Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Reelya]

Japan will get around both the PR and technical issues here by sending in the most adorable robots ever to lead the clean-up efforts.

[Sheb]

Mentioning Nippon, apparently Fukushima's radiation levels are now higher than ever, and may now be considered as the worst nuclear disaster in the history of humanity, surpassing Chernobyl.

You also gotta wonder if it's just that the Soviets didn't have fancy robots to measure the radiation level in Chernobyl.

[PTTG??]

Mentioning Nippon, apparently Fukushima's radiation levels are now higher than ever, and may now be considered as the worst nuclear disaster in the history of humanity, surpassing Chernobyl.

Hey, it's only the worst nuclear disaster in recorded history. There could be all kinds of prehistoric disasters that were worse. Come to think of it, when the human population was in the bottleneck period, a couple dozen people with bad sunburns would mean that, proportionately, a large portion of the species had radiation burns.

[MrRoboto75]

Mentioning Nippon, apparently Fukushima's radiation levels are now higher than ever, and may now be considered as the worst nuclear disaster in the history of humanity, surpassing Chernobyl.

Designing a disaster the worse based on radioactivity level rather than number of victims seems weird to me.

Well, highly radioactive land is basically useless, and probably not very good in terms of wildlife/environment.

But yeah, People dying is probably worse than people not dying.  Doesn't mean people won't start hating nuclear power forever, though.

[Starver]

Nah..  Radioactivity isn't forever.  And the worse it is initially, the shorter the half-lifes, and/or the less "forever" will the people be to complain about it!

_{^{(Some poetic interpretations made.)}}

[Reelya]

It actually makes a good nature reserve. The whole "radioactive desert" idea is really just a science fiction idea, and doesn't reflect the reality of irradiated wilderness.

The thing about mutations and mutants from radiation is BS because of sexual reproduction, genetic recombination and natural selection. Basically a gene pool has a lot of redundancy, and at each generation the gene pool is being reshuffled, while the worst mutations are being weeded out constantly. Basically a high mutation rate pushes the gene pool away from equilibrium but the further the gene pool goes from equilibrium the faster natural selection actually works - because suboptimal animals die off a lot faster than near-optimal ones. Even if all individual animals are compromised to some degree, only ones with at least the bare minimum needed to replicate go on to breed, and it doesn't take many generations to "patch" the proper genome back together because of the large amount of redundant copies spread across the population.

So the whole idea of e.g. three-eyed or two headed dogs that breed true from nuclear radiation is just BS. They're going to return to being normal dogs in no time flat, because having two heads isn't a benefit, and if it didn't evolve in millions of years there's no specific reason to think that it's going to be a good design now in a handful of years at a higher mutation rate.

[Starver]

Not sure if this is the best thread to say so, but it's the closest I could find to say that Grace Hopper gets honoured at Yale, and at the expense of somebody else who I'm not going to worry about.

[Max™]

Mentioning Nippon, apparently Fukushima's radiation levels are now higher than ever, and may now be considered as the worst nuclear disaster in the history of humanity, surpassing Chernobyl.

This article was amended on 9 February to explain that the camera had probed deeper inside the No 2 reactor – and closer to the damaged nuclear fuel – than before, hence the high radiation estimate.

They stuck the camera right up inside the reactor, there aren't spots where you can just be in the vicinity and receive 530 Sieverts or something, you'd have to be able to climb down inside the reactor itself and stick your head in the most dangerous microwave ever, which, well, let's just call that natural selection?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

50 Sv from standing next to the Chernobyl reactor for 10 minutes after the explosion.

I would not be surprised if you could go stick your head inside the wreckage of Chernobyl's reactors and receive hundreds of Sv.

[alway]

Mentioning Nippon, apparently Fukushima's radiation levels are now higher than ever, and may now be considered as the worst nuclear disaster in the history of humanity, surpassing Chernobyl.

You also gotta wonder if it's just that the Soviets didn't have fancy robots to measure the radiation level in Chernobyl.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x223h9r_bbc-horizon-1996-inside-chernobyl-s-sarcophagus_shortfilms
Go to 20 minutes in. (Then watch the whole thing because it's excellent)
Also of note, robots shown at 12 minutes in, pushing material back into the core shutting down (hence why the robots in the articles about fukushima are listed as having an expected lifetime dose). The issue at Chernobyl wasn't so much the level of radiation in the core (not really a bad thing) but the fact that half the core was on the roof and surrounding area (a rather bad thing).

[Max™]

Plus the roof was missing, the dude who talked about seeing "a column of blue light" was probably describing steam from the explosion being illuminated by Cherenkov glow, which is one of those "my god that's the most beautiful and terrifying thing I've ever seen" moments, after which he went inside with the others who knew they had to shut it down and contain it however they could, though that was kinda moot after the two went in for the control rod lowering controls to discover they could see the exposed core and got a tan from the radiation dose.

They did have robots at Chernobyl btw, one of the interviews has someone noting that "the problem was when the high levels of radiation reach the robot it stops being a robot and turns into a chunk of metal and plastic" so they used "bio-robots" or "dudes in hazard suits" to remove material.

[Starver]

Dubai drones propelling passengers? Experts edgy.

[MrRoboto75]

Taxis the Dahir Insaat way

[Bumber]

Hover cars, finally?

[martinuzz]

Hover cars, finally?

Close.

https://www.pal-v.com/en/

[Reelya]

How about we cut the middle man out and you live in a hover pod that attaches itself to a central cluster? Then when it's time to get up and go somewhere your hover pod drops you off in a "just in time" fashion.

But there's one good thing about all this: automated driving etc will give people who have money a lot more free time to kill. That will increase the amount they spend on digital content such as games and movies, so there will be more job growth in those areas.