It can be interesting to show people how one guesses. A priori guessing is honest, because no one can say " he said that because he had hidden info... ". truth is, to your question, I just don't know.
this is about as serious as it gets. saving seeds, so we can reseed life in the aftermath of an apocalypse-- that does not claim all of us. sprinklers? water and seeds, on call for all of just-short-of- eternity, does not sound to me to be, a great mixture of ingredients. I don't ration my passion for sprinklers, but as Chris Cahill said, " there are about 8-12% of building inventory we should really pause and think about before we put sprinklers in. this is one of those, in my opinion. I would say, don't put sprinklers in this facility. If the seeds are stored hermetically, (an obvious possibility), then they won't be damaged by the rare smoke coming from a rare fire. Perhaps in this facility, under as tight security as it must be, it is better to TRY to maintain control on the fuel load. seeds are probably in metal drawers/bins. I would further subdivide bin storage areas into small fire compartments, so a fire in one area, could not damage the other areas. What kind of damage could sprinklers do? Probably, the facility is way underground, to protect from nuclear events and also reduce stellar EMR. So, while this facility probably could get away with wet systems...if a main broke, that would be a lot of water to potentially hose our future--a future we quite possibly will need to reseed. Regarding low-oxygen atmospheric "passive systems" for this application. It sounds like a great application, until we think, "seeds have (according to one theory) evolved through millions of years of exposure to oxygenated environments". If we change that, what will be the unknown impact on seed viability from storing these seeds for scores (or more) years in low oxygen environments for fire prevention? Maybe the effect will be good, because lower oxygen concentrations is lower exposure to an oxidizing atmosphere. But to bet the farm on Low-Ox when I don't got the facts (maybe Svalbard or the US National Agricultural Library in Beltsville has), seems like unduly risky business. _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://fireball.firesprinkler.org/mailman/listinfo/sprinklerforum For Technical Assistance, send an email to: [email protected] To Unsubscribe, send an email to:[email protected] (Put the word unsubscribe in the subject field)
