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.
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2024
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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.
What photo are you referring to? Can i have a link?
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.
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.
We should have gone nuclear, at least for the short term.
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.
Also, we buy the rocks from dictators.
But we also stopped using open fire after we found better/safer alternatives to heating and cooking
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.
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.
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.
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
There goes anon again, keeping the “idiot” in “idiot”. I’m torn between telling him to stop headbutting running buzz saws… and urging him to practice more.
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.