A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I guess renewables are still cheaper.
At least personally and anecdotally, because it doesn't happen often, but it has happened more than once, that I have purchased electricity at negative prices due to overflow from renewables, which is a hell of lot cheaper than paying a tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour.
“Junior please walk 30cm to the left and do this task that would have been easier for me to do than ask you to do it”
It's just one of those things you can do yourself, but you want the kid to feel valuable too.
Besides, if you're getting radiation poisoning, you want that little shit to go down with you.
Imagine using something dangerous to generate power or heat for a home. Something that if it leaks into your home could suffocate you overnight or explode, or that in normal use can give children respiratory issues or cause cancer. Thank goodness we're too smart to use something like that unlike the absolute imbeciles in this comic
I have absolutely no idea how to find reference to this at this point because every search I do results in absolute bullshit that’s not related (like apparently the most liquid currency is the diarrhea coin… a problem that didn’t exist a few years ago..), but I recall reading about a practice from like the medieval era or something where special coins were made that contained heavy metals, and when consumed, would induce diarrhea. They would be retrieved, washed, and reused, and even passed down in families.
Today we know how bad of an idea something like that is, but then, like with radiation, it was all ghosts in the blood causing problems. Shitting blood was normalized.
Not a coin, and not medieval. The search term is "antimony pill".
Thank you! I was having such a struggle with it! That’s exactly what I was thinking of!
Imagine if we had to move it around in such large quantities that there were thousands of kilometres of unwatched pipelines just out there, potentially leaking.
And imagine people fight pointless wars over resources instead of using the renewables that are available for free.
I feel like "Atomic Wafer" should be a band name
Or as slang for a tab of LSD
why do i feel like Radioactive Buttplug is both already a band and an approved medical device
Pretty sure that kid's arm would hang down to his ankle if he straightened it. Must be all those atomic wafers.
He's actually the bass player in a metal band.
That's not his arm.
"Kilowat"
Might have questioned the reliability of that information source even back then already...
Yes, the kilo-wat. For when a simple "wat" doesn't accurately capture the absurdity of the situation.
For example, asking junior to put an atomic wafer in the power box, when you are standing right fucking next to it.
But like a thousand times
But a picture is worth a thousand words!
I wish I could give that lady a hug.
She can't do it, her eyes fell off because of the radiations.
*Licks powerbox*
Could you imagine a world where we first used atomic power for good and not evil?
I don't know history of uranium very much but wasn't it first used to paint ceramics and later radium for glowing watches? Uranium bombs were made later probably after it was used to generate power. But I wonder what our world would look like if there was not as much scare of nuclear power. Perhaps bit like fallouts world? We still have some time left to 23rd October 2077 thankfully.
The watches were radium, not uranium.
The first man made reactor (there's an extinct naturally occurring one) was created in 1942 as part of the Manhattan project to create the first bombs. So we really did speed run the tech tree for bomb on that one. The first nuclear power plant was in 1951.
First use: glowing paint
Second use: cancer
if there was not as much scare of nuclear power.
I was pro nuclear until solar became cheaper than nuclear but I think if there was less scare about nuclear, there would have been more Chernobyls. That happened because of thinking it's completely safe.
I was pro-nuclear until Georgia Power stuck me with the bill for Plant Vogtle 3 and 4.
(Or rather, I was pro-nuclear until shortly after construction began on a 7-year plan that ultimately took 15 years, when it started to become clear that gross incompetence and corruption was going to make it an expensive debacle.)
Nuclear power from Vogtle 3 and 4 costs 16¢ per kWh (according to the linked document), by the way, compared to less than 0.1¢ per kWh expected by OP's comic.
Chernobyl happened through the incompetence of leadership, not because they thought it was "completely safe".
It's a good thing leadership incompetence is something that only ever happens once
Incompetence AND overconfidence, cause those reactors were the latest generation and considered completely safe.
I'd sure hope that the latest generation of a technology would be considered safe. That's generally how things work. And then when accidents occur, we learn and make things safer the next time.
As to them considering it completely safe, I'd love to read about that if you have sources. Cause I doubt that they thought it couldn't fail.
That world, that wonderful utopic world... we could weaponize it!
Not really. It's not economical and never has been. Civilian use of nuclear energy has only ever been a cover for nuclear arms development.
people down voting you haven't considered the cost of dealing with the waste. Consider how long and expensive Hanford Washington cleanup is and how much damage it's done to the environment around it. Then there's Fukushima Japan. The damage will be dealt with for a 1000 years. And the reactors that don't break still have so many spent rods and other waste that can't just be thrown away. The best idea was to store it in the bottom of old mines but nobody wants it shipped over their backyard to get it there. It's a dead end.
So was the popular conception back then that power was somehow magically transferred directly from uranium to the power grid?
What grid? It looks like the "power box" on the wall is generating power for that house all by itself, no transmission necessary.
Considering that the smallest operating nuclear reactor ever made was this big...
...and that critical mass is a thing, I can only assume the "power box" was some kind of RTG.
Wouldn't all but the largest RTGs struggle to power more than a few incandescent light bulbs, though? Looking at the table on Wikipedia, their output is usually only from a few dozen to a few hundred watts.
It was 60 years ago. If they put same effort to it as they put to computers you would have one in your pocket.
Miniature breeder reactor
You would drop in the uranium fuel source and it would be used to create more fuel.
Short version is most early nuclear science focused on breeder type reactors but they were abandoned when it was found that more conventional designs are a lot more feasible for producing weapons grade material.
The weapons grade stuff is U-235, right? Do conventional nuclear reactors enrich U-238 to U-235?
Uranium 235 or plutonium 239, may be completed with Hydrogen for more energy release: deuterium and tritium.
AFIK natural uranium is mainly centrifugated for the heavier 238 and lighter 235 to separate. Enriched uranium is just having a higher percentage of 235.
Plutonium 238 is man made in reactors
Looking at the illustration, it's hard to figure out year it was drawn. The artist is creating a 'future house.' Also, it's not clear if this is an educational comic, or one for entertainment.
99% of the people today ahve some idea of what 'gamma rays' are, but we all accept that they can turn a normal man into The Hulk.
It was worse than that. Our understanding of radiation took awhile. While Uranium glass is probably safe I wouldn't go using it regularly. A lot of women ("radium girls") suffered from cancers induced by licking their brushes when painting luminescing instruments. This comic looks like 50s era when post the bomb sci-fi was full of "atomics" as the stuff of the future.
Title... "that's what she said!"