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 Desubot wrote:

 Jimsolo wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
The elephant in the room will be unsupervised nuclear reactors. They are a hazard far in excess of that caused by any nuclear bomb, except a bomb landing on another nuclear reactor.

The reactor doesn't need to even cook off to be horribly lethal, it just needs to break down and be exposed.

Kinda thought there were safeguards for just such eventualities.

I think he is talking about general break down of the whole building and shielding. though i figure most shielding might last quite a long time.

Though if we are assuming sudden case of zombie or grey goo like the pop bomb thread earlier. then i figure the worst will be the oil tankers and ships out at sea that eventually drift into things in bad ways.

Nah, ships out at sea stay at sea. Even if they bump into stuff, nobody is going to notice.
The worst will be the massive piles of dead bodies covering the world. Also, it is highly unlikely only humans would be affected by this apocalypse, so the entire ecosystem would be destroyed as well. That is the real problem.

Did we just start another depopulation thread?

 Orlanth wrote:
The elephant in the room will be unsupervised nuclear reactors. They are a hazard far in excess of that caused by any nuclear bomb, except a bomb landing on another nuclear reactor.

The reactor doesn't need to even cook off to be horribly lethal, it just needs to break down and be exposed.

Well given the safety features curran12 pointed out it seems that the power plants would just shut down and become inert. So no danger of a meltdown. The worst you'd get would be if the fuel leaked into the ecosystem after the plant began decaying, but it would be a slow process and it would remain a relatively small threat. It would probably take decades for anything to start leaking. And I imagine people would either avoid reactors in general OR they'd get the resources together to get it running again.

You'd probably end up with small communities built around functioning reactors that they can keep operating.

Ancient stone cities will last, low concrete buildings will last, it is the high rise and wooden skeleton buildings that will not last, the grid without supervision will collapse because most safety measures will shut the plant(s) down, lots of cities have water management, so some cities will flood while others will run dry.

Nuclear reactors without regular maintenance to keep them up could be a nasty piece of work to be around.

Relapse wrote:
Did we just start another depopulation thread?

I don't think so. I haven't followed it that closely, but that one seems more moralistic and philosophical - should we do it, how could we do it - and this one seems pretty strictly focused on the mechanics of the aftermath of "it" happening.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
The elephant in the room will be unsupervised nuclear reactors. They are a hazard far in excess of that caused by any nuclear bomb, except a bomb landing on another nuclear reactor.

The reactor doesn't need to even cook off to be horribly lethal, it just needs to break down and be exposed.

Well given the safety features curran12 pointed out it seems that the power plants would just shut down and become inert. So no danger of a meltdown. The worst you'd get would be if the fuel leaked into the ecosystem after the plant began decaying, but it would be a slow process and it would remain a relatively small threat. It would probably take decades for anything to start leaking. And I imagine people would either avoid reactors in general OR they'd get the resources together to get it running again.

You'd probably end up with small communities built around functioning reactors that they can keep operating.

Relapse wrote:
Nuclear reactors without regular maintenance to keep them up could be a nasty piece of work to be around.

Assuming nothing catastrophic happens to the structure of the reactor...

If something happens to a reactor it safely shuts down on it's own. Nuclear reactors work by constantly shifting the control rods up and down in the reactor vessel to keep the reaction at a steady rate. Self sustaining but sub critical. As soon as it needs to be stopped in an emergency the control rods are dropped to stop the reaction. The rods are covered with a neutron absorbing material. Depending on the type of reactor this can involve dropping them in to an iodide pit, flooding the reactor vessel with Xenon, flooding them with boric acid or a few other ways. At this point some reactors can be re-started quite quickly, for example you can recover the rods from the Iodide pit within a few hours and get going again. But after a few days sat in there they will be borked. Other ways, such as boric acid flooding, feths they rods completely and instantly. Either way, it takes specialist skills to keep a reactor running or to re-start one.

As for the years to come. Baring massive catastrophic damage such as unprecedented tsunami or unexpected earthquake again, reactor vessels should keep integrity for a long time.

Unless the plant is old, as are many, and starts collapsing on it's own:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OtDCG2qEa2k

Without maintanence you will have these kinds of incidents with no one to detect and fix, as happened at Vermont Yankee:

"On February 4, 2010, Vermont Yankee reported that ground water samples from a newly dug monitoring well at the reactor site were found to contain about 775,000 pCi of tritium per liter (more than 37 times the federal limit). On February 5, 2010, samples from an underground vault were found to contain 2.7 million pCi/l.[30] On February 14, 2010, the source of the leak was found to be a pair of steam pipes inside the Advanced Off-Gas (AOG) pipe tunnel. The pipes were repaired, stopping the leak."

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Nah, ships out at sea stay at sea. Even if they bump into stuff, nobody is going to notice.

how so?

 Desubot wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Nah, ships out at sea stay at sea. Even if they bump into stuff, nobody is going to notice.

how so?

Also, your average ship will last about twenty years before the hull starts to rot, although it would be practically immobile long before then without someway to clean the hull.

 Orlanth wrote:
The elephant in the room will be unsupervised nuclear reactors. They are a hazard far in excess of that caused by any nuclear bomb, except a bomb landing on another nuclear reactor.

The reactor doesn't need to even cook off to be horribly lethal, it just needs to break down and be exposed.

You realize that that isn't remotely how nuclear power plants work, right?

You act like they are some kind of bomb. They aren't. We've had nuclear reactors blow up before, Fukishima and Chernobyl. They were devastating environmental catastrophes to be sure, but they were not a nuclear bomb.

In the Fallout universe, food is still edible after 200 years...

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
In the Fallout universe, food is still edible after 200 years...

Mmmmmm RAD flavored.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
In the Fallout universe, food is still edible after 200 years...

Well, some food, like Twinkie equivalents

 Desubot wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
In the Fallout universe, food is still edible after 200 years...

Mmmmmm RAD flavored.

Enough Radroaches to eat

But are videogames properly preparing our children for life in a post apocalyptic world?

http://www.theonion.com/video/are-violent-video-games-adequately-preparing-child-14314

If you want to read about the aftermath of a particularly nasty kind of apocalypse, read the book One Second After (I forgot the author's name). In it, the US is hit by an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapon by terrorists, and all electronics, modern cars, everything is completely shut down. The book shows how society breaks down as resources we used to take for granted become scarce. If it really happened, we would be totally fethed.

 ZergSmasher wrote:
If you want to read about the aftermath of a particularly nasty kind of apocalypse, read the book One Second After (I forgot the author's name). In it, the US is hit by an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapon by terrorists, and all electronics, modern cars, everything is completely shut down. The book shows how society breaks down as resources we used to take for granted become scarce. If it really happened, we would be totally fethed.

Channel 4 here in the UK did a week long series called Blackout on a similar subject. The National Grid here goes down and there's no contingency plan to fix it (...which is an actual thing). It follows over the course of a week the break down of society as the water is shut off, fuel becomes a premium and the knock on effect of that one resource going down. By the end of the week its at the point of anarchy. =P

Fear mongering perhaps, or rather a realistic take on such a situation given how little prepared people are for disasters (*spoiler* The prepper type guy in the show doesn't do well either as his neighbours rob him for all his supplies*spoiler*).

Modern society works because of the complex interlock of many different systems that rely on lots of people working constantly to keep them going.

It isn't realistic for everyone to prepare individually to survive mass disasters of the type that knock out a major system for weeks.

You can reasonably prepare for localised short term disasters like a major earthquake. The Japanese are good at that and all have little survival kits, a map of how to walk or cycle home from central Tokyo, and a local evacuation centre where a census can be taken, emergency supplies rationed out, casualties treated, and so on.

This kind of disaster assumes that enough organisation and technology is still available to bring in aid from unaffected regions and repair or replace the damaged infrastructure.

In the scenario that say 90% of the population were killed overnight by germ warfare, society would inevitably collapse and your individual long term prospects would depend on finding enough other people prepared to cooperate, to have the skill base to make good use of the infrastructure before existing stocks of supplies and materials started to deteroriate.

Your objective would not be to restart the national grid, it would be preserve a certain level of technology and education that could be used as a springboard for redevelopment as the population began to rebuild.

Relapse wrote:
But are videogames properly preparing our children for life in a post apocalyptic world?

http://www.theonion.com/video/are-violent-video-games-adequately-preparing-child-14314

surely this is some kind of comedy?...never seen that show, as a foreigner...but these so called experts have to be comedians...yes?

 Viktor von Domm wrote:

Relapse wrote:
But are videogames properly preparing our children for life in a post apocalyptic world?

http://www.theonion.com/video/are-violent-video-games-adequately-preparing-child-14314

surely this is some kind of comedy?...never seen that show, as a foreigner...but these so called experts have to be comedians...yes?

The Onion is a well known satire site.

Ah, many thanks...for a sec I was worried...

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I have just finished another SF book of the apocalypse genre. In this one almost the entire human race is wiped out by a bio-weapon plague in a few days, leaving the physical infrastructure intact, so the survivors have to worry about feral dogs and so on, but have the pick of buildings and supplies like food, cars, guns and so on.

A town like the one I live in, with 11,000 population and three supermarkets, probably has several days of food supplies for thousands of people. If I was the sole survivor, there could be years worth of tinned food left on the shelves. There would be cars all over the place, guns and ammo in farmers' houses and in the local army base, petrol and spare parts in local garages, and so on.

In such a scenario, how long would things like the power grid keep running by themselves? How long would it take for supplies and hardware to decay? For example, tinned food can last 100 years if stored correctly, so can ammunition.

Looking at hardware, a modern car will run down its battery in a few months because of the burglar alarm. The rest of the hardware will eventually decay. If you have a portable generator, you can recharge the batteries. How long before the tyres, fuel hoses and so on start to decay? What about spare parts stored in workshops and so on?

Check this out, it may prove very interesting:

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/did_you_know.html

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Sounds interesting. I wonder if it's available on Amazon Prime.

I imagine buildings would last 10 to 50 years depending on how well-found they are to start, and the weather. For example my own house is currently having all the windows rebuilt and painted, but the roof and some of the pointing will need attention in the next 10 years. Without that maintenance I would expect weather to start to damage the structure.

Life after people is a decent show, but the narrator is way too over-dramatic.

They never go into WHY the people are gone, just that the suddenly left. Cats, man. Cats become fething scary. Also, stay the feth away from nuclear plants, high rise buildings, and dams.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Modern society works because of the complex interlock of many different systems that rely on lots of people working constantly to keep them going.

It isn't realistic for everyone to prepare individually to survive mass disasters of the type that knock out a major system for weeks.

You can reasonably prepare for localised short term disasters like a major earthquake. The Japanese are good at that and all have little survival kits, a map of how to walk or cycle home from central Tokyo, and a local evacuation centre where a census can be taken, emergency supplies rationed out, casualties treated, and so on.

This kind of disaster assumes that enough organisation and technology is still available to bring in aid from unaffected regions and repair or replace the damaged infrastructure.

In the scenario that say 90% of the population were killed overnight by germ warfare, society would inevitably collapse and your individual long term prospects would depend on finding enough other people prepared to cooperate, to have the skill base to make good use of the infrastructure before existing stocks of supplies and materials started to deteroriate.

Your objective would not be to restart the national grid, it would be preserve a certain level of technology and education that could be used as a springboard for redevelopment as the population began to rebuild.

My bet would be on the world coming to a late 1800's/ early 1900's level within twenty years of a major disaster, with most of the controlling players being those who understood farming, medicine, and manufacturing.

People will kill themselves if their social media addiction gets cut off...also people would look where they walk...look while they drive instead texting...

 Kilkrazy wrote:


Your objective would not be to restart the national grid, it would be preserve a certain level of technology and education that could be used as a springboard for redevelopment as the population began to rebuild.

Unfortunately, we truly stand upon the shoulders of giants. You might have one chap who worked in a power plant, but he doesn't know how to perform most of the functions, and even if he did, he wouldn't have the skills to manufacture all the components that are needed to run one. The odds of you having access to the full skill set necessary for any serious kind of technology is unlikely in the event of 90% of the population perishing. You could cannibalise parts and learn what you could from books for a period of time, but without supply chains and a large enough population base, things like petrol vehicles, power grids, pharmaceuticals, and computers are going to be gone reasonably fast.


Your best bet would be to go back to the roots of technology, and head to your local museum with however many people you can scrape together once you have the food side of things sorted out. Get your basic wire telephones and steam engines running in that ten-twenty year window, and the manufacturing apparatus necessary to support them, whilst stockpiling as much knowledge as you can so you can steadily upgrade your tech again as the population base expands.

 Ketara wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:


Your objective would not be to restart the national grid, it would be preserve a certain level of technology and education that could be used as a springboard for redevelopment as the population began to rebuild.

Unfortunately, we truly stand upon the shoulders of giants. You might have one chap who worked in a power plant, but he doesn't know how to perform most of the functions, and even if he did, he wouldn't have the skills to manufacture all the components that are needed to run one. The odds of you having access to the full skill set necessary for any serious kind of technology is unlikely in the event of 90% of the population perishing. You could cannibalise parts and learn what you could from books for a period of time, but without supply chains and a large enough population base, things like petrol vehicles, power grids, pharmaceuticals, and computers are going to be gone reasonably fast.


Your best bet would be to go back to the roots of technology, and head to your local museum with however many people you can scrape together once you have the food side of things sorted out. Get your basic wire telephones and steam engines running in that ten-twenty year window, and the manufacturing apparatus necessary to support them, whilst stockpiling as much knowledge as you can so you can steadily upgrade your tech again as the population base expands.

Indeed. This reminds me of the Ted talk where the guy tried to build a toaster by himself. It was just mindbogglingly complicated.

The classic example is the HB lead pencil with rubber. It requires skills in forestry, mining, chemistry, metallurgy, machine tooling, etc, that could not possibly be gained by one person, yet it can be bought anywhere for a few pence.

I think your objective would be in five to 10 years to put together a functioning economy on a late Victorian/early Edwardian technical base, while there is still enough operable modern equipment to gather the people, machines and materials including paper based education and history.

From that point further development would depend on how fast you could build up a working population and educate them, because you have the advantages of looking up designs and large stockpiles of raw materials such as the steel in car bodies.

Whilst it took only 100 years to get from the Victorian technology to where we are today, they had the advantage of a huge population. Taking the lead pencil example, if you want to develop the skills to make one, first you need at least half a dozen people to learn them.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Looking at hardware, a modern car will run down its battery in a few months because of the burglar alarm.

You may be able to get a bit more life out of modern cars by disconnecting the battery and removing/covering the wheels (to prevent UV and weight aging the tires) and leaving the handbrake on. I'm of course assuming you'd be able to prepare a dozen or so cars and treat them as essentially disposable. As the fuel goes off, and roads deteriorate they aren't going to last very long. You'd probably be better off long term preparing bicycle parts and power tool batteries.

Food wise, the first thing I'd be doing is driving to anywhere I can get vegetable seeds (supermarkets here, DIY places, garden stores) and get planting. Then when all the vegetables are gone in ~6-12 weeks you'll at least get a source of fresh veg. In fact, I'd probably just try and move to a local farm and set up there.