The radiation explains why his right arm is long enough that he could scratch his shins standing up
Future rock climbing world champion
$ 0.001
The Jetsons/strangelove era pricing for nuclear energy was based on fuel costs only, and certainly scale was needed rather than this absurd wafer system. The fuel costs were based on no one using any yet, and maybe children yearning for the cancer.
tell me you dont understand how nuclear-powered energy without telling me you dont understand nuclear-powered energy
Beta-voltaic batteries are fairly safe, work for 50 years, no recharging.
Almos tuseless at like 0.1 milliwats.
It’s easy: just boil some water
Kilo wat
Imagine using something dangerous to generate power or heat for a home. Something that if it leaks into your home could suffocate you overnight or explode, or that in normal use can give children respiratory issues or cause cancer. Thank goodness we’re too smart to use something like that unlike the absolute imbeciles in this comic
You forgot the /s at the end.
Imagine if we had to move it around in such large quantities that there were thousands of kilometres of unwatched pipelines just out there, potentially leaking.
Actually leaking, not potentially.
Not only that, but mining for it produces massive quantities of dangerous runoff and radioactive waste. Good thing coal doesn’t do that!
Coal is probably more radioactive than you think and the waste gets unfiltered into the air. Poisoning the whole world
Hi, I’m a traveling trampoline salesman. Would you be interested in a quick pitch?
Nah sorry not interested in music instruments.
And imagine people fight pointless wars over resources instead of using the renewables that are available for free.
I have absolutely no idea how to find reference to this at this point because every search I do results in absolute bullshit that’s not related (like apparently the most liquid currency is the diarrhea coin… a problem that didn’t exist a few years ago…), but I recall reading about a practice from like the medieval era or something where special coins were made that contained heavy metals, and when consumed, would induce diarrhea. They would be retrieved, washed, and reused, and even passed down in families.
Today we know how bad of an idea something like that is, but then, like with radiation, it was all ghosts in the blood causing problems. Shitting blood was normalized.
Not a coin, and not medieval. The search term is “antimony pill”.
Thank you! I was having such a struggle with it! That’s exactly what I was thinking of!
“Junior please walk 30cm to the left and do this task that would have been easier for me to do than ask you to do it”
30cm can make a big difference
It’s faster, cleaner, and far more efficient for me to clean my kids’ dinner plates.
And if I always do it, they’ll never do it on their own.
It’s just one of those things you can do yourself, but you want the kid to feel valuable too.
Besides, if you’re getting radiation poisoning, you want that little shit to go down with you.
She uses her child as a radiation shield.
Junior ought to be able to do his work
I guess renewables are still cheaper.
At least personally and anecdotally, because it doesn’t happen often, but it has happened more than once, that I have purchased electricity at negative prices due to overflow from renewables, which is a hell of lot cheaper than paying a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour.
no radioactive waste to deal with either.
and with solar, most of the hardware can be recycled now into new units; with a 20 year lifespan, that’s going to pull thousands of kilowatts out of the sky, that’ll do just fine.
I don’t understand why waste was such a big anti-nuclear talking point. The raw material was mined. Just put the waste back in the same hole.
the raw material was mined. Just put the waste back in the same hole.
yeah it seems really simple, but then, you have the realities:
lots of uranium mining is open pits. like this one in namibia -
-that’s not going to keep stuff in one place.
transporting it, hell even getting the producers to agree to accepting it for storage - would be a political nightmare.
even in places where it was mined underground, you have water tables to worry about. it’s simply not that simple.
i don’t understand it either, because there’s so little of it. and also, we know how to handle dangerous substances. like, asbestos stays dangerous forever.
Oh, this is one i actually know. I wish I could find the exact YouTube video where I learned it, butnuclear waste disposal is a massive long-term problem.
It boiled down to answering the question of - how do you prevent people from digging up all your buried nuclear waste for the tens of thousands of years it will continue to be radioactive? It was a super interesting watch, so I’ll see if I came find the vid after I get off work.
yeah “no great deed is commemorated here” etc etc etc. spooky stuff.
but… that’s also true for asbestos. except it’s worse because the moment you dig it gets worse, it can get into the water supply, and it doesn’t stop being dangerous. it’s carcinogenic forever. there are entire mining towns in canada that are condemned and cordoned off because of the risks of asbestos in the air.
like, there are as of right now two countries that have long-term storage plans for nuclear waste, and they both are “dig a big hole”. …okay? so just do that. there are thousands of abandoned mines that go down almost a kilometer where we have extracted millions, billions of tons of material. the total amount of nuclear waste ever produced is like… 200 000 tons. and uranium is dense, so by volume it’s not a lot. just fucking dump it in an old mine if you want.
or better yet… don’t! the fact that it is still radioactive means that it is still useful for generation. with the technology we have today, we can breed away like 40% into inert substances and new fuel. if we dump it all down a hole, what will happen is we’ll have to dig it back up again in 20 years because it’s too valuable to leave down there.
i used to live next to the biggest iron mine in the world, the luossavaara-kirunavaara mine. they have mountains of slag and waste product. far bigger than the actual mountain the mine is in. and in the mid-2000’s, they started mining the slag. because there’s still so much useful material in there.
That was always so frustrating and annoying to me. “We won’t invest money on nuclear power because someone in 10,000 years might get radiation poisoning from the waste we will carefully bury underground. So, let’s keep burning coal, pump the waste smoke into the air that will kill the atmosphere whitin three decades and give everyone radioactive poisoning, today!”
Humanity was handed the key to stop global warming dead in its tracks and skip straight to renewables with a healthy planet. But we can’t seem to resist the temptation of blowing people up for a slightly higher profit next quarter.
I also don’t know a lot about the nuclear fuel life cycle, but don’t you think it might be more complicated than this?
I think it’s basically what we’re already doing with spent nuclear fuel. I’m not aware of any actual real life examples of this being a problem. It seems like people who do know the nuclear fuel life cycle have got it figured out and “what do we do with all this waste?” is more of a hypothetical than an actual issue.
Not only this, but research into nuclear waste processing, to make it safer to dispose and maybe even recyclable, is halted. There’s no research grants going there almost at all, because of the off chance it might turn into weapon’s grade fissionable material.
I recall that Canada was working on a long-term nuclear waste storage facility. I looked it up, it’s a 26 billion dollar project.
It’s not a hypothetical issue, it’s a political issue. Political issues are real issues.
You can’t blame Grassy Narrows first nation for opposing the location of the nuclear waste facility near their territory. It’s a community that’s been decimated by industrial waste.
I support nuclear technologies where sustainable energy isn’t feasible but I think people aren’t wrong to consider a waste a problem. It’s not an absolute showstopper, but it is something that is part of the challenge of building nuclear facilities.
My main thing with solar is I wish they’d put panels over existing parking lots or large buildings. This is a thing that is already done in some places, this is a solved engineering problem, but in my area anywhere a solar farm has sprung up it’s been a field that previously either grew crops or was undeveloped woods. And I know the reason someone’s going to come back with: To install solar awnings over an existing Wal Mart parking lot, you need to tear up the asphalt to install power lines, build the actual structure, permitting is probably more expensive, and you have to have some or all of the parking lot down for awhile during construction restricting the use of the store. Meanwhile, clear cut 10 acres of forest and you get lumber to sell to a paper mill.
I disagree, only thinking we should cover EVERYTHING - any human building / structure etc should have solar all over. yeah, it’s not cheap to build them, but we should stop playing fuckaround and get it done, it’ll be cheaper to do it today than tomorrow.
But re: fields - they can do double duty via agrivoltaics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
They can, but when you have any alternative, Agrivoltaics aren’t very appealing.
You frequently end up deliberately setting up solar panels in suboptimal ways to let the plants get the light. So you end up having fewer panels and those panels not able to be used to their full potential at a given site.
So I absolutely vote for parking lots and rooftops to be the first order of business. Yes, Agrivoltaics as it comes to it if the alternative is losing cropland, but it seems like we have a long way to go before we have to make such compromises.
even if it improves the farming?
Also, can’t forget that those concerns come back when maintaining the panels. Along with the additional precautions needed to account for foot/other traffic.
It sucks though.
Thorium reactors can use their own waste as fuel.
Not only their own waste, but other radionucleotides - it’s very impressive. I’d love to see a crash program to develop a modular thorium reactor that could eat this stuff.
They can use a part of their waste again as fuel. Therefore, they are a bit more efficient with their fuel. But they still require fuel and produce waste.
Until recently I thought that human waste wasn’t used for fertilizer, but I learned that it is. The water treatment plant separates the solids out, composts them, and then it’s sold as “biosolids” to spray on the crop fields.
Let this be your reminder to wash your veggies before eating them!
Composting kills bacteria and parasites when done properly. You should still wash your veggies, but composed human waste is wildly different from non composted human waste.
That’s not what that word means
Kind of like humans.
I don’t think fiscal cost is the best or only way to measure success or necessarily improvement of society’s energy generation.
Pretty sure that kid’s arm would hang down to his ankle if he straightened it. Must be all those atomic wafers.
He’s actually the bass player in a metal band.
That’s not his arm.
I feel like “Atomic Wafer” should be a band name
Or as slang for a tab of LSD
why do i feel like Radioactive Buttplug is both already a band and an approved medical device
“Kilowat”
Might have questioned the reliability of that information source even back then already…
Yes, the kilo-wat. For when a simple “wat” doesn’t accurately capture the absurdity of the situation.
For example, asking junior to put an atomic wafer in the power box, when you are standing right fucking next to it.
But like a thousand times
That’s 1024 Wats, so a kibiWat, not a kiloWat
This is my type of pedantry!
But a picture is worth a thousand words!
I wish I could give that lady a hug.
She can’t do it, her eyes fell off because of the radiations.
Could you imagine a world where we first used atomic power for good and not evil?
I don’t know history of uranium very much but wasn’t it first used to paint ceramics and later radium for glowing watches? Uranium bombs were made later probably after it was used to generate power. But I wonder what our world would look like if there was not as much scare of nuclear power. Perhaps bit like fallouts world? We still have some time left to 23rd October 2077 thankfully.
The first man made reactor (there’s an extinct naturally occurring one) was created in 1942 as part of the Manhattan project to create the first bombs. So we really did speed run the tech tree for bomb on that one. The first nuclear power plant was in 1951.
First use: glowing paint
Second use: cancerdeleted by creator
if there was not as much scare of nuclear power.
I was pro nuclear until solar became cheaper than nuclear but I think if there was less scare about nuclear, there would have been more Chernobyls. That happened because of thinking it’s completely safe.
Chernobyl happened through the incompetence of leadership, not because they thought it was “completely safe”.
It’s a good thing leadership incompetence is something that only ever happens once
And only in USSR!
Incompetence AND overconfidence, cause those reactors were the latest generation and considered completely safe.
I’d sure hope that the latest generation of a technology would be considered safe. That’s generally how things work. And then when accidents occur, we learn and make things safer the next time.
As to them considering it completely safe, I’d love to read about that if you have sources. Cause I doubt that they thought it couldn’t fail.
Oh yes, you’d consider it safe, but you’d probably also be aware of its faults and shortcomings. Now I think I read it years ago in a book about the incident, but even reading the Wikipedia page I think we are both right: some of those working there were not even trained specifically for nuclear reactors, cause part of the technologies were considered state secrets.
I was pro-nuclear until Georgia Power stuck me with the bill for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4.
(Or rather, I was pro-nuclear until shortly after construction began on a 7-year plan that ultimately took 15 years, when it started to become clear that gross incompetence and corruption was going to make it an expensive debacle.)
Nuclear power from Vogtle 3 and 4 costs 16¢ per kWh (according to the linked document), by the way, compared to less than 0.1¢ per kWh expected by OP’s comic.
The watches were radium, not uranium.
That world, that wonderful utopic world… we could weaponize it!
Not really. It’s not economical and never has been. Civilian use of nuclear energy has only ever been a cover for nuclear arms development.
people down voting you haven’t considered the cost of dealing with the waste. Consider how long and expensive Hanford Washington cleanup is and how much damage it’s done to the environment around it. Then there’s Fukushima Japan. The damage will be dealt with for a 1000 years. And the reactors that don’t break still have so many spent rods and other waste that can’t just be thrown away. The best idea was to store it in the bottom of old mines but nobody wants it shipped over their backyard to get it there. It’s a dead end.
So was the popular conception back then that power was somehow magically transferred directly from uranium to the power grid?
Miniature breeder reactor
You would drop in the uranium fuel source and it would be used to create more fuel.
Short version is most early nuclear science focused on breeder type reactors but they were abandoned when it was found that more conventional designs are a lot more feasible for producing weapons grade material.
The weapons grade stuff is U-235, right? Do conventional nuclear reactors enrich U-238 to U-235?
Uranium 235 or plutonium 239, may be completed with Hydrogen for more energy release: deuterium and tritium.
AFIK natural uranium is mainly centrifugated for the heavier 238 and lighter 235 to separate. Enriched uranium is just having a higher percentage of 235.
Plutonium 238 is man made in reactors
may be completed with Hydrogen for more energy release
Uh, that understates things a little bit. Hydrogen bombs (which utilize fission for triggering the fusion reaction) are generally a few orders of magnitude more powerful than fission bombs. The opposite is more accurate: fusion bombs that use spent Uranium as a tamper roughly double their yield.
What grid? It looks like the “power box” on the wall is generating power for that house all by itself, no transmission necessary.
Considering that the smallest operating nuclear reactor ever made was this big…
…and that critical mass is a thing, I can only assume the “power box” was some kind of RTG.
Wouldn’t all but the largest RTGs struggle to power more than a few incandescent light bulbs, though? Looking at the table on Wikipedia, their output is usually only from a few dozen to a few hundred watts.
It was 60 years ago. If they put same effort to it as they put to computers you would have one in your pocket.
RTGs aren’t as limited by technological investment as they are constrained by fundamental physics.
It is pretty hard to irradiate a whole block and give everyone turbo-cancer with my smartphone, tbh.
The Soviets used RTGs quite a bit for remote installations, and “whoops, we lost one, I hope nobody finds it and kills their family” is a real concern (that was kind of ignored because a. Russia is big and b. it’s the Soviets we are talking about)
Nobody wants you to wear it. It would be enough if you could keep it next to the building that would power it for next 100 or 1000 years. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry about energy in your house for couple of generations ? You can read about ex. carbon-14 battery https://www.ukaea.org/case-studies/carbon-14-diamond-battery/ or watch video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgGVt4sUnnw
Looking at the illustration, it’s hard to figure out year it was drawn. The artist is creating a ‘future house.’ Also, it’s not clear if this is an educational comic, or one for entertainment.
99% of the people today ahve some idea of what ‘gamma rays’ are, but we all accept that they can turn a normal man into The Hulk.
It was worse than that. Our understanding of radiation took awhile. While Uranium glass is probably safe I wouldn’t go using it regularly. A lot of women (“radium girls”) suffered from cancers induced by licking their brushes when painting luminescing instruments. This comic looks like 50s era when post the bomb sci-fi was full of “atomics” as the stuff of the future.
*Licks powerbox*
Title… “that’s what she said!”
