Just looking at the site, it looks like basalt is about four times the price of black steel. It, like other rock, is still going to be subject to decay. Whether it’s a better material or not, I don’t know. The thing to do is to get some experimenal bridges done with basalt, and then watch them closely.
Or start with some experimenal slabs: make up several hundred of them, and then start breaking them, one each year. Put some through a wet freeze-thaw cycle, others through a high-chloride environment, still others in intense sun, some in an anoxic saltwater environment, and so on. See where the basalt does well, where it does badly. Each style will generate a data point every two or three years.
There’s another design implied by the bag of basalt fiber: That is embedded steel or carbon fiber. Such concrete, AFAICT is called “Type ii” in Europe, though that has a different meaning in the US. We’ve done some experiments with that here, but it’s nasty stuff to cast. It tears up your forms, your equipment, and your finishers’ hands.
The basalt fiber may have worse problems yet: it could be very similar to asbestos. In that case, there’s a huge demolition cost added.
Dollar_bille,
Very good comment.
One additional thing: The Victoria bridge is a private bridge. It is owned by the CN.
We can assume that this asset is important to a private company's business and that maintenance was properly done.
Chris, can you comment on what Tesla is doing? I'm fascinated by the story and I'm very much behind the company to succeed. Maybe there could be some synergies between PP and Tesla, would be cool. I know every Tesla owner I've spoken to absolutely loves their car and would never go back to any other.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux
Also, check out this video of their Powerwall and Powerpack products.
Here is the perspective from a friend in Cleveland who quite enjoyed the article, but is not a member. The bridge he refers to was indeed massive.
BUT, the ancients of 100 years ago were very well aware of the problems with rebar, which is why:
1- reinforced concrete was 50% thicker than it is now;
2- interior reinforced concrete beams often had steel beam supports for augmentation;
3- the steel used for concrete reinforcement was always formulated for lowest corrosion from virgin steel (not reprocessed- reprocessed has higher carbon content- and while strong, it corrodes horribly fast);
3a- prestressed concrete was manufactured not by concrete companies but by steel companies so the formulation could be controlled; Truscon Steel & Concrete Truss Company built stuff like that. They were a division of Republic Steel. They also sidelined in steel windows. My house has them, circa 1940. The bathroom window is wet inside pretty much November thru April. 75 years if this. For decades it showed a fine layer of rust. It made no progress and my linseed paint job has, for nearly a decade now, arrested it completely. The metal shows no loss at all. A modern formulation would likely corrode to perforation in under 20 years. And this is the stuff we use now in reinforced concrete!
4- old buildings like our destructed schools used reinforced concrete as above but primarily on the weather-protected internal structures, with outside walls being built from brick and hollow clay block that allowed moisture to breath out of the building and not collect inside so as to protect the concrete as well as the whole of interior materials. These methods together formed an edifice good for half a millennium or more by design.
5- NONE of the above is true any more.
Even old overbuilt bridges like the original Fulton road bridge near the zoo here was done with the above in mind. The bridge had long looked awful especially at the end, and by today's standards would be deemed to be near collapse. And it was deemed such. So when they proceeded to blast it to pieces into the valley there, --Nothing Happened. It was still standing much to the "modern's" chagrin. So they rescheduled and tried again. Nothing Happened. It was still standing. Finally, the third try brought it down, but in three huge sections. Those sections had to be jackhammered to pieces bit by bit.
The decline of empire is a strange place to be!
Fascinating. The Dam discussion brought me here. The type of insights and perspective offered by this article is why I pay my monthly fee.
Any thoughts on how this knowledge pertains to nuclear reactors – are not most of them built out of reinforced concrete??
Other metals have been tested like aluminum bronze rebar which could last forever in concrete but it is a bit pricey. The other issue is how much energy is used to make concrete from limestone.
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