I mean it’s in the name! Melt-down. It melts, and goes down. How much simpler can it be!
I don’t think humans will still be around in 100k years (or less than that, really), so I guess it doesn’t really matter.
Well you have heard of the Elephant’s Foot in Chernobyl, right? It actually melted and burned through a lot of concrete and steel before it stopped. It hasn’t cooled much though.
But remember, it’s just 1 square mile.
Do you seriously not grasp how totally insignificant the area is compared to the entire world?
Like, just don’t go to Chernobyl. Ever. There’s no reason to. It literally does not matter that you can’t go there.
You can’t go inside an active volcano either. It’s ok.
And, for the hundredth time, that literally cannot occur with a modern reactor. It couldn’t even happen with our old reactors.
The China Syndrome! I remembered it! The Jaws of nuclear reactors.
Edit: There was also a book named Nerves by Lester Del Rey. Read it.
I never knew about the Three Mile Island after effects. Learned something new today - thanks!
Yeah, most folks think that it was some great catastrophe.
But nope. Some steam was vented, and there was no measurable radiation detected. A lot of folks don’t realize that TMI is still an active power plant. TMI-2 is shut down, but TMI-1 is still operational.
However, if you live near Harrisburg, they still give folks iodide tablets, or did as of like 10 years ago, purely because some folks freaked out.
If you ever fly into Harrisburg on a plane, you basically fly right over TMI and can get a good look at all the reactors, including the shut down one. (Well, the cooling towers, and the buildings containing the reactors)
Persistent teens win again.
It sounds completely improbable: The Utah Legislature recently adopted a resolution that moves the state from denial of global climate change to the recognition that finding a solution is crucial.
An obvious question is how this flip-flop occurred in a legislature with a Republican super-majority of 83 percent, in a state that produces more than 90 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels. Students at Logan High School can tell you the answer: For nearly two years, they have been working to make the Legislature budge. They educated themselves about the science of climate change and formed alliances with other students and business leaders throughout the state.
Most of all, the teenagers never stopped. They simply refused to give up.
That’s awesome. Gives me a sliver of hope for my state, on a day when we’re supposed to hit a record high no less. :)
This is so true. I’m 40 years old and grew up in a house with a view of the Great Salt Lake. My parents still live in the same house and when I go up there for a family dinner, it’s always struck me over the years how the lake has dwindled. I was just up there last week and you can barely tell there’s a lake from the east side anymore. Instead of Antelope Island, it looks like Antelope Mountain.
Check out the images from 1984 to today here.
1984:
2016:
Granted, it’s a shallow lake and there are factors like irrigation to take into effect, but for the legislature here to deny climate change is so absurd as to be offensive. I grew up with going out sledding as our Thanksgiving tradition, but for most years now it’s becoming the exception to have snow on the ground before Christmas. And what snow does fall doesn’t last nearly as long.
Good on those kids. Climate change has affected Utah just in the 40 years I’ve been around and kicking. I don’t know what it’s going to be like in another 40 years.
We also get rather cheaper energy. It least did.
More good news:
More coal plants are now projected to retire more quickly than experts thought a year ago, according to energy-industry analysts who gathered in Chicago Tuesday.
Three alternative energy sources—wind, solar and natural gas—are expected to divide up the spoils, they said at the American Wind Energy Association’s Windpower 2018 conference.
“The real story I believe is in coal retirements," said Bruce Hamilton, a director in the energy practice at Navigant, which has modeled every coal plant in the U.S. and projected 73 gigawatts will retire in the next 10 years.
“That’s more than twice what we projected last year at this time. It’s more than we had two years ago when the Clean Power Plan was in the assumptions.”
The projection changed in part because of more announced retirements, Hamilton said, “but more importantly, the fundamentals of the economics of coal have gotten worse, with costs going up, while the competition for coal—that is, gas, wind and solar—has all gotten cheaper. So it’s getting to the point where huge swings are forecast. You can see it will be throughout the decade.”
Navigant’s projection is more conservative than some:
“Our outlook includes about 100 Gigawatts of coal retirements,” said Max Cohen, an IHS Markit analyst. “That’s about a third of the fleet.”
Turning a blind eye:
Wow, I had no idea the Great Salt Lake had shrunk that much. None of those islands in the first picture aren’t even islands any longer.
The US is in good company here, one of five nations voting against (Turkey, Syria, the Philippines and Russia.)
(Note, though, that Macron supports a massive gold mine in French Guiana. )
Denying Dystopia: The Hope Police in Fact and Fiction
I got the same kind of feeling when everyone dog-piled all over David Wallace-Wells “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York Magazine this past summer. Wallace-Wells’ bottom line was that even the bad news you’ve heard about climate change is a soft-sell, that things are even worse than the experts are admitting, that in all likelihood large parts of the planet will be uninhabitable for humans by the end of this century.
I frankly doubt humans will be around in 1k years.
Oh, I think we will. Even if 99% of people died that would leave 70 million. We might live in a medieval hellscape in constant fear of the robo-monkeys, but I find total extinction unlikely.
There were a lot of dinosaurs too.
I think odds are fairly good some people would make it because humans are pretty good at adapting to things and anything short of a nuclear war followed by a radioactive winter isn’t likely to wipe us out. And even in that scenario odds are small pockets would survive in places. We’ve survived an ice age once and the species probably could again.
Yeah, I see us surviving in some fashion even in 1k.