A stock trains while they were being replaced...

Photo of an old mine adit, illuminated by a flashlight, taken through a large, locked gate. There are partially submerged ore cart tracks on the floor as well as thick water/air pipes along a side of the tunnel. Electrical cables are running along the ceiling, with their severed ends facing us, marking where the old workings were sealed off from the still-maintained museum section. If you have waders, you could take this route to get to the old compressor station.

Yeah, that concludes all my babble on this topic for today. :)

Last but not least, taken by sticking my phone and light through a locked gate, a photo of an adit beyond the museum area.

That's actual abandoned mine territory behind there, illegal to enter. Every part of me wanted to explore it.

Photo of the end of the conveyor belt, with a brick wall that was obviously not part of the original structure. Behind it would have been the first rock crusher. You can see the larger pinch rollers of the conveyor, which differ from the support rollers we saw on previous photos.

Photo of a lower level on next to the room where the crusher once sat. The photo is blurry, but in the light of a powerful torch, one can see an electric motor connected via a coupling shaft to what I presume to be a large pump.

Photo of the electrical control panel that once supplied the pump, with remnants of writing like "Pumpe" and "Ventil" still being legible among the corroded metal parts.

Photo of the very end of the adit as it reaches the surface, secured by a myriad of cameras and motion sensors. Bats also live here in the winter months.

Sooner than expected, we arrived at the end of the conveyor's remains. The rock crusher used to be behind that wall (kept underground to avoid noise pollution), along with other pumps and machinery that now sit underwater, with the adit unceremoniously ending at a large surface gate.

Close-up of one of the rollers that once held up the conveyor belt, now hanging loosely off the one intact axle. Everything is extremely rusty, with the metal visibly flaky and brittle thanks to over 90% humidity.

Photo of a section that still had the belt on it, which is sagging through quite a lot due to many of the rollers having rusted away. It's heavily laden with rock, some might still be from when it stopped for the last time back in the 70s, but much of it probably detached from the ceiling over the years.

This section has a large vertical shaft right in the middle of the inclined one we're traversing. This was used to dump ore back down onto the level the belt originally started, in case it was so heavily laden that it couldn't be started up again. Even when leaning above it with a torch, I couldn't see the bottom of the shaft.

This section had the conveyor system removed completely, as it was used for fire tests of insulation and support materials used in mining and other construction. Some mining deaths could be retroactively explained thanks to the tests performed here. All of the rock around us is blackened from the soot that resulted from these tests.

While many of the group were huffing and wheezing from the continuous climb, I was mainly enamored by the untouched decay we saw in some parts that still had the mostly collapsed belt in place. I'll put most of the detailed babble in the alt text.

An LED flashlight illuminated photo of the rusted and deteriorated remains of the conveyor belt, looking downhill at the passage we came from, with a brick wall separating this area from the regular museum route. Old electrical cables are scattered, with severely corroded chains and remains of the original lights dangling from the ceiling. Most of the rollers that once held the belt have crumbled to pieces and fallen off.

Another downhill view a bit further up the shaft, at one of the recently installed lights. Only the bare frame of the conveyor remains at this section.

And with that, we set off into the dark and the wet, climbing up the muddy and rough inclined shaft. It only recently received some working lights every few hundred meters, on insistence from authorities, as well as a phone line one could plug into.

Looking down the inclined shaft with the silent and rusted conveyor disappearing into the depths, along a pair of narrow gauge tracks that once housed a short incline railway for maintenance. The lower end of the conveyor below the ore bunker is not visible, since it's under water, the stark blackness visible in the distance.

Photo of the view in the uphill direction. The regular museum route is below us, and that's where barely teen yeen once stood back in the day, wondering where this conveyor might go.

Finally being able to get up here was really special to me. :)

While formally part of the museum (and not an abandoned/unsecured mining sector) and an emergency egress route, it was never really used for tours until this year, when these special/long ones were offered on a few occasions.

Photo of a conveyor belt emerging from a dark, inclined shaft.

Photo of the same conveyor belt disappearing into an inclined shaft on the other side of the adit we're standing in. Back when I was here in the late 90s or early 00s, there were fewer lights, so all I saw was this dark scaffolding just disappearing into silent nothingness, wondering where it came from and where it went.

The biggest highlight was something I only caught this exact glimpse of back then: The Bandberg, an inclined shaft housing the conveyor that brought the ore to the surface.

I remember how kid me just saw how it came out one wall and disappeared into the other, with no clue where it went exactly.

I lived first!

I'm kind of betting on being able to get updates for one more year, but that option hasn't yet materialized on any of my machines...

Photo of mine cart tracks approaching a tippler station, showing the large retarders on either side of the rail to stop the carts, as well as the chain drive between the rails to move them forward.

Closeup photo of the rotary tipplers, with one containing a mine cart and being rotated to an almost horizontal position. These also had shaker motors to really get all of the contents out.

During the regular tour, you can look at these rotary tipplers from behind that handrail.

During this tour, we could walk all over everything; nobody ever said "Stay back, it's dangerous!" despite the precariously flexing metal covers hiding the bunker below. I loved it.

Why do you live so far away? :<

Photo of a pair of massive winding drums in a large underground cavern.

Peering past the top of the large drums up the inclined shaft that leads to the pair or sheaves at the top of the blind shaft. Sadly, that view is obscured by metal plating.

One of the highlights of this extended tour, apart from being 8 people instead of 60, was the ability to see stuff that's not part of the regular tour. I remember how kid-me peered at this massive underground winding engine through a dirty window, and now I finally got to see it up close. Magical.

It's in the butt, of course!

Yeah, I was rather glad it was not entirely abandoned/dismantled, but also wonder how it's better to have polluting vans stuck in traffic instead of this system that was already... There and in place.

I have a huge soft spot for narrow-gauge trains, be it in mines, industrial applications, or forestry. Their hidden and often makeshift-esque nature makes them kinda special, and in the modern world, one often just sees remnants of once very extensive networks, with this one being a classic example.

Photo of an adit opening, with narrow-gauge tracks visible in the foreground.

I'm in luck, there's a mine right there!

Yes, I went back for a much longer, in-depth tour with a small group that's only offered a few times a year. My feet now hurt, but it was well worth it.

Will probably post some pics tomorrow!

Photo of some weirdo who might be in a mine.

He yearns for the mines.

With Portland being in the news a lot at the moment, I'm reminded of this random drawing by @brushwolf.bsky.social that he once used as packing/filler material when shipping originals years ago. Still intrigued by it.

Screenshot of a customer survey e-mail from Agilent regarding the purchase of "one vacuum pump".

No relation at all to my previous post.

Or to the fact that I'm a complete tool.

One of my colleagues is being all "You've given me so much support, this shouldn't be a one-way street. Is there anything I could get you in return?"

A VACUUM PUMP.

Hah, didn't expect that, did you?

Huh, an entire movie about watersports? Kinda neat!

Academia, turning you into a renowned expert for something very specific, then sending you away so all that expertise is lost.

You want to keep doing science? Become a professor who never sets foot in a lab because they have to do HR and shit they are entirely unprepared for. Genius!

They could've thought that the last 50 times he said idiocracy-worthy shit...

It's this latter part that fucks up the pump oil by design. It has an electric gas ballast valve that opens for the first hour of it pumping on the scrubber, but there's so much water coming out of it that it's not really sufficient... It does say to change the oil after each regen cycle.

Yes, it's a mole sieve with some kind of copper catalyst that captures water and oxygen during operation. It gets heated up first and the initial regen stage just blows the argon/hydrogen mix through and ejects a lot of the water already, after which the scrubber is pumped on for a few hours.