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Helsing posted:Oh right. The gritty and realistic book by Mel Brook's kid where plucky misunderstood Israel expends significant resources in the midst of a global crisis to save save Palestinians from a global zombie epidemic. To be fair the ultra-orthodox (and them losing because they have no military experience) being the source of an Israeli civil war is the most realistic plot point there.
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Feb 19, 2017 22:15
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Party Plane Jones posted:To be fair the ultra-orthodox (and them losing because they have no military experience) being the source of an Israeli civil war is the most realistic plot point there. TBF it looked a lot more likely back when the book was written in 2006. Also, the author is jewish. He's the son of Mel Brooks. Got to make the chosen people look good.
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Feb 20, 2017 01:19
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Mycroft Holmes posted:TBF it looked a lot more likely back when the book was written in 2006. Also, the author is jewish. He's the son of Mel Brooks. Got to make the chosen people look good. Not all jews are pro-Israel, though.
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Feb 20, 2017 03:48
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I'm not totally convinced that even a virus with an impossibly high mortality rate, that somehow doesn't kill the victims faster than it spreads, is necessarily going to be apocalyptic. Once governments recognize the threat, there's obviously going to be a lot of incentive to act, and the resources you can throw at the problem are, in this day and age, fairly substantial. The only real way through that is if you somehow can't recognize the threat, until it becomes uncontainable, and how the hell does a virus do that? But okay, let's assume that's somehow the case. There's an extended 'downfall' period, where it becomes obvious that the situation is irreversible, and strategy switches from containment to adaption. So rather than quarantining the infected, because that's now impossible, you isolate (reverse-quarantine) the people you can guarantee are healthy, into limited societies. Assuming some % of such experiments succeed, you're going to end up with a collection of what are essentially city-states, which operate with a high level of vertical top-down control (ie the citizens won't have things like freedom of travel, or a lot of other freedoms, because the idea of a high level of control, and the trauma of the pandemic, would have normalized that idea). How well they succeed is gonna depend on how they're set up, what technical expertise they have, and what their environment permits, because everything is going to have to be produced locally. Social stability is going to be the #1 priority of the citizens of such states. Assuming that anyone can actually survive the pandemic, and become immunized (not actually a guarantee), they're gonna be stuck wandering mostly uninhabited countryside. If they're lucky, they'll run into other survivors and form small tribal groups, operating as hunter gatherers. It's going to be impossible for them to do anything else, because you won't have enough of them (even if the disease only kills 99% of the population exposed, not everyone in that 1% is going to be lucky enough to have avoided all the other knock-on effects from social breakdown, nor the opportunity or personal ability to actually live that kind of life in the first place). In general, I'm gonna guess that the city-state pop >> hunter-gatherer pop.
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Feb 20, 2017 05:19
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Party Plane Jones posted:To be fair the ultra-orthodox (and them losing because they have no military experience) being the source of an Israeli civil war is the most realistic plot point there. Maybe if you're a pro-Israel liberal living in America who cannot bring themselves to fully recognize how the entire country has been swinging hard to the right since the 1990s. We're talking about a book where Palestinians who irrationally fear that the zombie epidemic is a lie spread by Israel have to be rescued by the benevolent intervention of the IDF. I don't think Max Brooks intentionally wrote pro-Zionist propaganda I think he's probably just a moron who was really caught up in that mid-2000s Jon Stewart liberal poise of assuming everything in the world would be fine if only a small band of extremists on either side of every conflict could be brought to heel. I assume that if World War Z was written today it would most likely have a much darker tone and it already does. Anyway, why anybody thinks that book is worth bringing up in the context of how an actual pandemic disease would impact the globe is beyond me.
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Feb 20, 2017 19:03
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the black husserl posted:Very well articulated - your first paragraph is exactly what I think would happen. Breakdown in organizational structure means that the finger on the button gets more and more twitchy. If one of those three launched do you think Russia/China/US would? Because I don't. So a limited nuclear exchange is a problem, but it's not nuclear winter/annihilation level bad.
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Feb 23, 2017 19:22
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rudatron posted:I'm not totally convinced that even a virus with an impossibly high mortality rate, that somehow doesn't kill the victims faster than it spreads, is necessarily going to be apocalyptic. Once governments recognize the threat, there's obviously going to be a lot of incentive to act, and the resources you can throw at the problem are, in this day and age, fairly substantial. The only real way through that is if you somehow can't recognize the threat, until it becomes uncontainable, and how the hell does a virus do that? Spanish flu is the one that immediately comes to mind. Flu is extremely infectious and it's only by sheer luck we've avoided the yearly strain being a more serious/deadly one. Of course you could argue that Spanish Flu was more effective because WW1 had everyone in close proximity and made spread easy, but I think modern international air travel puts people just as closely together, with the added bonus that one person can manage to infect dozens of locations. Relevant Tangent posted:If one of those three launched do you think Russia/China/US would? Because I don't. So a limited nuclear exchange is a problem, but it's not nuclear winter/annihilation level bad. Limited exchange is a myth. It is likely that the use of any nuclear weapons dominoes into a large nuclear exchange even if the belligerents are small. India/Pakistan nuking Pakistan/India is probably the only scenario where you could sort of see things not going global. axeil fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Feb 23, 2017 |
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Feb 23, 2017 22:43
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axeil posted:Spanish flu is the one that immediately comes to mind. Flu is extremely infectious and it's only by sheer luck we've avoided the yearly strain being a more serious/deadly one. Of course you could argue that Spanish Flu was more effective because WW1 had everyone in close proximity and made spread easy, but I think modern international air travel puts people just as closely together, with the added bonus that one person can manage to infect dozens of locations. Nah, you don't get to call limited exchange a myth. It's no more or less mythical than total nuclear annihilation. To be frank, nobody with their fingers on the button is going to give a poo poo about Pakistan/India or Israel and whoever Israel might nuke (Iran, presumably?).
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Feb 24, 2017 02:39
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Yup. Also worth mentioning that nukes aren't all nukes; of the two belligerents you're talking about only india has ICBM's (so not just warheads delivered by plane/cruise missile) and even then they only have a few and realistically no targets worth using them on that aren't their neighbours. Russia, China and a few NATO countries are the only players who have missiles with global striking ability and enough warheads to do some serious damage. They also have the infrastructure in place to make launching said weapons really loving difficult if nobody else launches first. Nuclear exchanges are a spectrum, not just a binary decision between annihilating civilisation or not, and very, very few people are moronic enough to stab the red button because people are dying of a disease. I suspect the trumps of the world would immediately be deposed by their military subordinates if the possibility even came up but maybe I'm an optimist.
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Feb 24, 2017 03:59
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Rime posted:drat, I love when someone else actually remembers this underrated classic. That book was a wild thing to discover at the age of 12. Nar, if you up and left a nuclear power plant alone it will LITTERALLY wind down and shut off like a giant kids toy. Modern stations are spectacularly safe, a team of nuclear physicists were unable to spark a meltdown when invited to try and left completely alone to have at it.
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Mar 28, 2017 14:46
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504 posted:Nar, if you up and left a nuclear power plant alone it will LITTERALLY wind down and shut off like a giant kids toy. Modern stations are spectacularly safe, a team of nuclear physicists were unable to spark a meltdown when invited to try and left completely alone to have at it. just like Fukushima
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Mar 28, 2017 15:11
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504 posted:Nar, if you up and left a nuclear power plant alone it will LITTERALLY wind down and shut off like a giant kids toy. Modern stations are spectacularly safe, a team of nuclear physicists were unable to spark a meltdown when invited to try and left completely alone to have at it. Even many older designs from the 70's would scam and shut down if left alone, assuming you didn't suddenly wreck the power/water/etc. bits before that happens. Worse than Chernobyl is also a stretch - that was pretty much a worst case scenario with a hydrogen explosion throwing the fuel all over the place, breaking the reactor vessel and mechanisms, and then the remaining fuel catching fire and burning for a while. These were direct consequences of the operators bypassing the automated systems and making mistakes. NewForumSoftware posted:just like Fukushima If you flood it with a Tsunami before it shuts down?
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Mar 28, 2017 15:24
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Warbadger posted:If you flood it with a Tsunami before it shuts down? yes, if you interrupt the cooling in any way the entire containment vessel can melt down and explode in fact, it could still happen now, go check out how Fukushima is cooled these days
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Mar 28, 2017 15:34
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No, those systems will work fine for a few weeks and then begin to fail in the absence of workers. In the event that nobody comes back for months or years, such as would happen following a population decimating plague, those power stations will suffer a total meltdown as the piles begin to heat up again, followed by god knows what. Do you honestly think NPPs are these magically automated little black boxes with infinite supplies of cooling juice? Especially the older designs from the 70s and 80s which are still in use? Fuel rods take up to or over a decade to cool down if they've been properly disposed of.
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Mar 28, 2017 15:45
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I was under the impression that in most plant designs, the control rods are arranged so that if something goes wrong they literally just drop into the core under gravity and inhibit the reaction.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:05
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If it can go wrong it will go wrong, except when it doesn't. That's my expert opinion.
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Mar 28, 2017 17:38
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OwlFancier posted:I was under the impression that in most plant designs, the control rods are arranged so that if something goes wrong they literally just drop into the core under gravity and inhibit the reaction. They are. Powered systems hold the fuel in place. If power to the plant systems is cut the rods simply drop out and begin cooling due to the lack of a critical mass necessary to sustain the nuclear reaction. It only needs to cool down to the point that it won't burn or melt and none of the fuel rods will maintain that temperature individually. Fukushima was the result of a huge earthquake and tsunami knocking out all of the redundant systems simultaneously. It would never have come close to Chernobyl even if the fuel had melted - there would be no hydrogen explosion and no open-air fuel fire. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Mar 28, 2017 |
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Mar 28, 2017 17:49
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Fukushima did automatically shut down. It didn't melt down or anything, big objects just mashed it around until stuff fell out that was radioactive, there was no nuclear reaction part of the failure like chernobyl or something.
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Mar 28, 2017 18:14
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As far as cooling goes I believe also the primary concern is immediately after shutdown, because the chain reactions aren't happening any more due to the insertion of the control medium, however the reactor is still flooded with intermediate fission products which take time to decay (and produce heat while doing so). Once they have decayed the reactor requires far less cooling because sub critical fuel is not supposed to be dangerously hot. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to transport it. It becomes hot when lots of it is gathered together and achieves critical mass. Such as when it has already melted a hole in the reactor and is now sitting in it. If you avoid that happening by controlling the initial decay heat and not causing a steam explosion you should be alright.
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Mar 28, 2017 18:22
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NewForumSoftware posted:just like Fukushima Yeah, and fire resistant clothing does burn if you throw it into a blast furnace. Fukushima failed because it was ground loving zero of a massive earthquake and immideately hit by a tsunami, even then it barely failed.
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Apr 10, 2017 06:35
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