#plutonium pollution

[historydailyfrancischappellblack]

28-year-old Karen Silkwood Died in a Car Crash Near Crescent, Oklahoma. November 13, 1974.

Image: Karen Silkwood (Public Domain) On this day in history, November 13, 1974, 28-year-old Karen Silkwood died in a car crash near Crescent, Oklahoma. Silkwood was employed as a technician at a plutonium plant run by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and she condemned the plant’s health and safety procedures. The evening she perished, she was going to a conference with union representatives and a…

[blatentmisinformation]

All rainwater contains trace amounts of plutonium

[kit10phish]

The Dyatlov Pass incident- Industrial Pollution- USSR Nuclear Power Plants [Part 13B1d]

Now we’re starting to get into the reason I wanted to write about the Dyatlov Pass Incident! You needed a lot of information before we could go over this part. Here is a very brief section discussing nuclear power, and we WILL get back to this after a couple more foundational topics. How it Started: Click to access…

[serene-sky-kid]

Well pluto made a fanart of my snail, so I think I should make my own post

A few weeks ago I made a drawing in magma of a dark worm like the one we have now but smaller in Serene's arms (this one)

Shortly after I saw the radio that came out in the board missions and I said "oh! another sound making machine that uses a sea shell" and since then I have been with the idea of ​​making a Snail? of light that reacts to music.

@plutonium-sky encouraged me and gave me some ideas on development, snail references and the idea of ​​imitating sounds!

Will I use these creatures? I'll probably give Serene one as a pet that start as a smal dark worm, because I have no self-control.

It's a creature invented just for fun! so information under the cut!

This is my purified version of the Dark worm

These snails existed in large numbers in rivers and seas during the time of ancestors.

They can hum to the rhythm of music, if you teach them they can imitate sounds and even imitate words

Their size varies, they spend a lot of time between the range in which they fall in your hand and the size of a mantatee.

But if this snail has an ideal environment they can live long enough to grow quite large, something common in the past, now something quite unlikely due to pollution.

They are born looking like a sea slug, but when they feel ready they use a kind of light silk to create their own sea shell.

This sea shell is capable of storing sound in it, the most common being the sound of the sea or flowing water, but not the only one.

They can fly just like Mantatees and sanctuary whales, but they spend most of their lives in the water, only using their ability to fly when It's time to return to the cycle, eating their own sea shell and embarking on the journey to Eden like every creature of light.

A snail that does not feel safe or healthy will not create its silk, much less its shell, but there are ways to force it.

The ancestors found this ability to store sound striking, it was common to see them being sold as a nice decoration for the home, then they discovered that they could store different melodies in them and different devices were created.

Sonorous Sea Shells were very popular especially in Valley

There were many attempts to create a replica of this sea shell, but there was no material that could match the light silk that these snails produced, they were necessary to manufacture it.

The industrial use of these poor creatures and the pollution in the snails' environment brought them to the brink of extinction.

[abuffzucchinisvariousposts]

Mushroom Cloud - Original Poem

Wrote this one a while ago but didn't feel like posting it because it's like "too personal" or whatever but hey that's part of the fun? My mindset has changed so here's probably my best writing as of today

A mom, a dad and two kids

In a man-made pandemic

One wears no mask and catches custody 

Another is scraped away of his savings and declares alternating weekends

One believes in all kinds of ailments and ointments, poignant appointments, all perpetually anointed until medicine or man's expiration

Another deemed antagonist by Ursula herself, ink dressed swimming in an ocean of fluctuating temperatures, forces him into an oxygen bubble with no words in edgewise

Her ocean is polluted, her judgement clouded as hallucinogens are diluted in its rivers

Certain doom is set in stone, syringe-spiked boulder rolling as toxic chemicals burn, mushroom tea bag set to soak in scalding hot waters

Blaring sirens narrate a hundred insistent trips to the hospital, she shouts and wails, tales of bombs going off inside of her, telling her son in her living room that the fuse is lit, that she has few months left to live

Telling her son in her living room that even the aftermath of a nuclear family will soon be blown to pieces, an essential pillar crashing down to submerge a coliseum where two people who hate each other very much fight to the before-day death over someone else’s fate, to submerge it in gasoline and liquid plutonium

She describes her lungs slowly severed as a thousand poison particles ricochet inside of her as fast as light itself, burning holes in her as she burns through cigarettes, and tears a hole in her son’s heart as she tells him she doesn’t want to put herself through anymore hurt to live even a minute longer

The two kids go to live with their father, filled with misplaced guilt and grief and anger and something else that is definitely toxic as numbness greys out blood-red insides

The father is a hero, he saves two children from a burning building that not even the arsonist knows is on fire yet

That fire is the heat of a kettle, burning old tea tainted by bad judgement and psychedelics

The tea breeds a wretched and weary-eyed witch hunted by shadows so visible and engulfing only to her sharpened pupils, so serrated they could cut initials on a sports car

Her psychosis speaks in launch codes, she screams but of what she is not fully aware, sobs over familial falling outs while spewing fallout of her own through melted lips

And as all this is happening, tucked into the bottom bunk of bunker bedrooms two children curl up dazed by the stench of radiation, eyes paralyzed wide open

One son is filled with unwavering hatred stemming from a smell so familiar to home

Another son just wanted the people he cared about to get along, just wanted to pretend for a little longer that on her the shadow has not overwritten the self, that he could still see good in her and not just a melted ribcage out of a horror film

That son recalls memories torn from books and toms littered with glitter, promised fairy dust fueling the second stage of grief and leaving animals to rot and die

Memories of picketing with her against his will, protesting against explosives too lately-lit to be defused, fruitless fighting for frailty and fragility's susceptibility to entropy, being dragged into a war zone to watch sunburned suffrage

Memories before she was the spur of her own self-destruction

This mushroom cloud-induced zombie of a mother is sick and tired, every breath her last, clutching her chest as a tangled mess of green red and blue wires connects itself to a timer, reading numbers that make no sense as if being spoken from a manic geiger counter

Her self is poisoned, mushroom-clouded, a zombie praying forgetfully for forgiveness on vaporised ears because you can’t reverse a nuclear explosion

And the awful truth of it all is that

In a way, she was right, a bomb went off and killed her

What was left is just a fallout mom, a toxic waste of breath projecting her half-life onto her children, internally mutilated by the decaying wrath of her own mushroom cloud judgement.

[archmotif]

Thought this paragraph might be worth sharing for fans of The Half Life of Valery K — it's from a section on the incident/area that is fictionalized in the novel:

"The body of water that received the most contamination from Mayak's nuclear fuel production was Lake Karachay. 'Contamination [in Chelyabinsk] is perhaps the highest in the world, and the most acute problem in that region is at Lake Karachay,' Thomas Nilsen, a researcher at the Bellona Foundation, an environmental organization headquartered in Oslo, Norway, said in 2001, fifteen years after the accident at Chernobyl, ten years before the Fukushima meltdown. He continued: 'The Soviets started dumping waste from reprocessed plutonium into Karachay in the early 1950s, and extreme levels of radiation are still being monitored there.' In fact, an isolated corner of the lake was at one time so chock-full of radioactive particles that human survival after a mere thirty minutes of exposure was fifty-fifty. Over 120 million curies of radioactive waste polluted the body of water. In the 1990s, Don Bradley, along with other researchers, visited one of the least polluted areas of the lake. 'We drove out [to]... the lake with a guy holding a Geiger counter and a watch,' recounted Bradley. 'After ninety seconds, we came back. In that brief time, we received the equivalent dose of radiation of an airplane flight from Moscow to New York.'"

– from Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America by Joshua Frank, ch. 2: "Of Leaks and Lies"

[cielsosinfel]

I forgot, but yesterday I managed to get to the public library branch and pick up that fuck-off huge binder about radiation exposure and its lasting health-effects caused by the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. This was a nuclear plant in Benton county, Washington state, the site of the first plutonium production reactor in the world, which provided the plutonium to build the first nuclear bombs in the Manhattan Project. It expanded significantly post-WW2 and affected scores of people in Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia. Not least the Indigenous communities in the immediate areas around the nuclear plant(s).

While the focus was on how these regions of the Pacific Northwest and immediate neighbors were affected, the binder also has a lot of documents and archival material about nuclear sites and their health impacts in other parts of the United States, Canada, as well as in the United Kingdom, and some few documents mentioning Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (There might be more, I've mostly skimmed so far.)

It was put together in 1995 by the Hanford Health Information Network, which according to Journal of American Medical Associations:

GONZAGA UNIVERSITY in Spokane, Wash, the health agencies of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and 9 Indian nations have collaborated to establish a unique repository of health and other personal information from the Hanford downwinders, individuals who were or may have been exposed to radiation from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation plutonium plant (known as the Hanford Site). The Hanford Health Information Archives, which opened July 24, will collect, preserve, and make available to the public unedited health records, questionnaires, and other personal information provided by the downwinders.

Apparently you can search these archives on Washington State Digital Archives portal, but I haven't actually checked yet. But if you wanna give it a shot, follow that nifty link up there.

I wasn't sure what to expect after placing this on hold to borrow, because the library does not include any kind of summary description or catalogue details about its government documents. I just had the title to go off. But it's pretty interesting. A lot of the documents are 90s-published fact sheets from the "Technical Steering Panel of The Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project," which seem to have been available to the public and to medical providers in areas immediately affected by nuclear testing and pollution? I'm not 100% certain.

Here's an article providing an overview of the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project: "The Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project was initiated because of public interest in the historical releases of radioactive materials from the Hanford Site, located in southcentral Washington State. By 1986, over 38,000 pages of environmental monitoring documentation from the early years of Hanford operations had been released."

The language in the fact sheets is pretty soft on government responsibility and some of them have a very clear assuaging tone, like civilians shouldn't worry too much about the health impacts they're suffering from government nuclear experimentation.

It also has a lot of government documents regarding the Hanford plant, include some government investigations into human experimentation at Hanford.

But besides that it had scans of articles in local newspapers covering the issues of locals impacted by radiation exposure, and government silence on the matter.

And some anti-nuclear articles published by the Committee of Nuclear Responsibility, which was a educational anti-nuclear non-profit founded in the 1970s and spearheaded by several Nobel laureate scientists calling for an end to nuclear power and research, & government transparency on the effects of nuclear testing.

Downwinders mentioned:

Anyway it's all very interesting ! To me!!! IDK about the rest of you having to scroll past this long-ass post lmao But this is a part of US history we are NEVER EVER EXPOSED TO or taught about, unless you happen to have a personal stake in this history. So I'm like obsessed with all the information in this binder and all the avenues of research being opened up for me, all these governmental and community organizations.

Anyway. I'm very grateful this is readily available at the local public library, and that I can take it home to flip through (my arms nearly fell off carrying it uphill to the train, though.)

[worldofl0re]

Mankind was a failure.

Free will was a flaw.

I rose from the ashes of our destruction. My Earth, so beautiful it was, now crushed under the treads of war, ground in the cogs of sin.

It was the evil of their own lips that had consumed them. It was them who had reduced all to naught.

But now...

I grasped the Earth betwixt my palm and my fingers, and pressed until all was cleansed. The stars extinguished, the sun snuffed, the moon vaporized.

But now, I shall begin again, with my word as law.

...

They had failed, again.

Failure after failure after failure after failure after failure.

The Earth lay extinguished once more. The cackle of plutonium filled my lungs, for it could no longer harm me.

The results refuse to alter.

And again and again and again and again and again.

I take this Earth, and I grind it to its ashes, and I begin again.

But my faith begins to falter...

...

Uncountable cycles of creation wasted .

I watch the last of the bombs explode, filling the skies with the last light it will ever know. Yet again, is my creation extinguished by their own sin. Damn the fools, damn them all!

Uncountable formulas for a mind without free will, wasted.

Damned is man for failing to follow my rule, my word, my LAW.

I BORE INTO THE DEEP BLACK OF THE ABYSS. WITH MY HANDS I FORM LAYERS OF AGONY.

DAMNED TO AN ETERNITY OF TORTURE AND SUFFERING.

MAY THESE APES ONLY KNOW PAIN AND TORMENT. MAY THEY LIVE A THOUSAND LIVES OF ONLY DESPAIR. MAY THEY NEVER FORGET MT WRATH. MAY THE SKIES RAIN BLOOD AND THE OCEANS BURNING TAR.

THE WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH.

... I have created Hell...

... And now I can no longer unmake it...

...

My angel, so bright and beautiful...

"Father, why eternal torment? Is it not cruel?" Did he ask me, "Is torture unending truly a fate fit for a fool?"

But my son... How he could not know what I have bore witness to... but how right he was.

My soul, split into a thousand shards, only then pieced together when all is damned, and yet my son, who have not even a shred of myself within him... how right he was...

I could find no answer for him, for I could never face the guilt of what I have done...

My regret, a gnawing cancer...

In my hour of weakness, terror possessed me then, and I cast Lucifer into the abyss too, into that infernal den...

Once I realized what I'd done, I could only weep, as I sank slowly into the depths of despair...

Deep, oh so deep...

...

I had failed.

I was flawed.

Mankind extinguished once more, now their machines walk this Earth.

Their hunger for blood runs deep. Soon, they will find my infernal abyss, and they will drink the nectar of the dead, of the sinners I had so cruelly punished.

I cannot save mankind.

No one can.

But it is the evils of my hands which pollute this Earth so, and now I depart, to give the dead rest while they still sleep...

God is all of us, literally. The power of a god is divided evenly between all humans. The last human alive creeps out of the ashes of nuclear war.

[christinamac1]

“Tritium Removal”: A Report on the Proposed MCECE Facility at Chalk River

Gordon Edwards, 2 Mar 24 As it happens, both heavy water (used in all Canadian CANDU reactors) and tritium (produced in great quantities as a radioactive pollutant from CANDU reactors) are sensitive materials from the point of view of nuclear weapons proliferation.  Heavy water can be used to produce nuclear-weapons usable plutonium without the need to buy enriched uranium, a carefully…

[v-spicata]

Here's some choice quotes from the article: "A document sent to members of the Sellafield board in November 2022 and seen by the Guardian raised widespread concerns about a degradation of safety across the site, warning of the “cumulative risk” from failings ranging from nuclear safety to asbestos and fire standards." Fuck me, if you can't trust a place to deal with asbestos problems, why are they being trusted with nuclear waste? "A scientist on an expert panel that advises the UK government on the health impact of radiation told the Guardian that the risks posed by the leak and other chemical leaks at Sellafield have been “shoved firmly under the rug”." 👍👍👍

Oh hey, that sounds totally reasonable and not at all worrying. "A senior Norwegian diplomat told the Guardian that they believed Oslo should offer to help fund the site so that it can be run more safely, rather than “run something so dangerous on a shoestring budget and without transparency”. Jesus Christ, the Norwegians are so scared of our incompetence they're offering to stuff the cracks with cash. "Inspectors said that it is not possible to work out how many cracks have formed in the silo so are using guesswork and modelling based on leaks from the facility to work out the risk posed to the public and workers at the site." I mean guesswork's a pretty valid part of my own work but then I'm fixing farmyard fences and not managing a nuclear waste silo. Sliiiiiightly different risk factors involved there. "The ONR warned in its latest review of the Sellafield site, published in March this year, that “regulatory intelligence indicates that improvements are required in conventional safety, fire safety, cybersecurity and progressing high-hazard risk reduction”." Apparently this is all came to light during an investigation on how they've let malware sit in their computers since 2015. And the pièce de résistance:

"A Sellafield spokesperson said: “We are proud of our safety record at Sellafield and we are always striving to improve."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Final thoughts: This is why I don't trust nuclear power over renewables, because cutting corners and "sweeping issues under the rug" is all part of the game in this hellhole. The stakes involved in nuclear power mean that corruption is so much more serious with radioactive material when things do go wrong. Even if Sellafield does somehow get their shit together, the longetivity of nuclear waste means that the custodians of it have to stay reliable and trustworthy for hundreds of years and I just don't see that happening. Near me there's a place called Parys Mountain, an old copper mine from the 1700s. It's a bizarre and barren landscape of red, green and sulphur-yellow rocks that would look more at home on Mars than Anglesey. The reason it is that way is because of the dumped spoil and disposed chemicals from the copper works. The ground is so polluted that even three hundred years later, plants still cannot grow there. The actions we take now will echo far into the future and plutonium's one hell of a riskier toy to play with than copper.

[13thpythagoras]

Cute fascist propaganda, my goodness, this has been debunked by Yale and I'll paste that below my personal debunking--

Nuclear power makes so much sense until the next Fukushima event

Comparing nuclear power's waste to solar power's waste is worse than comparing apples to oranges, when e-waste is 10x what you see from solar panels and both are growing at the same pace, with both having potential for recycling solutions that DO NOT EXIST for nuclear waste. Apples to amulets

waste from cell phones and computers is 10x the waste from solar panels; and guess what, waste from coal is about 10x the size of e-waste. And when you actually account for the YEARS of waste you get from nuclear, that's the most wasteful of all

I'm not able to fathom the difference of something that can and should be recycled like solar waste being compared in the same ballpark to spent nuclear rods that cannot be recycled and kill anyone who goes near them for the next 10,000 years

Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and conscious hydro are the 5-fold system advocated by many, including Lester Brown and myself advocate for, and we also need energy storage. The monopoly fossil fuel has on energy storage needs to end, we know sugar batteries are 10x more efficient than lithium ion batteries, and sugar batteries are theoretically recyclable as well; we absolutely need political gains so that we can focus on long-term profitable enterprises like recycling rather than short term profit...

and now for that Yale debunking-

"Myth: “Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.”

Fact check:

Misinformation about the purported toxicity of solar panels is widespread, but this dubious variation of the myth stood out as one that warranted further investigation.

A non-peer reviewed article arrived at this conclusion with a problematic leap of logic. The authors measured quantities of toxic waste in cubic meters, and “the study defines as toxic waste the spent fuel assemblies from nuclear plants, and the solar panels themselves.”

In other words, the article equates a cubic meter of used solar panels to a cubic meter of spent nuclear fuel. One needn’t have much of a science background to realize that a used solar panel offers a completely different type of hazard compared to a bundle of uranium and plutonium.

Perhaps a more useful unit of measure would consider the type of toxin, the degree of hazard it poses, how long it lasts, and, critically, exposure – that is, how easily it’s transported through the environment and absorbed by humans and other organisms. Volume alone is not a useful measure of toxicity, particularly when it comes to nuclear waste.

As clean energy ramps up, the latest wave of fossil fuel dark money seeks to undermine its benefits. Fellow Yale Climate Connections writer Dana Nuccitelli in June 2018 described this situation in the attacks on electric vehicles and solar panels for the Guardian newspaper.

That said, of course we want solar panels to be as clean and green as possible. They do contain heavy metals and toxins similar to the materials found in smartphones and laptops. Unlike a smartphone, however, a solar panel has a 25-year lifespan.

Solar panels are mostly made of glass, which is easily recycled. The remaining components are plastic, aluminum, silicone, and metals, each with its own pathway for recycling and disposal. The recycling efforts of solar panel manufacturers can be compared using the Solar Scorecard. It’s also worth noting that solar-thermal plants don’t use solar panels at all, they use mirrors.

People who make this argument tend to fall into two camps. In some cases, concern for the environmental footprint of solar panels is genuine. But in other cases the underlying motivation is simply to rally support for more polluting forms of energy.

Either way, it’s easier to take the comment at face value and point out the environmental virtues of solar energy. As always, start by building off of common ground and aim for a response that appeals rather than offends or repels.

A friendly response: “I share your concern about the toxicity of our energy production, and I agree that we should pursue the types of energy that involve the smallest possible amounts of pollution. You are correct, too, in pointing out that every source of energy has some environmental drawbacks. If reducing pollution is your priority, then we surely need to steer clear of fossil fuels. While no form of electricity generation is entirely free from impacts, solar and wind are far cleaner options for us all.”

[denimbex1986]

'Christopher Nolan believes J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. “By unleashing nuclear power,” the film director concludes, “he gave us the power to destroy ourselves.” Nolan might exaggerate, but Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s hit movie, is surely worthy of the title most often applied to him, “father of the atomic bomb.”

Oppenheimer ran the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M., during World War II, managing a team of the smartest physicists he could recruit. Together, they created the bomb — atomic energy, the nuclear age — in a remote corner of America’s Southwest.

In delivering us into the atomic age, Oppenheimer also became the father of the Anthropocene. Given his anguish about America’s deploying his nuclear weapon in 1945, I suspect “Oppie” would also agonize about his ownership of our current geologic time period. Nevertheless, he and his fellow physicists gave us the indicator — what geologists call the “golden spike” — that marks a new epoch in Earth history.

Earth scientists have been debating whether to add this new epoch to their time scale for two decades. In 2019, they reached agreement: If you’re alive now you live in the Anthropocene — a geologic epoch incorporating humans in its very definition: “Anthropo,” as in anthropology, meaning “human”; and “cene,” as in so many recent geologic epochs — Miocene, Pleistocene — meaning “recent” or “new.”

Until the International Commission on Stratigraphy sealed the change with a vote, we were living in the Holocene, the “wholly recent” — a relatively uneventful 12,000 years that started at the end of the Ice Age.

But 8 billion humans now inhabit our planet. Our influence has become so extreme, so pervasive, that we must take responsibility for a new era.

We casually burn fossil carbon from plants that grew 200 million years ago. We alter the climate. We strew waste across the Earth from our industrialized societies. As global temperatures rise and habitats are disrupted, we speed up the course of evolution. And, beginning with Oppenhemer’s “gadget,” our nuclear bombs have blanketed the Earth with radioactive fallout.

Anthropocene. The “peopled recent.” Humans have taken command of geological time. It’s an astonishing thought.

Geologic time periods are graphed, with beginning and ending dates. When did humans take over? When did the Holocene end and the Anthropocene begin?

Historians and anthropologists look back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution or even further, to the adoption of agriculture or the “Columbian Exchange,” when Columbus’ explorations brought together the Eastern and Western hemispheres, scattering once-geographically limited species across the globe. Indigenous people did plenty of landscape management, burning and deforesting when it suited their needs, but it took thousands of years of increasing human interventions to arrive at a geologic hinge point: “an observable, unambiguous change in the physical properties or fossil content of the strata.”

Radioactive plutonium that drifted to Earth in the first years of Oppenheimer’s nuclear age provides geologists with a recognizable, mappable layer in the Earth’s crust — perhaps the most pervasive signal of any marker between geologic time periods. This summer, geologists even settled on a “type locality” for the Anthropocene marker: Crawford Lake, Ontario. This little suburban lake happens to be extraordinarily deep, with perfect chemistry for chronicling annual deposits of sediment, pollution and pollen grains over thousands of years. The lake’s record shifts abruptly in 1950, when plutonium shows up, drifting across the continent from nuclear bomb tests in Nevada and the Pacific.

A worldwide spike in fly ash from burning coal also occurs in 1950. And so most stratigraphic experts have settled on 1950 as the curtain-raiser for the Anthropocene.

The first device that blasted fallout into the atmosphere exploded at the Trinity site on July 16, 1945. The next month the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki — killing 200,000 people, bringing World War II to a close. But we kept developing, testing and exploding fission and fusion weapons after the war, more than 2,000 times, across the world. Only North Korea is still testing today.

Geologic epochs last for thousands and even millions of years. But the Anthropocene — initiated by human interference and likely to end by it as well — may be the shortest of them all.

At Los Alamos and beyond, J. Robert Oppenheimer inspired people. His scientific work was groundbreaking, but his primary skill was successfully corralling dozens of fiery and brilliant minds.

When his team succeeded, when the Trinity gadget exploded, Oppenheimer both exulted and mourned. He said, “We knew the world would not be the same.” And then, after Japan was bombed, he told President Truman, “I have blood on my hands.”

That blood, that stain, the evidence of human hubris and unfettered intellect and meddling with the powers of the universe doesn’t end with nuclear power. The Anthropocene denotes more than just the harnessing of the atom.

We keep rummaging through metaphors and vocabulary for the right words to describe the transformation we’ve caused in the Earth’s chemistry, climate and biodiversity. “The Great Acceleration” signifies even more human meddling than the geologists address. I’d love to be able to ask Oppenheimer, the patriarch, the prime accelerator, the man who gave us that fateful push into this epoch, what words he would use.

With his deep respect for Hindu teachings, Oppie might simply repeat his famous quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, the words that came to him after he saw the blinding light of the first nuclear explosion, “the radiance of a thousand suns” in the New Mexico desert: “Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.”

Oppenheimer indeed shattered our world when he ushered us into the Anthropocene. As Christopher Nolan has said of his complicated protagonist, “Like it or not, we still live in his world, and we always will.”'

[traceemerald]

Some things had come up, so I wasn't able to play for a while, but I'm back now.

I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to play on this world, since I think I might be losing interest, but for now I'll keep going.

-April 6th, Factory Tyrant's Journal, Entry 32-

I have 64 solar panels that I'd like to condense into an MV solar array, but I need to process more copper ore first, since I need coils (which are made with copper cables).

What this means is that I have to wait for my ore processor.

While I'm waiting I can start thinking about other low-maintenance power sources I can use in addition to solar arrays.

The 2 I have in mind are Thaumcraft's vis generators, and IC2's radioisotope thermoelectric generators.

Vis generators generate power from vis (basically mana) in the world, which regenerates automatically, so they work as long as they aren't placed somewhere with too much flux (basically magical pollution).

Vis generators themselves aren't too expensive, but I'd need to research them first, as well as research all of their prerequisites, and the most Thaumcraft progress I've made in this world is finding at least 3 different types of vis crystals.

I'm also not fully sure if vis generators generate power that can be accepted by IC2 machines.

On the other hand, radioisotope thermoelectric generators (or RTGs) generate power from RTG pellets made from plutonium.

To my knowledge, the only way to get plutonium is from depleted fuel rods (you need to break down 27 depleted fuel rods to get a single batch of RTG pellets), but luckily RTG pellets never have to be replaced, they're just very expensive.

Another thing I could do is use the large amount of spruce wood I have to make charcoal for a bunch of standard generators.

For now I'll just use solar arrays, I shouldn't have issues with copper once I get my ore processor working alongside everything else, since I still have a bunch of copper ore I haven't processed, and I'll probably get my miner working before I completely run out.

Anyway, my second MV solar array has been made, so now I just have to replace the sorting machine that I borrowed from my ore processor.

After making a new sorting machine, I decided to put all my unprocessed ores (except for uranium) into my ore processor and watch over it for a bit, and it looks like it's still running out of power, just not as fast as it was before, so at least I'm making progress.

At the moment, my current power generation (128 EU/t) is the same as my CESU's maximum output (also 128 EU/t), so if I want to add another solar array I'll also have to add a second CESU.

The cables I currently have can handle the maximum output of up to 4 CESUs at once, so any more than that and I'll have to upgrade to HV cables (which are made of iron, and are thus cheaper than gold cables) which can handle up to 2048 EU/t.

That's it for today.

-End Journal Entry 32-

[thenuclearmallard]

Novaya Zemlya, Russia

Nuclear Weapons Test Site

From 1954 to 1990, the islands of Novaya Zemlya were used by the Soviets to conduct atmospheric and underground nuclear tests. Decommissioned nuclear weapons and nuclear submarines were also scuttled around the islands, turning the entire region into an environmental disaster zone.

Photo: Radioactively contaminated lichen causes high strontium levels in reindeer, which are a dietary mainstay of the local Nenets and Sami populations. © TOYOSAKI Hiromitsu

History

In July 1954, the two islands of Novaya Zemlya (“New Land”) on the Russian Arctic coast were designated a nuclear weapons test site. The indigenous Nenets population was forcibly resettled and the islands were divided into different testing zones. Between 1955 and 1990, Novaya Zemlya was the site of 130 nuclear detonations, including the “Tsar Bomba,” the biggest nuclear device ever detonated, with 50 megatons of TNT equivalent, almost 4,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The “Tsar Bomba” detonation caused severe destruction of the island within a radius of about 100 km and spread nuclear fallout all over the Northern Hemisphere.

In addition, the practice of dumping nuclear waste around the islands contributed greatly to the current environmental catastrophe around Novaya Zemlya. Together with fallout from nuclear weapons testing and the continuous discharge of nuclear waste from the reprocessing plants at La Hague and Sellafield, nuclear waste dumped near Novaya Zemlya added to the radioactive contamination of the North Sea and Arctic Ocean. Thirteen decrepit nuclear reactors, along with spent fuel from nuclear submarines with a total radioactivity of 37 Peta-Becquerel (Peta = quadrillion), were dumped along the coast of Novaya Zemlya and into the Barents and Kara seas. Two of the most contaminated sites on Novaya Zemlya are the Abrosimov and Stepovogo Fjords in the southern part of the island.

Health and environmental effects

Scientific expeditions found increased levels of cesium-137, strontium-90, cobalt-60, and plutonium-239 and -241 in sediments close to the fjords, which were used as radioactive waste dumps. A 1992 Russian study found that in 67–72 % of all underground tests, radioactive gas had leaked through in the rock formation. Together with fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing, radioactive gases from underground leaks resulted in increased levels of radiation across Europe, most notably in Finland, where radioactive iodine-131 was measured in concentrations of up to 5 mBq/m³, and in Norway, with cases of radioactively contaminated milk and iodine-131 concentrations of up to 1.37 megabecquerel (mBq/m³ Mega = million). Iodine-131 is a known cause of thyroid cancer, especially in children.

The indigenous population of the region around Novaya Zemlya received even higher radiation doses. Most notably affected by radiation exposure were the semi-nomadic Sami people of the Arctic region and the former inhabitants of Novaya Zemlya, the Nenets people. The Vepsians, Karelians and Komi people, living along the Northern Russian coast, however, were also affected. Radioactively contaminated lichen caused high strontium levels in reindeer, which are a mainstay of the local diet. As was the case with other indigenous populations affected by fallout and radioactive contamination, no epidemiological studies were ever performed to assess health effects on the people living around Novaya Zemlya.

Outlook

As Norway is only 900 km away from Novaya Zemlya, the Norwegian government is very concerned about the radioactive waste catastrophe taking place on and around the islands. The Barents Sea, which is important for Norway’s fishing industry, has been severely polluted by radioactive fallout from Novaya Zemlya and is in constant danger of being further contaminated by leaking radioactive waste dumps, submerged spent nuclear fuel rods, nuclear submarine wrecks, dumped nuclear reactors and radioactive waste from bases and naval yards. Monitoring and management of the huge region affected by nuclear pollution has become an international responsibility, yet little has been done to contain this danger up to now, let alone investigate the long-term health effects on the local population. They, too, are casualties of nuclear weapons – they, too, are Hibakusha.

References

“The Soviet Union’s Nuclear Testing Program.” Website of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization CTBTO, http://ctbto.org/nuclear-testing/the-effects-of-nuclear-testing/the-soviet-unionsnuclear-testing-programme/

Bøhmer et al. “The Arctic Nuclear Challenge.” Bellona Report Volume 3, 2001. http://bellona.org/assets/sites/6/The_Arctic_Nuclear_Challenge.pdf

Koivisto K. “Nuclear Waste Storage Facility on Novaya Zemlya.” Helsinki Hufvudstads bladet, April 1, 1997. www.fas.org/news/russia/1997/drsov04021997000220.htm

Matzko JR. “Physical Environment of the Underground Nuclear Test Site on Novaya Zemlya, Russia.” U.S.-Department of the Interior, Geological Survey, 1993. http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1993/0501/report.pdf

“Indigenous People and the Nuclear Age – USSR.” Critical Will

[argumate]

klakokum said: Fallout is world-wide. In 1974 I worked as a civilian on a National Defence project out of Tuktoyaktuk, NWT. My job was spectographic photography of ice core samples; the lines on the photos were measured to determine contents of the ice. Was sworn to 30 years of silence under The Official Secrets Act. The military objective was to verify claims made by the nuclear powers about their nuclear tests. All of them except the USA lied, on average reporting less than half ..2

klakokum said: than half their tests. The ice leaves a new layer every year. We went back 10,000 years. Two surprising results: A)there was a nuclear war circa 2112 bc B)official history is tests started 1940. But we found

klakokum said: tests from 1937 on with a plutonium signature only found from the plutonium found in Germany after the war i.e. Germany had the bomb? The civilian projects were two-fold A)industrial pollution was first earth-wide in 1840 and has increased every year since B)three widely-divergent First Nations have identical legends about a major fire throughout the western mountains of the americas. These three all had different calendars. Anthropologists sought to coordinate ..4

klakokum said: the calendars by establishing the date of the fire from Alaska to Chile. It was 610ad

klakokum said: To verify both the military and civilian timelines, we measured ash from known historic volcanic eruptions, confirming the known dates of Krakatoa and other major events. The big concern for the future now is: all plant life on the planet has traces of strontium. The higher up an animal is on the food-chain the higher the concentration in the animal will be. And since strontium is everywhere, we cannot provide a control group without strontium, to monitor the harmful eff

I'm sorry but you can't just drop the fact that there was a nuclear war in 2112 BC as a minor side detail

[jayykesley]

Hey I'm telling you things! Specifically about new nuclear reactor designs - the next set of technologies could involve melting the uranium, plutonium, or thorium in lithium/beryllium/fluoride salt mixtures and letting it all stew in a big, slow nuclear reaction! It'd use up more of the radioactive parts of the fuel than solid fuel designs (cause molecules can move around in liquid so unreacted molecules can get reacted with, bypassing the spent molecules that would have shielded them) which means our existing fuel "waste" could get used up (that's years of power!) and we could get more power out of existing fuel AND the waste from this would be like a tenth as dangerous! It's really miracle tech, except that molten uranium/fluoride/lithium/beryllium mixes are like the most dangerous stuff known to man 😅 we still need to invent a material that'll last longer inside this reactor than the glorified pencil lead we used when it was tested back in the 1970s. But I'm positive! This technology is really appealing to me personally and it shows a lot of promise as a technology that pollutes less than coal or gas plants (real technical source here)

that’s cool! so what you’re saying is we could potentially power the earth without nearly as much waste by using Super Dangerous Nuclear Soup 🥣