What if a global disaster strikes? How radioactive will we become?

a reply to: DaRAGE

Aside from the sheer damage from your tsunami (even though one that size is highly unlikely to cross an ocean, much more likely to cross part of an ocean), the exposure to radiation and the potential damage is actually quite hard to fathom. For example, radiation can be good for us and is actually essential for evolution.

Look at Chernobyl - for all the terrible damage, some babushkas refused to leave, drink local ground water (still), eat locally grown produce and yet are still radiation free. Wildlife has returned in droves. And yet many people suffered from various cancers from exposure to massive radiation.

Another prime example to show why it would be difficult to gauge.....meet Tsutomu Yamaguchi....A little deaf in one ear

This elderly Japanese gent was at ground zero for both Nagasaki and Hiroshima and lived (possibly still alive) a happy and healthy life well into his 90's - his only health concerns - being "a little deaf in one ear" following the blasts (that generation really put the rest of us to shame!).

Chadwickus has it completely right - an asteroid that size and it wouldn't really be the radiation that you should be worrying about.

If an asteroid hit Earth with enough force to cause a 3000ft tsunami radiation would be the least of our worries. If it posed any major threat, people would be dead from whatever caused the incident or other outcomes long before radiation had time to make any impact. Loss of food, water, import/export, collapse of society, medicine, law and order would all happen long before radiation would have chance to have any effect.

Reactors aren't as simple as 'if this blows up there will be this much radiation here' there's thousands of variables involved that go from 'no impact' to 'china syndrome'. It entirely depends on wind direction and what reactors, nuclear material, scale etc.. happened to try and guess how much radiation would escape.

Fukushima was a perfect storm of bad circumstances and poor design.

However, let's leave design and backup systems out of the equation. Let's also leave a global catastrophe out of it as well. Let's say 100 Nuclear Reactors all lose cooling at once due to some previously unknown hack, and it is completely unrecoverable. Many Reactors are built near rivers or on coastlines. When the fuel melts through the containment vessel (Which it most certainly will without any cooling), the first and most immediate effect will be massive oceanic and groundwater contamination.

Hydrogen explosions at older reactors will happen, scattering nuclear material across the local landscape, and prevailing winds will carry radiation pretty far. I'd say if you live within about 100 miles of a Reactor, you'll likely get SOME increased dose of radiation from the air alone, and may become lethally irradiated depending on where you live in relation to the reactor. If you live downstream from a Reactor that sits on a river, you'll probably suffer some pretty serious radioactive contamination.

However, very few people will actually die from acute radiation syndrome. It takes MASSIVE doses of radiation to die from ARS. Life will go on very much as normal (Aside from massive swaths of land being without power) for most people. The big killer will be cancers from the low to mid-level radiation exposure, many of them occurring within 5 to 10 years of exposure if the dose is high enough, or if a low level dose is maintained (such as living near a destroyed plant).

Birth defects will begin to present themselves in the offspring of both humans and animals. Many children born after the great disaster will be deformed in one way or another, and already have a near certain chance of developing cancer in their adolescence. Essentially, the generation following the disaster will be deformed and have much shorter life spans. If the destruction is limited to one continent like North America, the birth defects and cancers will be mostly contained within that landmass. However if the 100 reactors are spread more across the globe, it could seriously affect global population numbers as the birth defects and cancers cause reproduction rates to plummet while lifespans are greatly shortened in exposed adults as well.

I would estimate a 40% drop in total population over about three generations.

I believe I would survive a radioactive fallout. We are already constantly bombarded with radiation from the sun to cell phones. I'd thrive.

if there was a tsunami that big nuke reactors would be no problem because it would kill everyone

a reply to: DaRAGE

Tsunami.......NO......CME taking out the power grid and causing every plant in the country to go into shutdown......Eventually.


You need water to cool.....You need electricity to circulate that water or it will boil off. How long do diesel generators really have after the power goes off and the grid is fried.

a reply to: DaRAGE

US? United States thought right?

If you + an outgoing stargate inside the water and route the inhole to the location of the +er of land mass = the +er of land mass flooded.

a reply to: ScientificRailgun

Thank you ScientificRailgun. You answered my question perfectly.

ARS is what I was mainly concerned about. Thanks.

originally posted by: DaRAGE
a reply to: ScientificRailgun

Thank you ScientificRailgun. You answered my question perfectly.

ARS is what I was mainly concerned about. Thanks.

ARS would be pretty uncommon unless you lived really close to, or worked at the plant as it melted down. Though if you live downstream from a river plant, you could also get ARS by using/ingesting the water from the plant. Even then, given proper medical care, ARS is rarely fatal unless you get ridiculously high doses. Most ARS deaths in recent history came from either malfunctioning medical equipment, or the workers in the early hours of the Chernobyl disaster.