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Lamebot
Sep 8, 2005

ロボ顔菌~♡

Blackhawk posted:

Does that include the area taken up by open-cut coal mines used to feed the plant? Or tailings dams and other associated coal-mining related area? How about the energy used trucking/training gas/coal from where it was mined to the plant? You're kinda forgetting the insane scale ecological disaster happening right now which to be honest is probably too far gone for people to have much impact on anyway, I'd take a large scale renewable plant causing habitat loss over the current planetary deep-dicking.

On the matter of ship-bound nuclear reactors, a large factor in what causes damage and radiation release when things go wrong with commercial reactors is latent heat production. Technically speaking the fuel from a reactor once it has undergone fission keeps producing some amount of thermal energy forever (from decay of fission products) however obviously the rate of heat generation falls off exponentially from the time that the fission chain reaction stops. The fuel from a large grid-connected reactor generates enormous amounts of heat (in the megawatt range) for days after the reactor has been completely shut down, which will quite happily melt the reactor core, causing the exposure of nuclear material to water which will generate hydrogen, or air which can cause the fuel to ignite. The difference between a large reactor and a small one like you'd find on a ship is that the magnitude of the latent heat generated is much lower and the reactor structure can realistically handle it without melting and having the fuel become exposed, so accidents are going to be a lot easier to manage.

i get it now. we should construct rows of land locked nuclear sea vessels in place of current reactor sites.

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Lamebot
Sep 8, 2005

ロボ顔菌~♡

Coolguye posted:

Another way to look at what rudatron is saying is if we want things beyond hand to mouth subsistence, we have to make something serve us. It's the definition of poverty to consume only that which you produce. Prosperity means consuming the labor of others.

So we can enslave plants, enslave some animals, but it's fairly limited. After you get some cool stuff from them - some leather for shoes from a cow and something resembling a predictable cereal input from enslaved corn, you have to enslave more. You have to have something more working for you to have medicine, internet, and cell phones. At that point, you have two major choices: enslave atoms, and by proxy force black metals, black liquids, and black rocks to work for you, or enslave others, and force black people to work for you.

There is no third option here.

wtf am I reading

Lamebot
Sep 8, 2005

ロボ顔菌~♡

Condiv posted:

do u think anyone's ever fallen into a vat of bananas and died of radiation sickness?

banana man has. its his origin story.

Lamebot
Sep 8, 2005

ロボ顔菌~♡
Donkey Kong is a simian terrorist who stockpiles radioactive materials in massive quantities

Lamebot
Sep 8, 2005

ロボ顔菌~♡

whomupclicklike posted:

I'm willing to like, have my mind changed here but I don't understand why nuclear energy is worth the risk of a disaster like Chernobyl or Fukushima? I recognize that these sort of events are incredibly uncommon and even that Fukushima probably wouldn't have happened had it not been for that tsunami.

we're already on the way to having vast regions of earth becoming uninhabitable :shrug:

Lamebot
Sep 8, 2005

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Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:

Well, in the case of uranium, you'd have to wait a few billion years, and it's really kinda hard to separate out the lead from the uranium that hasn't turned into lead yet. Some atoms decay faster than others and we can talk about reliably predicting them in terms of large numbers. It's not so bad, since a 2.2 lbs of uranium is something like 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

thats enough atoms to kill the whole universe

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Lamebot
Sep 8, 2005

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Condiv posted:

wouldn't this just cause an immediate giant sinkhole? where's the force from the explosion supposed to go?

love the groundwater contamination potential

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