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[thobal]

Since steam and steampowered machines are out, what about including uranium ore, refining or enriching it and use the result in either crude reactors or as simple heat sources. The heat sources could be exported as a way of melting ice in cold climates or substituting for magma in places far from volcanoes.

Of course, it would give the dwarfs(and anyone else nearby) cancer (or maybe even mutations) and serve as a way of limiting the lives of characters.

[G-Flex]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but this has been discussed many times before, and I'll give the same response now:

No. It's impossible.

Pitchblende, a uranium ore, is already included in the game, if you didn't know.

However, dwarves would have no way of processing/extracting the Uranium Oxide from the stuff, and they certainly wouldn't be able to smelt it into Uranium metal, which would require things like electrolysis and (possibly) advanced chemistry.

You can, in fact, use UO2 itself as a nuclear fuel source (which I didn't previously know), but for that to be feasible I think a lot of purification and processing is involved. Pitchblende contains a lot of impurities and a highly variable amount of UO2, and generally needs to be turned into yellowcake and then purified UO2 before nuclear fuel use.

[Silverionmox]

As a design choice it would probably be wise to explicitly ignore any age-inappropriate tech, i.e. electricity, nuclear fusion, combustion engines, etc. At the same time, if we're going to replicate the same tropes with magic, that's just cheap.

It would be necessary to start to think from the game world and try to find new ways to accomplish things, if we managed to disconnect from the major sources of concepts in fantasy games.

[TettyNullus]

I'm tempted to say to wait for the magic arc after what Silverionmox said  But really, if I recalls right, most of the reactions that need electrolysis can be roughly replaced by purely chemical reactions, just much more expensive in term of manfacturing. Including radioactivity don't seems to be a good idea, but... assigning materials to be poisonous should mimic the radioactivity well enough ( If that ever get implemented )

As for OP, if there're no steam machines, then it's rather good assumpation that there're no advanced and large scale industry capable of huge scale chemistry and manfacturing that'd be needed to support the trickles of Uranium ( Yes, that seems at odd at what DF does, but it connects in my mind  )

[Royal Surveyor]

What about natural reactors occurring in the world on occasion?

[woose1]

but there are only 16... 

[TettyNullus]

What about natural reactors occurring in the world on occasion?

Hmm, now I wonder if Toady'll ever put in mechanisms to let water boil off warm walls, without forming obsidian, even if it takes a bit, that'd mimic that decently well, esperically if it's a magma pool ( IRL, it's believed that radioactivity at Earth's core is generating some of the heat, wouldn't put it past magma to be 'hot' in both ways in DF  ) Other than that, there'd need to be rocks that's pernamently hot, and should be rare in world-gen, a bit hard to accomplish that.

[Shoruke]

I think the closest thing to radioactivity for a while is lead poisoning.

"Don't drink from that lead artifact cup, Urist!"
"Why not?" *glug* "Ooh, I feel sick"

[G-Flex]

I don't think I'd call them similar, personally.

But similar to lead poisoning - and arguably worse - would be mercury poisoning. Read up on cinnabar mining/mercury production using it; it's horrible stuff.

[Thakh]

Radioactivity would be great though, burying your dead in lead coffins five floors underground and sealing them off

[Orange Drink]

I don't think I'd call them similar, personally.

But similar to lead poisoning - and arguably worse - would be mercury poisoning. Read up on cinnabar mining/mercury production using it; it's horrible stuff.

Wikipedia said that the Mayans used it to decorate their tombs to deter tomb robbers because of it's toxicity, and the Romans used Slaves to mine it as a death sentence.

[Pilsu]

You get told steam engines are offlimits and your logical response is to ask for a nuclear reactor?

[Pure_W]

You get told steam engines are offlimits and your logical response is to ask for a nuclear reactor?

Only in DF would you find this much maddness!

[thobal]

Gotta have something.

I do think it would work as some sort of "magical" artifact.

All the chemistry could fall under alchemy.

It would logically be a dark and powerful art.

Bronze Collossi must function some how.

[SirHoneyBadger]

I've included uranium in the mod I'm making, but it'll just represent an extremely rare, natural form of depleted uranium, and mining it *could* very well make your dwarfs sick. Cinnabar's another item I'm including that could sicken your dwarfs with a lot of exposure.

Probably not a death-sentence though, since I choose to believe that dwarfs are much more mineral and radiation tolerant than humans are, and that lead doesn't even hurt them. It's just a balanced part of their daily diet, like iron or zinc are for us.

I'll make adamantium ore cause mild sickness too, for that matter.

If poison minerals ever do get added, though, I'll almost definitely be adding plutonium, as a rare and very hazardous mineral, and that stuff'll kill *anything* that gets exposed to it, kindof like stationary magma.