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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Sobering thought to think that 65 square miles will take 300 years (minimum) to clean of threats and contamination. I would quibble with the characterization of dead people and animals as "contamination" as there are have been people and animals dying in great numbers over the millenia in various spots, but the concentrations of arsenic and lead are different.

Given what I've seen of strip mines from the air, I wonder how long it would take to process 100' of material from 65 square miles (~17,000 hectare) through a refining process. Could you just decide that what ever plant and animal life and structures would be forfeit and just dig it out, process it, and put it back? How long once everything had been processed might you expect it to take for the forest to regrow, certainly within 100 years you'd have a solid regrowth. So can you pull 150 to 200 years off the restoration time ?

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I imagine the explosive material complicates things immensely. I'm not an expert on strip mines but it seems like they just dig up and grind everything indiscriminately and process it later. This would obviously be a bad strategy when explosives are involved.

There are machines designed to clear minefields. Maybe build something like that but a bit bigger to do the digging, and operate it from a distance?

The big difference is that artillery shells are a lot more powerful than land mines, and some of those shells have mustard gas. Using a machine of some sort is a good idea but I bet it wouldn't work the same as the minefield sweeper at all.

There are also the mines that were placed to destroy trenches. Truly colossal quantities of explosives that were placed at the end of tunnels. Not all were exploded.

AFAIK, no mines were used at Verdun. Also, the ones used at the Somme all exploded (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_on_the_first_day_of_the_...)

I guess you are thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_in_the_Battle_of_Messine.... One of them exploded in 1955, a few others may yet explode or may be fairly harmless by now.

Yes, these are mines, built by miners (the people that dig tunnels to extract minerals). During the war, they dug mines under enemy lines and filled them with tons of explosives. Not all were used and the location of some unused ones has been lost [1]. One of them blew up from a lightning strike in 1955[2].

[1] http://www.firstworldwar.com/today/messinesmine1955.htm

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxG12ZYm3Q8

That sounds very economically taxing.

Naturally. It's a tradeoff between the cost of clearing the land and the cost of not being able to use it.

As we reduce our coal use, the United States has a lot of absolutely enormous strip mining equipment going surplus. An obsolete 1960's era shovel moves 80m^3 in a scoop and that scoop is WW-1 era bomb proof for all practical purposes, say you want to dig down 4 meters, thats 20m^2 cleared per scoop. About 2 million scoops to clear a square mile. That one shovel should be able to pick up and sift a square mile of Europe in about 2 years. Granted, some of it will need to be run through an incinerator as well and you'd have the same environmental result as a used strip mine, but you can farm that and a square mile of France or Belgium should have resale value.

Edit: The German bucketwheel excavators like the Bagger 293 might do it faster.

It does, but not insanely so. WW I explosives were much less energetic than modern munitions. A modern MRAP[1] could drive around all day and be fine. The gas cannisters are an issue but manageable as well. The economic choice in re-mediating battlefields has been to minimize economic harm (tearing up the landscape). But the question of 300 years of non-useful land? Taken all at once does it make more sense to pay the price now.

You can think of it like a mortgage with interest, if you pay it off slowly over time it takes less money per month, but the total money over time is large. If you pay off the mortgage it takes a lot of money but the overall cost is lower. What if you do the modern calculus of costing the land use, versus the cost of complete remediation more quickly.

Let me put it into a modern context. If you took 65 square miles and turned it into a city with the density somewhere between Manhattan and Aleppo, you could settle the entire middle eastern diaspora on land that is currently unused. This is fertile land which once had 9 villages. The diaspora is filled with working age people you could recruit as labor for the effort. How much would that cost? Would that be more or less than the cost of refugee programs and border management and social programs for the unemployed immigrants?

I only ask the question if anyone thinks about it this way, I don't think they do.

[1] http://www.navistardefense.com/navistardefense/vehicles/maxx...

To continue the mortgage example, you could also just not buy a house and put that money into a stock index...

The land may not be usable for another few hundred years, but what is the opportunity cost of all that upfront remediation? It's big. That's capital that can be invested in other things.

Some land in the middle of nowhere is not really that valuable. The productivity of such rural land is low. This is why no one has bought up that land and remediated it in the first place.

> How much would that cost? Would that be more or less than the cost of refugee programs and border management and social programs for the unemployed immigrants?

That 65sqm could be anywhere; there's tons of un-mined land in Europe. It's a whole continent. There is no necessary connection to remediation. If you can't make such a 'diaspora city' work economically on unmined land, you can't make it work on mined land either.

It's a fair point that the cost computation is imprecise. My question was more to the one of whether or not someone in France was thinking about it in those sorts of terms. Or put another way, would France lease it to me for 900 years for 1 euro with the provision that I ensure that nobody is endangered by inadvertently going into the area?

As bad as things are in the red zone environmentally, they aren't as bad as having been strip mined, no? Except for all the stuff that wants to explode...

Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't the unexploded ordnance make strip-mining the area prohibitively dangerous?

I wonder what the biggest ordinance in the ground is. Armorning some giant bulldozers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komatsu_D575A) presumably would not do the trick, or they'd be doing it already.

Given that armored IDF Caterpillar D9s can survive 500-1000 pound IEDs, which is larger than the explosive charge in any WWI artillery shell, getting mine clearing machines to survive isn't the problem. Finding said shells, which are dug deep into soggy ground, is a bigger problem.

I imagine the soggy ground would easily incapacitate such a vehicle even if the bomb can't.

Individual shells probably aren't that powerful but there are also absolutely huge explosives at the end of tunnels which were intended to be exploded and destroy enemy trenches. Googling brings up this article about a 50,000lb tunnel bomb under a field in Belgium: http://rense.com/general47/50000lbWW1bomb.htm

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