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[Reelya]

the hypothetical was "We have magical free energy, and magical free mass" to go along with that

Expansion of cheap solar energy isn't "magical free energy" it's just reality. The energy is there hitting the Earth constantly, it's just mostly going to waste. What % of that actual energy capacity are we even tapping? We're not far off, technologically, from a massive expansion in our ability to tap into solar energy which will make things like the coal and oil eras look tiny, because the sheer amount of available energy is just so much larger.

And the other point about not really having deficient mass was that if we tap even a small amount of that energy we can afford to recycle whatever we need, right here. We don't have a shortage of raw materials, we have plenty, we're just stingy with energy while there are cheap sources of easily processed materials to be had, so we're wasteful. Tapping more of the solar energy means we could get a lot more use out of the matter that's already all around us.

Atoms don't "run out" after all, they're effectively immortal from our point of view: there's plenty of mass of all the types we need, we just need to harness energy to process it better. And there's no real shortage of energy. There's a fuckton of unused high-quality energy hitting just this one planet.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/chart-of-the-day-the-world-will-add-70-000-solar-panels-every-hour-in-the-next-5-years/

It is estimated that global solar power capacity will triple by 2022, driven by Chinese demand and the ever-falling cost of buying and installing solar panels.

Alongside China’s solar expansion, the IEA expects possible policy and regulatory improvements in other key countries, such as India, Japan and the US, will cause world solar PV cumulative capacity to triple to 880 GW by 2022.

By this time renewable energy capacity overall should increase by 43% – equivalent to half the global capacity in coal power, which has taken 80 years to build.

The point being, that the next decade or so worth of the solar roll-out is going to produce an amount of power that it took a century to build up with coal power. And even then, that's only a piss in the ocean compared to the total available solar output we could capture.

[wierd]

Oh, I agree completely.  However, the issue of habitat destruction to erect the solar collectors is still present.

As is the issue of "The mere fact that humans are present is more detrimental to the environment than hard radiation from a nuclear disaster."

[Reelya]

Radiation from a nuclear disaster is bad news for individual organisms, but it's not even a blip as far as population-level genetics is concerned.

Because of gene-pool redundancy, natural selection and the remixing that happens at each generation, the damage really doesn't last many generations before a good genome gets spliced back together, even if every single individual has genetic damage.

Natural selection just pushes species' gene-pool back toward the pre-accident optimal genome, unless there's a big environmental change. And in that case, it's the environmental change that dictates the new "best" genome, not the radiation.

[wierd]

Only in short terms, or where there is an unimpacted reserve population to function as an intact genetic reservoir.  Given sufficient time, or in sufficient isolation, the genetic defects will become systemic in the population to the point where no healthy copies of the genes remain.

*edit-- as edit-wars are tedious

Yes, a shift in the environment dictates a new hierarchy and a new local optima will assume the niche.  The radiation is now part of that environment. The organisms that best adapt to ionizing radiation will prosper there.  That is still not addressing the statement.

Human activity causes wholesale extinctions of entire genomes of organisms.  Radiation causes slow systemic damage, but is not entirely fatal. The mere presence of humans in the environment is extremely hazardous to most lifeforms, either through habitat destruction, or through active extermination efforts undertaken by humans.

[Reelya]

That's only really likely if the affected population is small. Each individual is unlikely to get mutations in the same loci, at the same time, so if there's is any sufficient population size, the likelihood is that there are unaffected gene versions of almost all genes. Then, due to sexual reproduction there's a constant reshuffling of genomes at each generation. This is part of how sexually reproducing species are so successful.

Even if everyone ends up with one particular defective gene, then that gene is susceptible to genetic drift in every single new organism, and it only needs one carrier to have a flipped version to get it back, and if it is in fact a notable defect, then the good version is just going to spread that much faster: natural selection happens slowly when organisms are near equilibrium, but rapidly when they are far from equilibrium.

[wierd]

Again, you just need isolation, and sufficient time.

The area in question is hemmed in on almost all sides by human habitation, which restricts animal migration patterns, meaning the genetic platform of the region is effectively isolated into that area, and continually subjected to the effects of the ionizing radiation. 

Sexual selection only works to screen out defects when there is effectively undamaged mates to select from. When all possible mates contain genetic illness, the illness will become endemic to the population. If there is no influx of unmutated genes from reserve populations, there is no healthy genotype to weed out the defective copies. 

The effects are most pronounced in rapidly reproducing species (insects, etc-- germs dont count because they are mostly asexual), and it can be and has been documented.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964017/

The real power of sexual reproduction is that individuals that are incapable of reproduction because they have amassed such a large number of mutations cannot continue to pass on large collections.

[Reelya]

That one's only looking at exposing one generation of grasshoppers to radiation then looking at their offspring.

The multi-generational outcomes are a completely different phenomena, because such experiments do not account for multiple generations, natural selection, and genetic recombination.

Even if every specimen has some damage, each one is unlikely to have the same damage, and sexual recombination means that every single offspring is another "experiment" to find superior versions of the genome, and insects also have a lot of offspring, so each mating pair is running many, many recombination experiments at the same time. Insects have small genomes, but they also have large populations and very high numbers of offspring, meaning they have more redundancy of genome to compensate for damage, as a population.

Sure, zap a single pair of grasshoppers and they will give birth to mutants, who will breed as mutants, in the lab. But zap 1 million grasshoppers in the wild to be mutants, and they'll patch together a proper working grasshopper via cross-breeding within a very small number of generations.

[wierd]

No..

Not really.

https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/105/5/704/2961808

Covers chernobyl and its animal populations specifically, compares them against more recent Fukushima incident. Compares numbers of cumulative mutations between population groups.

Chernobyl populations have more. Because they do indeed accumulate in isolated population groups.

[Il Palazzo]

After they installed the new sarcophagus, the radiation levels are much more reasonable in the area, but the image was taken in 2007, and shows ADULT tree forest just a short distance from the site-- meaning the forest was growing just fine in the heavy radiation.

What were the measured radiation levels in 2007 in that area? I can't find a good source.

[Trekkin]

Chernobyl populations have more. Because they do indeed accumulate in isolated population groups.

To be more precise, they fixate more frequently in smaller populations, because the probability a neutral allele becomes fixed in infinite time is equal to its frequency in the population (and selective pressure acts on that baseline). Since they all start in 1/population individuals, that probability increases as the population gets smaller. The actual rate of drift is another matter entirely.

[wierd]

After they installed the new sarcophagus, the radiation levels are much more reasonable in the area, but the image was taken in 2007, and shows ADULT tree forest just a short distance from the site-- meaning the forest was growing just fine in the heavy radiation.

What were the measured radiation levels in 2007 in that area? I can't find a good source.

This site gives some single data points circa 2009, which is just 2 years later.
http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-levels/

They cite (for that year):
 2.4 to 2.6 microsieverts per hour for reactor 4 and surrounding roads
1.5 microsieverts/hr inside the cooling towers, and 12.5 uSv/hr to the rear of them.
The pripyat cemetery is cited as being between 14 and 22 uSv/hr.

This youtube video was recorded in 2009, and is of the appropriate areas, at least at the beginning.  All the pictures I can find of the cemetery are much more recent. It is possible that they did not allow people into that part of pripyat in 2009. However, the pictures I have found show the same kinds of seemingly unimpaired vegetation abundance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFwNEut9iyE

[Il Palazzo]

After they installed the new sarcophagus, the radiation levels are much more reasonable in the area, but the image was taken in 2007, and shows ADULT tree forest just a short distance from the site-- meaning the forest was growing just fine in the heavy radiation.

What were the measured radiation levels in 2007 in that area? I can't find a good source.

This site gives some single data points circa 2009, which is just 2 years later.
http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-levels/

They cite (for that year):
 2.4 to 2.6 microsieverts per hour for reactor 4 and surrounding roads
1.5 microsieverts/hr inside the cooling towers, and 12.5 uSv/hr to the rear of them.
The pripyat cemetery is cited as being between 14 and 22 uSv/hr.

This youtube video was recorded in 2009, and is of the appropriate areas, at least at the beginning.  All the pictures I can find of the cemetery are much more recent. It is possible that they did not allow people into that part of pripyat in 2009. However, the pictures I have found show the same kinds of seemingly unimpaired vegetation abundance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFwNEut9iyE

Yeah, I know that source. I was looking for levels from before the new vault construction, and specifically in the green areas from the picture, since you keep variously referring to them as very very high, dangerous, deadly, etc (from memory).
Which the table of measurements from 2009 doesn't indicate outside of a very few and relatively small hotspots. There are people (let alone plants) around the world living in areas with background radiation reaching 30 uSv/h, and they seem to be just fine (look up BR in e.g. Kerala or Ramsar).

[wierd]

You could always use other indicators of high gamma exposure rates, like the amount of black fungi growing in the vicinity.

https://www.nature.com/news/2007/070521/full/news070521-5.html
(which cites this:)
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000457

[Il Palazzo]

Could I? I'm not exactly in position to look for fungal growths in Pripyat or analyse them without proper scientific background.

Anyway, do you know of any actual supporting source, or would you say that you were slightly exaggerating when you described the area as 'radioactive as hell'?

[smjjames]

The area is effectively a state park by now, and ongoing experiment in nature taking over abandoned civilization.