Lost island is the WIPP

So obviously there’s a lot of ingredients that go into Lost. The shortest cut guidebook is probably GURPS Illuminati, if you can get a copy, otherwise start with The Prisoner, Robert Anton Wilson and Heart of Darkness, and you’ll be within 23% of the whole thing.

Here’s another chunk: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. An attempt to make a very long term nuclear waste facility both uninteresting and forbidding to future civilisations, so they don’t feel like hanging around it or trying to get inside.

Yeah, right. I think they’ve actually done quite a good job of making it look bureaucratically boring (something the earlier designs failed miserably at) but in the end it still looks like a Pyramid/ultratec treasure house, while the use of strontium hexaferrite magnets to communicate to people with appropriate technology that “something is wrong here” strikes me as exactly the wrong kind of signal.

And they’re the reason I think the WIPP is part of the Lost mix; because Desmond’s Mystery Bunker, under the hatch, also has strong magnetic fields. And they’re taken as evidence that there is something of value down there after all.

PS: If you really want the WIPP to be the sort of place where people won’t go, is it altogether the best thing to locate it a bare 20 miles from Carlsbad Caverns, a major tourist attraction? That’s probably better than the German solution, though, which is to put it in the salt mine where the engines for the world’s first functioning jet aircraft were built. Which, it strikes me, is probably the location Pynchon had in mind for his wildly inaccurate  descriptions of Peenemunde.

…and it keeps getting better: Unnamed Rd, Loving, NM – is this what censorship looks like, or is it a massive never-developed ghost town like that one bldgblog found in California?

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