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30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster

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A Fish Aficionado

I am going to make it through this year if it kills me
Ukraine marks 30th anniversary of Chernobyl disaster
Sirens were sounded at the same moment as the first explosion at the reactor, in the early hours of 26 April 1986.

The meltdown at the plant remains the worst nuclear disaster in history.

An uncontrolled reaction blew the roof off, spewing out a cloud of radioactive material which drifted across Ukraine's borders, into Russia, Belarus and across a swathe of northern Europe.

A memorial service was held in the town of Slavutych, built to re-house workers who lived near the nuclear plant.
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Chernobyl's legacy 30 years on

Children are still being born with severe birth defects and rare types of cancer in areas near to Chernobyl, according to a British charity, three decades on from the world's worst civil nuclear disaster.

The accident on 26 April 1986 contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union, changed the way the world thinks about nuclear energy and has affected an unquantifiable number of people in the region.

For British paediatrician Dr Rachel Furley, the "desperately sad" reality is that women who have spent their entire lives exposed to high levels of radiation are now having children.
She says that in the most severe cases babies have limbs missing and in one case a baby was born with two heads.

When Dr Furley is not treating children in Bury St Edmunds, she helps 800 youngsters in Gomel, a region of Belarus.

Kinda weird how "fetishized" Chernobyl has become in media that the world still kind of ignores the actual people who still suffer from the accident.

In pictures: Dark Pripyat
 

DrM

Redmond's Baby
How much longer until the radiation fades? Many decades more I imagine.

Cesium-137 is reaching the half life period this year. Plutonium radiation will stay there for next 20.000+ years

I wasn't even one year old when it happened. As the rest of the Europe, we heard about it in May, almost two weeks after the disaster.

Two more optimistic news:
New, huge cover (New Safe Confiment) will be soon finished and rolled over the reactor #4 building

Animals are thriving in the Chernobyl exclusion zone
 

BorkBork

The Legend of BorkBork: BorkBorkity Borking
A piece from the latest issue of Orion, one of my favourite magazines:

In the Exclusion Zone

We buried the earth, cut into the soil and rolled the earth like a rug—grass, flowers, worms, beetles—heaved the earth into shallow graves, buried the earth with ants and spiders. We sawed trees and buried forests—eggs, milk, wells, gardens. You left a note on the door:

Please don’t hurt the cat.
She kills the voles. She helps
the garden. Dear, kind Person,
Use whatever you need,
but please, don’t trash the house.

We’ll be home soon.
We’ll come home later.

We dug a pit on the side of your house. We buried your house in the pit. We buried your village.
 

Nivash

Member
I was born in Sweden the year after, and I still knew about it from an early age. We took a hit from the Iodine-131 and Cesium-137 fallout. Nothing like Belarus, but enough for there to be widespread fear and borderline panic in the early stages. People were told to not collect wild mushrooms or berries for years and to this day, you can find elevated Cesium levels in mushrooms (even if it's generally safe levels if you only eat reasonable amounts of them)

The overall public exposure to radiation did rise compared to background levels in large parts of the country. Thankfully though, recent studies showed that any rise in thyroid cancer (the most common radiation-linked cancer) was small enough to be undetectable. It would appear that the health impact on our population was negligible.
 

Gorger

Member
I was in my mothers belly when it happened living in Norway which was the second most affected country outside the Soviet Union. TV was reporting on it non-stop and my mother was terrified I would be born into some deformed mutant monstrosity.
 
I was in my mothers belly when it happened living in Norway which was the second most affected country outside the Soviet Union. TV was reporting on it non-stop and my mother was terrified I would be born into some deformed mutant monstrosity.

Well, were you?
 

Dougald

Member
Cesium-137 is reaching the half life period this year. Plutonium radiation will stay there for next 20.000+ years

I wasn't even one year old when it happened. As the rest of the Europe, we heard about it in May, almost two weeks after the disaster.

Two more optimistic news:
New, huge cover (New Safe Confiment) will be soon finished and rolled over the reactor #4 building

Animals are thriving in the Chernobyl exclusion zone


I always remember my secondary school teacher telling me about this. He took a bunch of students on a field trip and as part of it they were measuring background radiation, but all the readings were wrong. He assumed the equipment was faulty, and it wasn't until 1-2 weeks later they realised what they were seeing
 

CMDBob

Member
Cesium-137 is reaching the half life period this year. Plutonium radiation will stay there for next 20.000+ years

The... "good" thing about Plutonium 239 is despite it's 24,100 year half-life, it's "only" an alpha emitter. You have to basically eat/breathe it for it to get in you, the radiation can't pass through a sheet of paper or even your skin. (You wouldn't want to roll around in it though, super toxic.)

The Cesium is the real threat, being a strong beta/gamma emitter but as you say, it's half-life is 30 years, so it's already reached it's half-life this year. Still dangerous, but it's decreasing!

It's still one of the great tragedies of the 20th century, and a lot of people died to stop the power plant from collapsing and releasing a helluvalot more radiation. I would like to visit the area, one day though. As a disaster, it's a tragedy. As a place, it's fascinating.
 

Aiii

So not worth it
I have been wondering lately just how much of the current increase in cancer cases in Northern Europe could possible be attributed to this event.

I mean, it could just as well be better diagnosis of course, but these are the numbers for all detected cancer cases in The Netherlands over the past decades:
1990 57143
1995 64827
2000 70608
2005 82538
2010 97694
2013 102578
2014 104649
2015 104988

With the amount of shit this incident spewed over the continent, I could imagine it being a contributing factor. Has there ever been any thorough research on this or did we more or less just forget about it after our governments said, "nah, we're probably fine"?
 

Lime

Member
With this and incidents like Fukushima, as well as what the hell we do with all the nuclear waste for all eternity, I still fucking can't believe the audacity of people thinking nuclear power is the solution to sustainable energy.

Also, it was completely reckless and irresponsible by the Swedes to built Barsebäck right across from the fucking capital city of Denmark. It is perhaps the most fucked up thing to do and it will take centuries to dismantle and dispose of the nuclear waste from that plant.

Seriously Sweden, what the fuck were you thinking?
 

A Fish Aficionado

I am going to make it through this year if it kills me
With this and incidents like Fukushima, as well as what the hell we do with all the nuclear waste for all eternity, I still fucking can't believe the audacity of people thinking nuclear power is the solution to sustainable energy.

Also, it was completely reckless and irresponsible by the Swedes to built Barsebäck right across from the fucking capital city of Denmark. It is perhaps the most fucked up thing to do and it will take centuries to dismantle and dispose of the nuclear waste from that plant.

Seriously Sweden, what the fuck were you thinking?

old technology, graphite cooled, rushed construction, cutting corners and badly trained staff plus a political motivation for the fateful test.

Nuclear is still a great option.

Chernobyl and Fukushima – measuring our monsters in the midday sun
 

Tenebrous

Member
If that concrete slab gave way & the magma seeped into the water underneath, the world would've been a vastly different place.

Heroes. All of them.
 

Lime

Member
old technology, graphite cooled, rushed construction, cutting corners and badly trained staff plus a political motivation for the fateful test.

Nuclear is still a great option.

Chernobyl and Fukushima – measuring our monsters in the midday sun

Promises, sure. People keep promising that nothing will happen, yet shit still goes down. And your post doesn't address the extreme challenge of handling nuclear waste.

Nuclear energy is bullshit and the negative consequences for humanity and the environment are not worth it at all. It's an irresponsible solution to sustainable energy
 

Nivash

Member
With this and incidents like Fukushima, as well as what the hell we do with all the nuclear waste for all eternity, I still fucking can't believe the audacity of people thinking nuclear power is the solution to sustainable energy.

Also, it was completely reckless and irresponsible by the Swedes to built Barsebäck right across from the fucking capital city of Denmark. It is perhaps the most fucked up thing to do and it will take centuries to dismantle and dispose of the nuclear waste from that plant.

Seriously Sweden, what the fuck were you thinking?

It's not like the options are any better. Fossil fuels are basically killing the global ecosphere while, interestingly enough, releasing vastly more radioactive material than nuclear plants. Renewable energy, on the other hand, isn't at the point yet where we can do away with baseload energy production an can't provide baseload capability on its own.

There are risks with nuclear power,true, but we could greatly reduce them by modernising plants and building newer, more efficient, ones. Some gen IV plants could even run on nuclear waste. It would make sense to build them purely as recycling plants to reduce our stockpiles, even. Sticking our heads in the sand is the most dangerous approach because we keep running plants into the ground long after their best before dates have passed.

As för Barsebäck... you think that was by accident? You poor, sweet, naive Dane.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YlTukY9fV9Y
 

maomaoIYP

Member
Promises, sure. People keep promising that nothing will happen, yet shit still goes down. And your post doesn't address the extreme challenge of handling nuclear waste.

Nuclear energy is bullshit and the negative consequences for humanity and the environment are not worth it at all. It's an irresponsible solution to sustainable energy
Shit tons more people die from pollution caused by other sources of energy, but yeah let's keep shitting on nuclear.
 

Nivash

Member
:lol

You guys must seriously deplore your fellow countrymen in Skåne to have done this to them.

Seriously though, it's no laughing matter, it was and still is completely fucked up.

Bah, Skåne is basically Danish anyway. Can't understand either them or you, you can have them if we turn it into the location for Fallout 5.

Jokes aside, Barsebäck wasn't exactly the only capital adjacent nuke we built. Forsmark is still in spitting distance from Stockholm as far as fallout is concerned, and it's still active. They were built in a different time, I guess.

I might be somewhat pro-nuke in general, but even I admit that building them next to major population centres isn't the best policy.
 

Osahi

Member
I'm born in 1987 and damn it if I didn't hear abot Tsernobyl every year in my school ging times. It would go like this:

*class has a bad day. They're noisy. Pranking...*

Teacher: "You're the Tsernobyl kids. You're a lo more noisy then kids from other years! It's in other classes of your birthyear the same thing!"
 

bjork

Member
Recently there was a thread by Chittagong about having visited the site, lots of neat photos: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1206622

I spent a couple hours that day reading about the whole disaster. I remember hearing about it as a kid, but I was eight so it wasn't something they even told us about at school or anything. It was interesting to read about, but what a tragedy. I can't even imagine how those workers felt.
 

Jezbollah

Member
I remember the day this happened. Seeing the news early on a Saturday morning when I was 9 - even then I knew how serious it was.

The UK news agencies (back then we only had four channels - so the BBC, ITV and Channel 4) were adamant that there would be no danger of fallout affecting us - but a friend of mine used to race pigeons and he saw birth defects for a few years after that day.

The more I read and see about this disaster the worse it becomes for me. Horrific incident.

EDIT: Obligatory "Seconds From Disaster" Chernobyl episode link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WGUbfzr31s
 

CoolOff

Member
I went on a daytrip there last Thursday, it was quite the experience.

One thing that struck me while watching a documentary shown on the way there is the geopolitical ramifications it had. Who knows if Glasnost would've been as rapid without the USSR having to be so open about Chernobyl?

Also, a fun detail was that at the Vienna conference, when the Soviets wanted to release estimations that 40000 might die as a consequence, the western powers managed to tone it down to 4000. France even went as far as to say that their country wasn't affected at all due to some really odd wind patterns in Central Europe. :*)

Edit: A Slate article on that specific topic:

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...oviet_union_gorbachev_s_glasnost_allowed.html

Chernobyl, then, represented a fundamental shift in the relationship between the Soviet citizenry and the state. Before the explosion, most Soviets were not discontented dissidents; they believed in the Soviet system, forgave its flaws, and hoped for a better future within its confines. But after Chernobyl, the system seemed potentially unredeemable—and actively dangerous. In the early days of glasnost, stories of Stalin’s mass murders decades earlier slowly bubbled to the fore, but those generally receded, so far removed were they from everyday life. After Chernobyl, though, every citizen’s safety was at stake.
 
I was 6 when it happened. I remember it fairly well considering how young i was. Its weird, one thing i remember from the 80s was this overwhelming paranoia and fear of all things Nuclear. Nuclear war seemed like it was on everyones lips at the height of the cold war, really. There were films and songs and what have you, so Chernobyl seemed like the scariest thing ever. It really made an impression on me.
I went to Chernobyl in 2008. Heres a flickr album of it all:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/30911068@N07/sets/72157627277183643/

and i originally posted it over on grcade.co.uk if you want commentary for the photos:

http://grcade.co.uk/t:blhs-tour-of-chernobyl--pripyat-the-photos-56k-death?start=100
 
Promises, sure. People keep promising that nothing will happen, yet shit still goes down. And your post doesn't address the extreme challenge of handling nuclear waste.

Nuclear energy is bullshit and the negative consequences for humanity and the environment are not worth it at all. It's an irresponsible solution to sustainable energy

Nuclear research focused almost exclusively and plutonium and uranium because those materials can also be used to make nuclear weapons.
Simply switching to different fissile element, like thorium, would resolve a lot of safety and nuclear waste issues.

Sadly, because it isn't suited to making nuclear weapons, militaries and governments around the world haven't funded research into thorium, and now they are too invested in plutonium and uranium reactors to switch over.
 
With this and incidents like Fukushima, as well as what the hell we do with all the nuclear waste for all eternity, I still fucking can't believe the audacity of people thinking nuclear power is the solution to sustainable energy.

Also, it was completely reckless and irresponsible by the Swedes to built Barsebäck right across from the fucking capital city of Denmark. It is perhaps the most fucked up thing to do and it will take centuries to dismantle and dispose of the nuclear waste from that plant.

Seriously Sweden, what the fuck were you thinking?

It is the best solution short of sustainable fusion. Nuclear technology has improved greatly. Do you really think a Soviet reactor was really built up to snuff?

Molten salt reactors have almost no risk of meltdown and modern designs for regular reactors are magnitudes safer. Problem is most reactors in service now are super old. Spent nuclear fuel can be recycled and if people weren't so irrationally scared of nuclear power we could find safe disposal avenues for waste like deep bore holes, subduction zones, and Yucca.
 

cameron

Member
Can't have a Chernobyl thread without Battle of Chernobyl. I was a kiddo when this happened, but I don't remember it. Weird to think about, really.

Really good documentary. First one I saw about Chernobyl. Nauseating to point where I felt like shit for days. Not so much about the severity of the disaster, but more about the enlisted army of "liquidators" risking everything to establish containment. Truly harrowing.

WSJ recently wrote a bit about the current containment project. WSJ: "30 Years After Chernobyl Disaster, an Arch Rises to Seal Melted Reactor"
A workforce of around 2,500 people is finishing a massive steel enclosure that will cover Chernobyl’s reactor 4, where the radioactive innards of the nuclear plant are encased in a concrete sarcophagus hastily built after the disaster. The zone is now aglow with the reflective safety vests of construction workers.

If all goes to plan, the new structure—an arch more than 350 feet high and 500 feet long—will be slid into place late next year over the damaged reactor and its nuclear fuel, creating a leak-tight barrier designed to contain radioactive substances for at least the next 100 years.
"The arch stands 360 feet high and 540 feet long and will be the biggest moving structure in the world when it slides into place atop a concrete sarphogus built atop the melted down reactor four after the disaster. It is tall enough to fit the Statue of Liberty, from the base to the torch."
The project, known as the New Safe Confinement, is a feat of engineering. It will take two or three days to slide the 36,000-ton structure into place. The arch, which looks something like a dirigible hangar, is large enough to cover a dozen football fields.
The €2.15 billion ($2.45 billion) shelter implementation plan has been funded by international donors and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, an international financial institution. But the Chernobyl cleanup faces a shortfall: €100 million is needed to finish a storage facility for highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel from the other three Chernobyl reactors, all now offline

The EBRD’s spent-fuel-facility contract is with a U.S.-based energy technology firm. When the dollar-denominated contract was signed, the euro was stronger against the dollar; with the two currencies approaching parity, the bank faces a shortfall.

“This has dug a huge euro hole,” said Vince Novak, the director of the nuclear-safety department for the EBRD. “Our income is in euros.”

Mr. Novak said donors would meet later in April to discuss financing to finish the project, which is financed separately from the Chernobyl shelter fund.

"A new facility to safely and securely store spent nuclear rods is being built at the nuclear power complex. The Interim Spent Fuel Storage Facility, or ISF2, is intended to store spent fuel rods for a minium of 100 years."

Images from April 1986, November 2000, and March 2016.
More in the link.
 

Linkyn

Member
With this and incidents like Fukushima, as well as what the hell we do with all the nuclear waste for all eternity, I still fucking can't believe the audacity of people thinking nuclear power is the solution to sustainable energy.

I honestly think true ignorance is looking at incidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl and making blanket statements about an entire scientific and technological branch.

When looking at accidents at plants, you always have to consider the mechanism at play, ie what ultimately caused the loss of containment. In the case of Chernobyl, it was a combination of the old soviet RBMK design, and of course a series of bad decisions that led to a runaway criticality increase. In the case of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, it was loss of reactor cooling post-scram because the main and backup generators were respectively knocked out by the earthquake and the tsunami, and subsequent partial to full meltdown in several reactor cores. When designing modern reactors, much emphasis is placed on passive cooling systems and redundancy, either of which would likely have prevented the above accidents.

As for waste products, the biggest contributors to overall radiotoxicity are plutonium isotopes and various minor actinides. The minor actinides are an issue in and of itself, but there's nothing preventing us from using the plutonium on hand for fission or breeding. In fact, several European countries have been using mixed-oxide fuel plants for a while now, and a single mixed plant can balance the plutonium output of several uranium-oxide plants.

Furthermore, one of the current goals in reactor design is finding moderators, coolants, fuels, etc. that allow us to reach situations in which neutron-induced fission of minor actinides becomes commercially feasible (in principle, you can fission any nuclide that is heavy enough, but some nuclear species need higher energy neutrons than others).

At the end of the day, I would personally prefer deriving energy primarily from fusion, but we're simply not there yet, and we have no hopes of covering our current and projected energy requirements with renewable energy in the foreseeable future. Fission technology has its issues, but there's more to it than old reactors and accidents.
 

A Fish Aficionado

I am going to make it through this year if it kills me
Lancet article on the health effects 39 years on.

Health effects

UN officials who monitored the health effects of the disaster produced their last report 5 years ago, and another one is not planned. Despite the immense scale of the disaster, they say the long-term health effects, although serious, have been considerably less than was initially feared. There has been a modest increase in background radiation, but levels in Ukraine are generally lower than in other parts of the former Soviet Union, where background radiation was increased by years of above-ground hydrogen-bomb testing.

The most striking health issue from Chernobyl was a spike in thyroid cancer, related to children who drank contaminated milk. In Ukraine, as in other communist countries, many rural families kept their own cows to supplement the unreliable official food supplies. Unfortunately, a short-lived isotope, iodine-131, made its way into this milk, which was drunk by school children. Around 350 000 people received potentially dangerous exposure to the thyroid. Other effects noted have been a rise in the numbers of cataracts, skin problems, and a slight increase in the rate of leukaemia in children. However, many cases of childhood leukaemia blamed on Chernobyl cannot be definitely linked to it, UN officials say.
Chernobyl disaster 30 years on: lessons not learned may need to register for free.
 

Azoor

Member
What a terrible disaster brought by the corrupt Soviet system. They were more concerned with covering it up over dealing with it.

Sadly, the people of Ukraine and Belarus paid a high price.

Also, the exclusion zone is in the risk of lighting up because the are no bacteria to dissolve the dead trees.
 
If you're interested in Nuclear power, reprocessing and Britain's worst nuclear accident there was documentary on Sellafield shown last year on the BBC.

I work at Sellafield quite a bit and I can totally understand why people go to somewhere like Chernobyl. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a rush when I've worked in high radiation and contamination areas.
 

Salz01

Member
I'm always surprised Hollywood hasn't made a film, and I mean good triple aaa film, about the disaster.
 

TheSeks

Blinded by the luminous glory that is David Bowie's physical manifestation.
Also, the exclusion zone is in the risk of lighting up because the are no bacteria to dissolve the dead trees.

Controlled burn could probably help with that? Problem would be doing is safely with the radiation and possible spread of radiation due to smoke/burning.
 

Azoor

Member
Controlled burn could probably help with that? Problem would be doing is safely with the radiation and possible spread of radiation due to smoke/burning.

Yeah they fear radiation would spread with smoke and possible flying debris if the fire was large.
 

A Fish Aficionado

I am going to make it through this year if it kills me
I'm always surprised Hollywood hasn't made a film, and I mean good triple aaa film, about the disaster.

I don't know if being anti-nuclear, especially with climate change is in vogue as it used to be.
You can watch The China Syndrome which is a fictionalized account of an uncontrolled meltdown. Had a huge impact in fueling anti-nuclear sentiment, especially soon after the Three Mile Island incident.
 

Syder

Member
I remember having like a whole year during my teens consumed by learning everything I could about Chernobyl. It truly is one of the most astounding human errors in history.
 
I wondered whether anyone would make a topic on Chernobyl today. I did toy with doing it myself but not much of a topic creator. Always been fascinated by Chernobyl (partly thanks to Stalker). It is staggering to think this all happened 30 years ago and it happened on my birthday too (Chernobyl is 30 and I am 45 :p).

It is also depressing that such an important anniversary is being largely ignored in the west. Here in the UK I haven't seen a single mention of the anniversary at all in the main news today.

A truly tragic but eerily fascinating event. It showed not only the worst of humanity but the best too. There were brave souls diving into heavily radioactive water to turn valves. brave souls running into highly contaminated areas to prepare it to be made safe. These people died in the worst way you could possibly die but they did it because they knew if they didn't there wouldn't have been much left of Europe had there been a secondary explosion.
 

jfkgoblue

Member
With this and incidents like Fukushima, as well as what the hell we do with all the nuclear waste for all eternity, I still fucking can't believe the audacity of people thinking nuclear power is the solution to sustainable energy.

Also, it was completely reckless and irresponsible by the Swedes to built Barsebäck right across from the fucking capital city of Denmark. It is perhaps the most fucked up thing to do and it will take centuries to dismantle and dispose of the nuclear waste from that plant.

Seriously Sweden, what the fuck were you thinking?
As someone who worked in a nuclear power plant in the Navy, the fear of nuclear energy just doesn't make sense to me at all.

Nuclear waste is literally so little that it doesn't even matter, hell we could drop it in the ocean and literally nothing bad would happen because water literally stops radiation from spreading very effectively. Also the way the Russians designed their reactors was inherently more dangerous than any nuclear plant in existence, you would not be able to cause a nuclear accident even if you tried, the amount of safeguards is rediculous.

Also nuclear energy releases no exhaust or gasses at all while operating. Another point is three mile island wasnt a nuclear accident at all, no radiation leaked, no meltdown occurred it got a little to hot(still well below the actual danger point) and a safeguard took over.
 

LoveCake

Member
I would love to visit Chernobyl, the disaster is the first that I was able to understand, I have always tried to learn more about it.

A few things have stuck with me,
Firstly is the helicopter that rotor-blades catch on a crane as it is trying to drop boron onto the reactor, where it then falls into Helicopter crash in Chernobyl the burning reactor,

Then the bio-robots on the roof, who were there because the electronic and mechanical robots some that were designed to go to the moon failed due to the intense radiation, they used shovels and even (rubber gloved hands) to throw reactor roof fragments off an adjoining roof Battle of Chernobyl-These guys saved the world

The other is the three that volunteered to swim underneath the reactor to release water to stop an steam explosion
the graphite "moderator", 2,500 tonnes of radioactive carbon, which was ablaze and if unchecked would burn for the next three months, sending more radioactive material into the atmosphere with each passing hour. The damaged reactor was sinking and burning through its strengthened floor and was in danger of collapsing into rooms flooded with water. This would trigger a nuclear explosion that, so Soviet physicists calculated, would vaporise the fuel in the three other reactors, level 200 square kilometres, destroy Kiev, contaminate the water supply used by 30 million people and render northern Ukraine uninhabitable for more than a century.

A group of three men were required to suit up in scuba-gear and swim through the flooded chambers of the basement to the gate valve, twist it open and so allow the trapped water to drain out. It was a "suicide mission". Radiation was at lethal levels.

They knew they would die and due to the high radioactivity levels on their bodies, they were buried in lead coffins that were soldered shut.

Everyone should remember the sacrifices the thousands of people who tried to contain and clean up the site.
 
I do wonder if nuclear had been adopted wholly if we'd be at a point that nuclear waste would be the same global threat as burning and processing fossil fuels is now, or if the money in it at that level would have resulted in better solutions.

Nuclear will never shake the stigma it has, but it could have evolved into something better. Maybe fusion won't be a pipe dream.

A piece from the latest issue of Orion, one of my favourite magazines:

In the Exclusion Zone

I can't help but allow myself to wonder should our civilizations collapse if in 5000 years someone will stumble across these mysterious mummies, preserved by an unknown force that slowly kill all who gaze upon them.
 
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