Glassified/Classified

Last week, when I was doing my "research" on the Savannah River Site, I wrote down the word "glassified."  Maybe if I had been doing real research, I could have retraced my steps and found the word again.  Maybe it never existed.

As I was Internet zipping (as opposed to research), my brain decided that a new method of storing nuclear waste had been invented at the Savannah River Site:  glassification!  I thought, I'll have to come back to that; I want to know more.  I had this vision of waste being trapped in glass, which of course, is much more stable than metal containers, which can rust.  My brain stored all these "facts."

But then I went back to several sites and couldn't find the word "glassified" on any of them.  I couldn't find much mention at all of new methods of storing nuclear waste.  Old methods, sure.  But not new.  And certainly not a glassified strategy.

I think that since I wasn't reading carefully, and certainly not researching, my brain transposed some things.  You've probably figured out by now that I saw the word "classified" and read it as "glassified."

Now that I'm writing all this, I want to go back to double-check my double-checking.  Can I really have gotten so much wrong in such little time?  Or is it there, buried somewhere, but when I went back to double-check, I simply couldn't find it?

And the larger question looms for me:  how much else have I gotten wrong, but never realized it because I never went back to double-check?

And my poet brain loves the word "glassified."  I didn't use it in the poem that I wrote about the Savannah River Site.  I wonder if I could use it in another way.  Maybe in my collection of linked short stories, in the short story that will be set further in the future when interplanetary travel is easier.  Oh, yes, I will use it there!

Alternate Life Kristin, the one who is a jewelry designer in a different universe, also schemes.  Could you stabilize nuclear waste in a glass pendant?  Plutonium in a pendant?  I have a vision of an amber colored glass, shot through with red.

Have no fear!  I'm not a jewelry designer, and even if I was, I know enough about nuclear contamination that I wouldn't incorporate nuclear waste.  Artists are threatened enough with their regular art supplies.  Why introduce known carcinogens?

I bet lots of people would buy plutonium pendants, though.  I have a vision of a Marie Curie line of jewelry.  Or cosmetics.  No, not cosmetics.  Surely people wouldn't paint plutonium dust on their eyelids.

Would they?