Explore an abandoned research lab

Yeah, probably millions of dollars of salvage value before it all rotted away. I wonder whether they thought at first that they would be reopening this in the future, or whether this is corporate overlords being so ignorant of the underlying business that they didn’t even try to salvage what they could.

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From a quick glance at Wikipedia, different parts of the company were acquired by different corporations, and the responsibility for cleaning up the Superfund sites fell to the buyers.
It’s usually cheaper to just shutter one of those poison plants than clean it according to EPA standards.

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Yeah, but in the cafeteria alone, there was a bunch of equipment that had a reasonable value on the second hand market. I don’t know much about lab equipment, but I’m guessing that it is more expensive, although more specialized and with a smaller market, so possibly not worth disconnecting and carting out.

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This^^^

My Fort Detrick remark was a little flip, but you can never tell what’s been going on in a chem lab. Someone might have had a grant to investigate something fairly well removed from fertilizer and nutritional supplements. Someone might have switched fields to get a job there, but done a little of their original work on the side, which might have been more dangerous once abandoned.

I didn’t watch the video because it seemed a stupid stunt.

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To the huge international chem companies, it’s easier and cheaper to just let the site sit untouched. If they start touching it, i.e., carting off food service equipment, it sets off a whole series of checklists. You can’t just pull random things out of a Superfund site; unless the new EPA chief rescinded all those rules too, even inspecting the site makes them have to start remediation procedures within a certain amount of time.

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If you want to see really stupid, there’s people here in the UK who’ve gone into abandoned mines without proper equipment, including paddling across flooded sections with an inflatable dinghy.

Dinghy. Singular.

Oh, and there’s plenty of people going down into the basement of the hospital in Pripyat, to the room with the firefighter’s uniforms.

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When you google “American Cyanamid” one of the autofill suggestions is “superfund site.”

Uh huh.

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I probed an abandoned research lab and all I got was this lousy chem overload. Now I’m green, and not with envy. Switch off the IR beam.

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