Reading this article (highly entertaining, as always, Maciej; thanks
for brightening my day with your cynicism) led me to reflect on
architecture. It seems pointlessly wasteful to have built a bunch of
Quonset huts and trailers that people have to walk between, and also
to have built the buildings above ground in the first place. I
suppose digging in permafrost is difficult, and bringing in machinery
so that you can have economies of scale is difficult, even if we no
longer have the problems of cold steel embrittlement and tin pest that
bedeviled the old polar explorers.

A little quick calculation, since calculation is always what I end up
doing when confronting stories of human folly and suffering.

If you need to house, say, 1024 people, with 128 m² of floor area for
each one (home plus office plus bar, etc.), with a mean ceiling height
of 4 m, that’s 524 288 m³. If you want to enclose that volume inside
a hemispherical dome, the radius (and thus the height) of the dome is
about 64 m, or 16 floors. The skin of the dome — the part that
insulates the people from the cold wind — is about 26000 square
meters, 25 square meters per person. The cross-sectional area that
the dim sun illuminates during the summer is about 6400 m², so if we
assume a bit less than 1000 W/m², you receive about 6 megawatts of
solar energy during the summer, and about 3 megawatts year-round (3 kW
per person).

How much insulation do you need? If the inside-outside temperature
difference is 40° C, and you need to maintain that on 1500 W per
person (maybe your thermal solar collection is only 50% efficient and
you don’t have significant other sources of heat) then you need
insulation with an average R-value of about 3.8. 1-inch
polyisocyanurate foam panels have an R-value of about 6, and they only
cost US$19 for a 4’×8’ panel (US$6.40/m²; this is the Home Depot
retail price and includes aluminum facers) which works out to about
US$160 000 to cover the whole dome. Unfortunately they aren’t
transparent, so you can’t get solar radiation through them; you kind
of need some kind of non-imaging optics heliostat if you want to
gather the solar heat to illuminate and keep warm with. As far as I
know, these don’t exist yet.

At this point, and certainly when McMurdo was built, it would make
more sense to use heavier insulation, and do your climate control by
dissipating energy that you generate by some other means, such as with
the nuclear reactor or by burning fuel oil. If you’re dissipating 500
watts per person, you need three times the R-value (11.4, a bit under
two inches of foam insulation, or US$320 000 of insulation). You need
to use countercurrent heat exchangers to keep the air from going
stale.

16 stories is small enough that people can avoid using elevators most
of the time, at least if the common areas they usually travel to are
intelligently located; 128 meters diameter is small enough that you
can walk anywhere (in about two minutes), but large enough that
bicycles or skateboards would occasionally be convenient.

If each floor is concrete 250mm thick (suitable for essentially any
purpose that doesn’t involve armored vehicles), we need 32768m³ of
concrete, or about 65536 tonnes, if we use somewhat lightweight
concrete. Concrete typically costs about US$120/m³, so that’s about
US$4 million of concrete, plus probably a similar cost in rebar. This
cost isn’t particularly sensitive to whether you build a bunch of
separated buildings or a single giant arcology like I’m suggesting
above, as long as the buildings are more than two or three stories
tall. It is sensitive to things like whether each person gets 128m²
or 32m² and to the flooring material.

If you could somehow get by with more inexpensive floor materials like
expanded steel sheet with drywall under it, you could reduce the cost
dramatically — the 250mm reinforced concrete I suggested above costs
about US$60/m², while 9-gauge expanded steel sheet might cost US$24/m²
(according to MetalsDepot.com). I feel like that kind of thing might
be acceptable for a lot of floors that don’t separate unrelated
strangers.

This is important not so much for the cost of the materials (although
that is kind of important) but more because you don't have a cement
plant or even a quarry onsite there in McMurdo; all your manufactured
materials have to be shipped in, as if you were in Alaska or
something. A heavy-tested TEU only holds 28 tonnes; the amount of
concrete suggested above is 2340 TEUs’ worth of mostly sand and rocks.
That’s because the concrete weighs a ton per square meter, while the
expanded sheet metal weighs 8.8 kg per square meter. That way, you
might only need 25 or 30 TEUs instead of 2300 of them.

(The above conveniently omits the sheetrock...)

What about trash? Is it really necessary to haul it away from
Antarctica? Let’s make some pessimistic assumptions: suppose we need
to plan to store 64 years’ worth of garbage — ideally, frozen — and
that the McMurdo Base residents and visitors produce the same amount
of garbage per capita as New Yorkers, who are twice as productive of
waste as any other major metropolis, at 7.8 million tons per year (220
kg/s) out of 8.6 million people (26 mg/s per person). Over 64 years
and 1024 people, this is 54 000 tonnes of garbage, or about 54 000 m³.

This is about an order of magnitude smaller than the size of the
people dome. If we just build a garbage dome near the people dome and
put garbage in it every day and let it freeze, the garbage dome will
only be five stories tall if it’s built for 64 years’ worth of
garbage.

Presumably it will take less than 64 years for it to become economic
to mine the rich deposits of refined mineral resources (indium,
gallium, gold, copper, maybe even aluminum if energy prices don’t fall
dramatically) in the garbage pile.

Hopefully, the McMurdo residents will demolish less buildings, buy
less new clothes, junk less taxis, and compost more of their food than
New Yorkers do, so hopefully their garbage volume will be even
smaller.

So you could probably build a new, much better McMurdo Base for under
ten million dollars.