Interesting day.

Its not every day you get to take a "non guided tour" of a government facility. By non guided I mean we had a guide, but we walked our self's.

Today I went on a photoshoot to the Hanford Vitrification Plant. It was pretty neat to walk around and see everything being put together, lots of concrete. The pictures from our shoot today aren't up but you can see the entire process of the making of the plant (photos) here and some time lapse videos here

The latest video on there was shot about a week ago. There are some pretty neat videos on there too.

Sounds cool, did they just let you go where you wanted, or were you constricted to certain areas only ... ?

Haha, I had no clue what vitrification was, I had to ask my best friend wikipedia. That reminds me of aeroglass, very cool stuff.

heh I guessed vitrification from the etymology ('vitro-' meaning glass or glassy in latin) but I sure had to look up aeroglass

I love plants and factories. something so amazing about all those machines. I love watching 'how it's made' on discovery, with all the zany machinery making bottles or golf balls or biscuits or whatever...

I meant aerogel, not aeroglass. Can you blame me? They're practically the same word!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel

ha ha ha aeroglass actually exists, it seems it's the technology vista uses to make its windows etc translucent and glassy. you go figure

(completely off topic - reminds me of when my mother went to this unspeakably huge video rental store in Dhaka Bangladesh, to ask for a film she had been recommended by a friend, called 'Above the Law' (yeah, Steven Segal....) but had misunderstood and instead asked for 'Above the Love'. Anyhow turns out they had that one too!! So she came home with a film bearing no similarity to what she was recommended.......................)

needless to say I had to google 'aerogel' too. but man that really looks majorly cool!!!! I want an aerogel pillow!!!

An aerogel pillow would probably not be fun after a while. It's has such high insulating properties because it has virtually no moisture in it at all, so they say that when you handle it bare handed it will suck the moisture out of your hands and almost give you a burn like what dry ice does to you. I do remember seeing a site that had small samples available for only a few dollars shipping.

wooooh scary but I'd love to feel the stuff....

They say it is super duper light weight.

sure looks it solid smoke...... wicked!

Basically, we were just limited to safety hazard zones. Which basically meant that they were working in the air. Those areas are restricted to other workers too. Only the people working on that particular part of the building were allowed through it.

I'd love to work in a special security zone.... even if there wasn't any real great danger involved. something so james bond about that