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Radioactive materials really are the closest thing we have to ancient demons.
They can give you unlimited power, but it’s always an uneasy bargain. They must be contained in special places where no human can go, and the people tasked with keeping them sealed must be vigilant, with never a moment’s careless inattention, or they might get loose.
If anything ever goes wrong, they wreak havoc. And afterwards, that place is cursed beyond repair. No one can look upon it. No one can go there. If they do, they will die in horrible ways, with no hope of salvation. Machines that try to trespass will break. Film cannot develop, or is ruined. They must simply be left in the tomb, alone and undisturbed, forever.
That one grainy photo of the elephant’s foot is absolutely chilling to me, like a monster from another world lurking silently underground.
You can also bargain with them to destroy the cities of your enemies. There is no limit to the power. Whole continents laid waste, simply by the right type of priesthood making the right incantations. But for almost a century, no one has dared to do it, because of what might come.
And afterwards, that place is cursed beyond repair. No one can look upon it
Here’s a guy looking upon it 30 years ago, 10 years after the accident.
You wouldn’t want to sleep next to it, and you certainly wouldn’t want to breath it in, but it’s not going to kill anyone who looks at it.
What photo are you referring to? Can i have a link?
You know this really clarified something for me. So much fud on the internet is really about over simplification. If you take out all context and reduce something down to nothing you can make the conclusion whatever.
Also, we buy the rocks from dictators.
Eh, kinda. The largest uranium reserves in the world are in Australia, and the highest grade uranium deposits are in Canada. The western US has large reserves that don’t require international trade (though they’re mostly in federally protected land so it would take a lot of government action to actually start mining it).
That said, Kazakhstan does the most uranium mining at the moment by a wide margin and they’re not exactly a shining example of democracy. They’re responsible for 25% of US uranium imports.
Some of the largest deposits of uranium in the world are in Brazil, not currently a dictatorship, but also not being mined.
I think what would give cavemen pause would be if the house was on fire for 20,000 years.
That said, we definitely should have stayed on nuclear.
Don’t know why you’re being down voted, that’s accurate. Dresden was set fucking alight like 80 years ago and was rebuilt. Chernobyl?
And yes, it’s arguably cleaner than most fuel, just know what yours doing and don’t put it on a flood plane!
Their comment agitates both the “nuclear bad” crowd and the “nuclear good” crowd :(
Ahhh, I get ya.
Chernobyl shows that worst case scenario is that we get large wildlife preserves.
And we shoot everything that may potentially cross the border of such preserve for we don’t know wtf can happen if a contaminated animal breed outside of such area.
Yes, and yes.
Worse, that time we think of(3 Mile Island), the safeties worked. Things were fine.
Two other events were issues, but not “my” issue.
But we also stopped using open fire after we found better/safer alternatives to heating and cooking
What’s the better and safer alternative to nuclear power plants?
Not going into that, just saying the argument as presented is very flawed
Thorium rather than uranium fuel cycling
Yes, we’re that dumb. The China Syndrome, a movie about on out-of-control reactor meltdown, hit theaters 12-days (March 16, 1979) before the Three Mile Island incident (March 28, 1979). The US quit building reactors because of a Hollywood movie.
Does anon think chernobyl was the only nuclear disaster?
Even adding them all together, they’ve caused far less harm than almost any other energy source per TWh.
Nuclear power is usually not abandoned for being dangerous, but because it’s weirdly complex to keep it safe as compared to the alternatives [1]. This makes it one of the most expensive ways to produce energy (at least given European regulations). Also, the raw material is expected to be quite rare relatively soon.
I guess this may be more about the way caveman made their fire… and the multi-billion cavedollar structure for holding the magic stone can be annoying.
[1] reading other comments, I feel like it is necessary to clarify that by alternatives, I do refer to green energy like wind, solar and water, plus energy storage.
I agree that atomic energy is preferable to fossil energy in almost all regards. The most convincing aspect for me is that you can see, pack and store your by-products, at least somehow, while CO₂ emissions can only insufficiently be handled using carbon capture and storage (CCS).
People tend to understand dangers with visible effects easier (impressive boom) than indirect effects like climate change (less impressive, slow motion, yet possibly apocalyptic boom).
Also, the raw material is expected to be quite rare relatively soon.
To be fair, this wouldn’t be nearly as true if we had persisted with our original plan which was to reprocess the spent fuel, more than 90% of which is still usable material. Once we found a couple huge deposits of Uranium, it became much cheaper to simply mine more of it and dispose of the spent fuel, so the recycling plans were scrapped. Sure, we can technically still pull the spent fuel back out again and recycle it, but we spent many years building reactors without building an equal capacity of reprocessing facilities (which are almost as hard to build safely as reactors), so that ship has more or less sailed.
Definitely. Also, one could get the impression that profit is not always helpful for sustainable use of resources. Better not open a thread on forestry, agriculture or … whatever really …
How do we know prehistoric people didn’t cause a uranium explosion and then either died within a radius or swore to never use it again
As someone who literally had to evacuate when reactor 4 exploded in Fukushima these memes are so exhausting
The evacuations were considered a mistake and caused more harm than good.
There was very little actual damage from the reactors.
In response to the station blackout during the initial hours of the accident and the ongoing uncertainty regarding the cooling status of units 1 and 2, a 2 km radius evacuation of 1,900 residents was ordered at 20:50.[67] However, due to difficulty coordinating with the national government,[68] a 3 km evacuation order of ~6,000 residents and a 10 km shelter-in-place order for 45,000 residents was established nearly simultaneously at 21:23. The evacuation radius was expanded to 10 km at 5:44, and was then revised to 20 km at 18:25. The size of these evacuation zones was set for arbitrary reasons at the discretion of bureaucrats rather than nuclear experts.
This was a failure of the government not anything to do with nuclear power.
Nuclear safety and government are closely connected in most countries, though.
Indeed and they have to be. However an overly cautious evacuation order isn’t really a big deal. It should be improved, and learned upon, but lots of government needs improvement.
What if he burned down every house within 50 miles and the landscape didn’t recover for decades? What if it happened again and again?
Just a reminder, coal power releases more radiation per year than the totality of radiation released by nuclear power including all nuclear accidents and disasters… And it’s not even close.
It’s disingenuous to compare radiation which is diffused globally via the atmosphere with ground contamination which is localized and thousands of times too dangerous for human habitation.
You’re saying don’t worry about the toxic waste dump next door because there’s air pollution everywhere.
Boy have I got news for you, coal is also worse in terms of ground and water pollution by a factor of 4… Without counting coal mining which is basically the most long term harmful activity to the environment humans can do.
What if we constantly subsidized industries that made our climate unlivable?
Nuclear is a sound option. We already deal with mining wastes that must be managed in perpetuity. Nuclear waste isn’t much different in that regard.
Your point about landscapes also happens in mining.
Yes, we should be moving to solar instead of propping up uneconomic polluting industries like nuclear or coal.
Doing something because it’s the “most economical” is why we have a climate catastrophe on our hands. Plus solar can’t actually provide steady power on it’s own and never will be able to. Exotic nation wide energy storage solutions do not exists at our current level of technology. Instead solar/wind has to be offset by natural gas power plants.
I fully support solar and wind but I don’t think it’s a one size fits all at this point. I think solar needs to get a lot more efficient and better to cover all the applications that oil and gas and coal do.
Even renewables need mining (sadly) which has significant impacts.
Nuclear rarely ever perceived as a polluter in such discussions because there’s not much waste compared to nearly everything else. The major problem is with its’ very slow and expensive roll out and how gas\coal industries hate the guts of a technology that’s proven effective - so Germany famously rolled their nuclear programs back and got dependent on russian gas, thanks Schröeder (now works in russian oil companies, kek), Merkel and so-called greens.
What if instead of scary magic rocks that release bad juju, what if we went back to the burney rocks that also put out even more bad juju than the scary rocks and makes the sky fairies mad and fired up? That would protect us from the scary event, even if it was much worse long term.
On word Big oil.
It’s weird. In general, in the greentext community I just reply something stupid and move on. You guys are commenting what seems serious, at the same time there are a lot of people commenting about how we should have gone nuclear, etc. Now, I don’t know if you’re being serious or you are trolling as I would with a less apocalyptic topic.
There, feels like I made it.
Nuclear isn’t apocalyptic, if that’s what you’re saying. It’s caused far less harm than almost every other energy source (the only exception is large scale photovoltaic), including nuclear disasters, which we’ve learned a lot on how to prevent so will only become less common. They’re already extraordinarily uncommon. Storage is also a solved problem and just needs implemented, and is pretty minor as is.
The apocalyptic option is to let dirty energy win the battle. They’ve been pumping tons of money into anti-nuclear movements to convince people it’s dangerous. It isn’t though. That’s just what traditional energy companies want you to believe to protect their share of the market.
One caveat on prevention making accidents less common: cost-cutting gets in the way. It’s a tale as old as time; a regulation is written in blood, a company disregards or lobbies to have the regulation removed in favour of cutting costs, and then the accident happens again.
We should have gone nuclear, at least for the short term.
The “pre historic” people who witness the [r-word] burning his house down would not be able to spread their story (along with the fear of fire) before they go extinct because they lacked such a crucial technology. In contrast, stories like Chernobyl can have its story around the world before you can even walk 1% of the circumference.
