See, totally harmless accident. Just give it another hundred years and the place will be good as new.
It’s much better than the alternative, yes cancer rates shot up and a huge area of once beautiful and productive land is contaminated but if we had rooftop solar then rich corporations wouldn’t be able to manipulate us with price spikes and lock us into being helpless without them.
The rich need to have power over us and centralized power generation controlled by the ultra wealthy is the only option that let’s them have that dominamce so every propaganda bot must ignore all the safety risks, spiraling economic costs, and political bullshit so they can push for it and divert money from.far more viable and effective alternatives.
Manufacturing of solar panels produces a different kind of contamination, though—it’s just not located at the point of power generation. Wind is probably a bit better, with fewer exotic chemicals required, but “rooftop wind” isn’t exactly a common catchphrase.
Wind Turbine’s problems is we have to replace the blades every 3-7 years depending on the model and there is no good way to recycle or break down the fiberglasse components. So every every 3-7 years you have 3 XL tractor truck trailer size turbine blades going into landfills.
Wind and Solar are still good, don’t get me wrong, but lets not pretend they have no downsides or drawbacks.
Nobody claims it was harmless, but it sure was very low on the harmless scale – especially if you compare it with every fear monger’s favorite, Chernobyl.
In all the famous cases, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Sellafield, it was close enough to a real disaster. Sure, only some people died, some more got radiation poisoning, cancer, even more lost their pets, their homes, their livelihoods, quite some animals died… thank god that’s “low on the harmless scale”.
And don’t forget the trillions and trillions it has already cost and will cost in the future to clean this shit up. But that gets paid by the taxpayer, so that’s OK, right?
Thing is, most types of power generation have some kind of issue. Of the cleaner options, hydro, tidal, and geothermal can only be built in select places; solar panels create noxious waste at the point of manufacture; wind takes up space and interferes with some types of birds. Plus, wind and solar need on-grid storage (of which we still have little) to be able to handle what’s known as baseline load, something that nuclear is good at.
Nuclear is better in terms of death rate than burning fossil fuels, which causes a whole slate of illnesses ranging from COPD to, yes, cancer. It’s just that that’s a chronic problem, whereas Chernobyl (that perfect storm of bad reactor design, testing in production, Soviet bureaucratic rigidity, and poor judgement in general) was acute. We’re wired to ignore chronic problems.
In an ideal world, we would have built out enough hydro fifty years ago to cover the world’s power needs, or enough on-grid storage more recently to handle the variability of solar and wind, but this isn’t a perfect world, and we didn’t. It isn’t that nuclear is a good solution to the need for power—it’s one of those things where all the solutions are bad in some way, and we need to build something.
Don’t worry it probably won’t be long before the houthi rebels or some other terrorist state backed crazies manage to successfully launch an attack on a nuclear power station somewhere then you won’t have to keep hearing about three mile island, chernobyl, Fukushima, the windscale fire, sizewell leaks, or any of the other times nuclear power has gone dangerously wrong.
Thankfully Isreal doesn’t have nuclear power plants because it’s obviously too dangerous, let’s hope Russia, Iran, China, or any other well funded powerbase don’t get pushed into a corner and see funding an attack on a western nation as a viable response. Or some wacky religious group, race war proponents, attention seeking crazies or any of the usual suspects get as lucky as the 911 hijackers.
When reading about dungeness reactor i learned that even reactors that haven’t melted down also take about a hundred years to decommission safely.
Another interesting stat I heard on a podcast is that the coal industry has proven much more deadly than the nuclear industry in terms of human lives lost.
It doesn’t take a hundred years, but a couple of decades and it’s hugely expensive. And nobody knows what to do with the waste.
Everyone that does their research knows what to do with it. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/processing-of-used-nuclear-fuel
The care and maintenance stage is part of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) decommissioning strategy and spans an 80+ year period. This waiting period allows for radiation levels within the reactor core to decline and helps to facilitate a smoother demolition process. Dungeness A is due to enter the care and maintenance phase in 2027. Demolition of reactor buildings and final site clearance is planned for 2088 to 2098
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeness_nuclear_power_stations
It’s an amazing place. I visited last month. You can overlook the power station from a nearby lighthouse.
You know if they turn it into a video game with each copy sold on steam tied to a different robot, they could probably get this dinner 10x faster. I mean have you ever seen how much time people put into Minecraft? Satisfactory? Hydroner? Just a name a few. Speedrunner Fukushima any % lol
A sincere question: why they don’t place some relay/repeater for the robot’s signal so they could control it from anywhere in the world through internet (or even some very private wireless communication network, outside internet due to security concerns)? The fact that they have to switch personnel every 15 minutes is a sign that they’re doing this in situ, rather than remotely.
Drones with mobile network connectivity are already a thing, for example. If you consider that internet exposure is dangerous (connection could be hacked, etc), ham transceiver repeaters are also a thing, and you can even chain many of them across many kilometers. It’s called mesh network.
Highly Radioactive situations and nuclear applications in general cause great trouble with any digital device, let alone complex Wireless communication, due to the fact that the particles being emmited can flip bits on your Microprocessors and make the whole thing break down. Fully analog devices are used for control applications in nuclear plants for that reason, there is likely something like that going on with this setup
How radioactive is the robot afterwards?
Shortly after I returned to the States from Fukushima (a little bit after the disaster), I was taking an emergency response course on radioactivity. Everybody there got to use a Geiger counter on themselves and their belongings and various things in the room. The only thing that set it off was the purse I had brought back with me.
Anecdotal, obviously, and it wasn’t highly radioactive, but I did get rid of the purse.
Itself, not very, but any dust or flakes that land on it definitely will be. It only takes very small particles.
Usually, equipment like that is abandoned in place. Radiation has weakened its parts, and decontamination is complex and time-consuming for something you can’t just hose and scrub down.
That kinda depends on exactly what it is removed and how. Being exposed to radiation doesn’t make you radioactive. Ingesting radioactive particles will kinda make you radioactive until those particles reach their end of life and fission. I would be surprised if the robot is actually radioactive once it is done, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that the structural integrity of the robot has been compromised due to exposure to radiation.
Source: former Navy Nuclear Power Program Electronics Technician Instructor.
Good question
Depends heavily on the kind (and intensity) of radiation. Beta (electron/positron) and gamma (photon) generally won’t, but neutron and alpha can. Many of the atoms that become radioactive will rapidly decay, and that’s one of the mechanisms behind the impact to structural integrity.
Be really interested to know what it’s made out of. Had a coworker who used to work in forgings and did some stuff that got sent to nuclear plants, they said that they had really strict requirements on material compositions, specifically needed to ensure that the (think it was steel, may have been something else) material had basically no traces of cobalt in it because the cobalt would becomes radioactive over the service life.
There are several factors to consider when choosing materials in a nuclear plant. For things that aren’t in direct proximity to the reactor core, neutron activation (becoming radioactive) is less of a concern. Aluminum produces hydrogen gas when exposed to boric acid, which presents an explosion risk. Certain chemical compounds can cause corrosion to plant equipment, even a Sharpie marker could corrode a valve or pipe and cause issues over the 50 year life span of a plant.
Robot clearly never watched the ending of Fallout 3 about letting the humans do it instead.
Without the addon there was a robot companion that would refuse to go in, just like Fawkes does before you get the dlc. After you get the dlc both companions will go in, and be fine afterwards, because radiation doesn’t affect them.
Much like Fawkes the robot companion said some BS about not robbing you of your destiny before you install that particular dlc.
