by John D'Agata
—or “Pull My Finger,” a clear acrylic box on a white Corinthian pillar that was filled, according to the artist, with two weeks’ worth of his own feces, a design that he equipped with a rubber orange finger that was connected to a tap—
“The only way to safeguard the future of our planet is to bury this nuclear waste under the only other substance more repugnant to humans. We need to create on top of Yucca a gigantic mound of our own human filth that will be so foul that any person who encounters the mountain will end up vomiting and shitting themselves in disgust, thus adding fresh odors to this self-sustaining system, and simultaneously scaring off any Yucca Mountain intruders”
—which, in demonstration, the artist pulled down.
“I wanted to leave my mark on Las Vegas,” casino owner Bob Stupak once said about his Stratosphere, the hotel that he constructed on the Las Vegas Strip, the single tallest American building west of the Mississippi. “What I wanted to do for Vegas is what the Eiffel Tower did for Paris, or what the Empire State Building did for New York…. I wanted my building to be a symbol, to be entwined with the meaning of Vegas.”
“Well, yeah,” said Dave Hickey, an art critic at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. “He definitely created a new symbol for Las Vegas. But that still begs the question: what does this symbol mean?”
Dave Hickey has been called the city’s resident art historian, an ambassador for Las Vegas to the rest of the world.
“You know why I like it here?” he said. “Because everything in this city is economically driven. And that’s the only true democracy there is in the world. That’s why I like teaching art students in Vegas. None of them are fucking wimps.”
We met one morning before nine o’clock at a bar on the Strip called the Fireside Lounge, a room of red couches, octagonal tables, a neon strip of blue surrounding pit fires, and mirrors on every wall, floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall.
Three men in black suits were drunk on one couch, a couple on the next was making out with loud moans, a woman on another was alone with Bloody Mary, and Dave at the bar in black cowboy boots was funneling a free bowl of peanuts to his mouth.
“Sure,” he said, “the Stratosphere’s the tallest dick in Las Vegas, that’s true, and when you have the biggest dick you get some respect. But I also think the fact that the building is so fucking big is why it has had so much trouble in this town. Las Vegas architecture is all about commerce, and commerce is about flexibility. There’s absolutely no gap here between a thought and an act. This city prides itself on its ability to follow the whims of tourism, because that way, if something doesn’t work, you’re more psychologically prepared to try something else. If you build something and it fails, you just blow it up. Buildings, neighborhoods, politicians…whatever. This city doesn’t assume that anything’s permanent. But the Stratosphere can only be exactly what it is. I mean, that thing’s there to stay. And that’s what’s wrong with it. The Stratosphere’s trapped being ‘The Stratosphere’ forever.”
In 1996, only two years after the Stratosphere opened its doors, experts were consulted about how they might demolish it.
“That’s a good question,” said the Stratosphere’s contractor.
While most buildings in Las Vegas are chicken wire, stucco, and steel support beams, the Stratosphere is composed of several hundred thousand cubic feet of concrete.
“Basically, you’d have to fell it like a giant tree,” said Mark Loizeaux, an implosion expert who oversaw the demolition of the Stardust. “You’d incline it in one direction by tilting it explosively, and then you’d explode all the rest of it while it was falling to the ground. Basically, you’d want to turn the whole thing into gravel while it was still in midair, pieces the size of your living room couch. The biggest problem with doing that, though, is that you’d need to have an area to do this in that’s as wide as the building is tall.”
In other words, an area of land on the Las Vegas Strip that was a quarter-mile long, and vacant.
“Plus,” he added, “there’s the issue of cost, because you’d probably end up spending more to take this thing down than it actually cost to build.”
Approximately a billion dollars.
“So I’d say it’s there to stay,” said Loizeaux.
“It’s just not what people come to Vegas for,” said Dave. “This isn’t New York, this isn’t Chicago, we’re not a city of great buildings. We’re the city of shtick and gimmick, the place that you come to when you need to escape.”
From what?
“From what do you think?” said Dave.
He called a waitress over, asked for more peanuts.
“Look at the most successful hotels in this town,” he said. “What do they got in common? They’re all ceilings and floors and no fucking walls. Casino designers know that people don’t like gambling with a lot of space above them. So when you look at a place like the Bellagio, which is the most successful hotel this city’s ever seen, it’s got this giant open floor plan of eighty thousand square feet, but it’s all underneath a really low ceiling. It’s multilayered, if you look at it. You’ve got the main ceiling above everything, and then that steps down to a lower level, and then there’s a hood that hangs under that, and then an awning under that. So what you end up with is a twenty-foot-high ceiling that’s got nine feet of headroom. Why? Because the hotel knows that the reason people come here is to be protected from God. I’m serious. No one’s consciously thinking about this, but that’s why they’re here. They want as much space between them and Jesus Christ as they can get while they’re fucking around. That’s why hotels that emphasize their heights don’t really do well here. I mean, you’ve got the Luxor, right, with its light that shoots into space. That opened up in the mid-nineties as a luxury hotel, but ten years later they’ve got some of the lowest room rates on the Strip. Rooms at the Paris Hotel are usually discounted too, despite the fact that it cost a billion dollars to build. That’s because it’s just not a welcoming place. It’s got tons of tiny windows built into its facade that create a huge towering sense of height over the viewer. People don’t want to be looking up while they’re visiting this town, because no one comes here to pray. So if you put a fucking mountain in the middle of Las Vegas you’re gonna have some fucking problems.”
Initially, Bob Stupak wanted to build what he envisioned would be the tallest sign in the world. It would stand beside the low-rise facade of Bob Stupak’s Vegas World, a twenty-story structure whose theme—“The Sky’s the Limit”—was to be written vertically in neon up the length of a rocket ship that would stand 1,000 feet high. At that time, it would have been the tenth tallest structure on Earth.
“But around that time my daughter was living in Australia, and I went to visit her,” he said. “We had lunch at the Sydney Tower, which is a thousand feet high and has a revolving restaurant at its top. I saw people standing in line for an hour just to pay for a ride in an elevator to get to its observation deck. And I suddenly had an idea. I was only trying to build a sign in Las Vegas, but what if I put an observation deck on the top of my sign? People would come from all over the country just to stand up there and look. And then at some point I asked, ‘Well, why can’t it go higher?’ Which is when I decided to make the sign 1,149 feet high, instead of just 1,000 feet high, because that seemed like a more scientific number. And then that’s when the whole idea of building the world’s tallest sign stopped being a concern, because we realized that that’s what we were already doing. The very structure itself would be an advertisement.”
Since 1993, the Stratosphere Hotel has received seven awards from the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s annual readers’ poll, including “Ugliest Las Vegas Building,” “Trashiest Place in Vegas,” “Building Most Deserving of Being Imploded,” and a special commendation for Bob Stupak himself: “Most Embarrassing Las Vegan.”
There have also been eight fires at the Stratosphere Hotel, two of which occurred before the hotel even opened, and one of which broke out duri
ng its opening celebration.
There has been one guest strangled to death in his hotel room by strangers, a machine gun fired in the parking garage, and a lawsuit involving over 18,000 plaintiffs.
There was the Federal Aviation Administration’s warning that the architect’s plan for the 1,000-foot-high tower was 600 feet over airport regulations. And then there was the response from the mayor of Las Vegas that “it’s [the FAA’s] job to make planes safe for Vegas…it’s not the other way around.”
There was, for a long time, once construction on it began, the rumor of an anomaly that locals called a “kink,” a bend in one of the tower’s three 800-foot-high legs, which the Stratosphere’s contractor assured city residents was not a significant structural defect, but which some months later, on an early desert morning, disappeared after it was spray-filled with Styrofoam and painted.
There was, before its opening, the hotel’s stock price of $14.
And then, once it opened, its price of 2¢.
There was the $35 million that it was supposed to cost to build, the $500 million that it actually cost to build, and the $800 million that it accumulated in debt.
There was the hotel’s bankruptcy.
There was the man from Utah who jumped off in 2000.
The man from Britain who jumped off after that.
The jump by the producer of Las Vegas Elvis, a local reality television show about one of the city’s official Elvis Presley impersonators, who said to reporters, when he heard of the jump, “Now whenever I see it, the Stratosphere is going to be my heartbreak hotel.”
There is its appearance from a schoolyard trampoline: alone in the sky on the long brown horizon.
There is its appearance from a nursing home window: alone in the sky above the treeline.
And when coming into the city on 95 from the north or 15 from the south or 93 from the east, there are the five or the sixteen or the twenty-one miles during which the Stratosphere stands alone in the distance, alone over the valley’s high rim of black mountains, alone at the middle of the Las Vegas Strip, alone at the end of a bridge called Poet’s Bridge, a few blocks from the tower, in a rough part of town, upon which someone has written with black Magic Marker—over the concrete verses that are inscribed on the bridge—You wonder what you’ll do when you reach the edge of the map, out there on the horizon, all that neon beckoning you in from the dark.
HOW
The life span of black ink in disposable plastic pens is estimated to be about four and a half years. The blue ink in plastic pens starts to fade away in two. And newsprint is only intended to last for a day.
Already, scientists are experiencing difficulty in deciphering the technology that’s used in Univac, the earliest working computer from the late 1960s.
And even the laser-encrypted plastic that we put on compact disks is likely to start peeling off in about forty years.
A color photograph, says Kodak, will last for thirty years. Videotape for fourteen. Magnetic tape, seven.
The life span of skywriting is about nine minutes.
The life span of a sunbeam is six.
And the light that reflects off the Moon every night is traveling so quickly that it only lasts a second.
“It’s the medium’s fault when communication fails,” Vic Baker said in his laboratory office.
A geologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Vic served on the Department of Energy’s Expert Judgement Panel, helping to design the marker for the nuclear waste repository.
“That’s not a great surprise, though, is it?” asked Vic. “I mean, things decay. We know that. Nothing in this world is forever.”
Vic was in a safari hat and sandals and white athletic socks, and as we spoke in his office one late fall morning he looked over my shoulder into a lamp without a shade.
“People have this really weird conception of science,” he said. “They think that it’s the one reliable source for information that we have. They think that even if their public leaders are not to be trusted, and their newspapers are inaccurate, and cultural and religious morals are treacherously shifting, that science, at the very least, will provide a stable compass. But the problem is that science can’t do that. Science is alive, it evolves. It occasionally establishes a fact, but, if given enough time, it’ll probably refute that fact. Remember when the Earth was flat? Remember when the Sun and all the other planets spun around the Earth? Remember when humans became sick because the gods were angry with us? Science just uses a kind of rhetoric that sounds authoritative. Just like any other form of communication, however, science is susceptible to abuse, inaccuracy, and just bad interpretation. And that’s what’s wrong with Yucca. The public wants to have some assurance that all this waste that we’re producing is going to be safe in that mountain. So the Department of Energy creates all these computer models to try to prove that that’s the case. They measure and measure and measure and measure till they get the results that they want. And then whammo: Surprise! Their computers predict that everything will turn out fine at Yucca Mountain. Phew!”
He pulled the left sock on his left foot up.
“Well, I’m sorry,” said Vic. “I’ve got news for everybody. Our descendants are going to live in a reality in the future; they’re not going to live in a computer simulation.”
And then the other sock.
“The problem with wanting unwaveringly definitive results from science is that whenever we say we have an ‘answer,’ we also tend to believe that we’ve revealed some sort of ‘truth.’ But real scientists don’t settle so firmly into answers. They always leave a little wiggle room for new evidence to change their minds. The very fact that we still even have something that’s called ‘geology’ is an indication that we admit that we don’t have all the answers. That we’re still investigating.”
In a report entitled Durability of Marker Materials for Nuclear Waste Isolation Sites, the American Society for Testing and Materials exposed a Lucite rod, a red brick, and a concrete block to the same conditions that they would face over 10,000 years at Yucca. After only ten simulated years of study, however, the Lucite rod was found to have already lost a third of an inch from its surface. The concrete block lost an inch and a half. And the clay of the red brick was worn away by two inches. So, in an environment like Yucca’s, over a period of ten millennia, all three materials would eventually disappear.
The society broadened its study, therefore. It tried limestone mortar, a material that can be found in the buildings of Jericho, a city that’s estimated to be 9,000 years old. In Yucca’s windy environment, however, limestone would only last for a couple hundred years.
The society then tried lead, since lead is known for its exceedingly low levels of corrosion. But lead’s softness was ultimately found to be too easily vandalized.
So stainless steel was then considered. But since stainless steel has only been in use since its invention in the late 1920s, its long-term durability is ultimately unknowable.
The society tried ceramic. But that lasted 1,000 years.
The society tried copper, which held out for 5,000.
How about granite? the society wondered. Granite samples have been shown on some mountain walls to retain the same polish they received from passing glaciers, tens of millions of years ago. But granite is also known to be extremely porous. In fact, in a study of one of the two giant obelisks known as Cleopatra’s Needles, which were carved in ancient Egypt in 1500 BCE, almost an eighth of an inch was found to have worn away from the surface of one of the obelisks just twelve years after being transported to London. If Yucca Mountain’s climate were to change over time, and if precipitation rises in the region as is expected, a granite marker would eventually pit, crack, and fall completely apart.
After three years of study, the society concluded that the most durable materials that could be used at Yucca Mountain would also be among the most expensive in the world: titanium, sapphire, and something called “Synroc.”
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p; “Metals such as titanium and sapphire have too much value to human culture, however,” the society noted in its study. “A marker that is constructed out of either of these would most likely be looted by intruders.”
Synroc, on the other hand, is an artificial compound that is made from three other relatively worthless substances—hollandite, zirconolite, and perovskite—materials that are reported to have survived for as much as 2 million years in a variety of simulated environments. When combined as Synroc, they can resist temperatures as low as 1,300 degrees below zero and 2,300 above. The American Society for Testing and Materials called this substance “the hardest stuff on Earth.” And just a couple years after it was developed in Australia, Synroc was named by the World Nuclear Association “the single most promising material with which to handle most forms of high-level radioactive waste.”
In fact, Synroc has become so promising that some countries are investigating whether it can be used as a container for their waste, essentially doing away with the problem of disposal by immobilizing the waste in inert chunks of Synroc.
This is an idea that was first proposed by the Department of Energy back in 1950. At that time, there were 6 million gallons of nuclear waste left over from the production of the first atomic bombs. The department’s idea was to pour the contaminated waste into a molten mixture of a synthetic compound they called “borosilicate.” The two materials would then be mixed until they bonded, hardened, stabilized, and eventually became indissoluble, flame-resistant, and virtually indestructible.
“We are on the threshold of the future,” wrote the Department of Energy in 1950 about their waste solution.
But then, in ’51, the Cold War began.
Defense spending in the United States increased by 60 percent, and the $5.4 trillion that was eventually spent in America on developing nuclear weapons—about 6 percent of the nation’s entire GDP—included no budget whatsoever for nuclear waste storage.
