2001 (Page 168)

After 4 years of scientific investigation and public debate, the Portuguese environmental agency has approved plans for two cement kilns to burn industrial waste as fuel. The government hopes to reduce a national stockpile of hazardous industrial waste, composed mostly of oils and solvents.

One of the two plants is in the Arrabida Nature Preserve, while the other is near the city of Coimbra. They plan to begin incineration in June.
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The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem was supposedly built over the cave where Jesus was buried. Over the years, water seeping from the dome down into the shrine below has eroded the iron clamps that hold the 19th century structure together, causing cracks to form in the walls and the stones at its base to shift. Scholars have taken advantage of this by poking a tiny fiber-optic video camera down between the cracks and have discovered earlier shrines below it.

“The way a doctor uses an endoscope to look down one’s tummy, we used the same thing, except it was an industrial endoscope,” says Martin Biddle, professor of medieval archaeology at the University of Oxford. “We could look in and see there were earlier structures inside.”
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The 13,000 residents of Spring Valley, an exclusive neighborhood in Washington, D.C. where homes are valued at up to one million dollars, have discovered that there are lethal World War I era chemicals buried underneath them.

From 1917 to 1919, 48 poisonous gases, including nerve gas and mustard gas, were tested in the area. The chemical weapons, along with old mortar shells, were first discovered in 1993.
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