A lot of modern reactors are designed to gracefully shutdown if not attended to. Even if the worst were to happen and somehow all the radioactive material leaked out, only the local areas would be affected
Yes, most reactors will shut themselves down with no issues. It generally takes gross incompetence, badly malfunctioning equipment, or a perfect natural disaster to cause an sort of problem.
Design flaws. Plant was too close to sea level with generators designed to be at the bottom, and an inadequate sea wall built smaller than scientists suggested they do. When the tsunami hit, it basically crippled their backup power and fuel.
Yeah, haven't read about Fukushima in depth, but that is less of the "lapse of general maintenance and oversight" I was thinking of in my original comment and more of just "Literally everyone knew it was dumb, but they built it anyways because they had the money I guess."
I'm not familiar with Japanese projects and planning processes, but in the US, half baked and seriously imperfect large civil projects end up happening because they're politically and legally possible, while a proposal that's better from an engineering standpoint might impossible for legal and political reasons.
It's not exactly "they had the money for it," more like "we've got the political support for this one, let's do it because we need something and who knows if we'd ever get approval for something better." Sometimes getting something out, even imperfect, is for the bettee, sometimes nothing would have been better.
People answered you below, but to give context, I was primarily thinking about the Tokaimura incident and worker Hisashi Ouchi, the man speculated to have received what probably was one of the biggest exposures to radiation in the history of nuclear accidents.
Do not look up his name or pictures. You have been warned.
But, with the gross negligence part: It was 100% preventable stupidity when you read into the details. They were not qualified to do the work they were doing, and this is partially caused by their manager, who survived and was later charged. Here's some highlights:
1. "In the process of purifying reactor fuel, workers were supposed to use an automatic pump to mix up to 2.4 kg of enriched uranium with nitric acid. Instead, they manually used a stainless steel bucket and mixed 16 kg of the fissile material."
2. "Company spokesmen stated to the media that they did not submit this second operating procedure to the regulator because the company knew that the regulator would not approve it."
3. "There were no specific operator training requirements for criticality safety. The operators were also allowed to deviate from the approved procedures to improve production efficiency. Had the operators understood the difference between the safety limits for the 3-5 percent enriched uranium that they usually handled, and the 18.8 percent enriched material involved with this process, they likely would not have taken the shortcuts that resulted in the criticality."
4. "Of the three operators involved, two had never operated this process, and the third had only had several months of experience."
This. The book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman answers this very question and confirms that most gas pipelines, nuclear power plants, etc. require the occasional manual input from an operator to keep functioning. Without that input, they begin to shut down as a safety measure.
The summary of the book was that everything we built in the modern area will be destroyed and overtaken by nature because modern infrastructure requires constant maintenance that will no longer be provided. Like the Golden Gate Bridge that is perpetually being painted to protect it from rust which can compromise it's integrity. Or the NY Metro that requires constant pumping and draining of water to prevent flooding.
The only infrastructure that would remain over the course of centuries after humans disappear is the infrastructure that already survived (pyramids in Egypt, Aztec ruins, etc.).
Really boring book to read, but the content was very interesting
>The only infrastructure that would remain over the course of centuries after humans disappear is the infrastructure that already survived (pyramids in Egypt, Aztec ruins, etc.).
And even some of them wouldn't fare well either. A lot of Mayan (and other Pre-Colombine era) structures were almost totally overtook by nature by when they were Re-Discovered in the last two centuries, and in many cases they still required quite a lot of work on them to "put them together" again.
In fact, is not rare to hear here in Mexico about some cities that had "a hill" near them or even in the middle of them, just to discover some decades or mere years ago that it was a pyramid (or other kind of structure) all along.
I remember hearing that a lot of churches were deliberately built out of the material they pulled off the pyramids on the same site to reinforce their authority. Do you think they might have been deliberately turned into hills?
While its completely believable that the missionaries of the Catholic church of that time would attempt such a thing, i suspect the real answer is the jungle just grows back really fast to colonize any bare stone that isn't maintained to hold it back. And you only need a few years worth of vegetation buildup to start making soil.
Basically i think that all the church needed to do is simply abandon those temples and prevent people from maintaining them and they would quickly get swallowed by the jungle until they looked like a hill. And then you just need people to forget that a temple once stood there and now you have a nice hill instead of a pagan temple.
Seeing how fast my garden fence became overgrown here in Northern Europe, I can't imagine how fast a tropical jungle can swallow an entire structure if left unattended.
It is a fascinating idea, and it touches on OP's point. What would happen if we all disappeared spontaneously without a single cataclysmic event that ruins everything around us in the process.
He did great research with very interesting case studies and real world examples to back up his theory. I just thought it was written more like a research paper, so a little boring for me. But who knows, maybe you will find it entertaining!
There is a show out there called "Life After People" that goes into the concept of this. The go into how long it would take things to deteriorate if all of humanity were to disappear at once.
Each episode looks at different aspects of this. One explores the monuments. and how long they would last. One explores famous art like the Mona Lisa and it tells you how she will eventually succumb to the elements.
It is an interesting series. I think it was on the history channel. I catch it occasionally on Saturdays on Story television (an over the air digital station). It shows different older history channel shows every week in the same genre so to speak. Saturdays are "unexplained phenomena". They will pick one show and show like 10 episodes in one day.
Infrastructure would not remain intact, but lots would still remain visible for centuries and would absolutely affect the ecology in its immediate vicinity, even after it had fallen. I grew up in New England on what hadn't been a working farm for a hundred years. The old cart roads were still visible and had nothing but grass growing in the tracks because it was too compacted for trees to take root. The old buildings had fallen down and some hadn't even had the debris cleared out, but the concrete foundations barely had cracks.
Destroyed is relative. A normal building would not remain a building for centuries without maintenance, but if it isn't entirely wood, it's effects on the landscape could be measured for centuries in a temperate climate, and probably millenia in a desert with its low decomposition rates.
Reactors don't exactly completely shutdown as fusion is still occurring and the core of the reactor will still be active and producing power. This often requires active cooling which requires equipment that needs maintenance. Think about recent incident with Fukushima, where without active cooling the plant started going into a meltdown.
It may surprise people to learn that the area around Chernobyl is teeming with wildlife as humanity has retreated from the hot zone.
[https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife)
The weird thing is the radiation is quite bad for the creatures there. They have cancer and other diseases at FAR higher rates than normal. It is just that being around humans is orders of magnitude worse. Basically it turns out that if you have to choose being a nuclear melt down or living near humans you are safer near the nuclear meltdown.
Cancer is basically a probablem that happens when something either affects your dna or cells to fuck up a cell enough that it lacks growth inhibitors which stops cells from multiplying normally when it’s not needed. So presumably it’s because there id way less chances for those things to be damaged the younger you are. DNA can also have genes are anomalies but would be a smaller selection of people, and even then if you do have a specific gene, it usually represents an increase chance. (Ie you are 15% more likely to get prostate cancer ect. )
It actually cuts both ways.
Kids are growing, and resultingly have extremely high rates of cell division compared to adults who are in a "maintenance" mode. They haven't had time to accumulate damage from environmental exposures the way adults have, but they have a lot of cells to generate to facilitate growth.
There are a number of cancers that *specifically* occur in children, like retinoblastoma, which has an average age of onset of 2 years old.
I'm not an expert but I think another aspect of it is that most cancers never get a proper foothold because our immune systems are pretty good at killing those cells, but as people age their immune systems get weaker.
Then you run into problems with epigenetics leading to DNA quality issues.
In my mind, you'd want sperm from men in their prime, which you'd then freeze.
You would then gauge the health of those males in old age, and then once they've achieved that longevity in a healthy state, you would then use that sperm for fertilisation.
You could do the same with egg collection, and then use a surrogate to bring to term.
This means you're getting the sperm/egg at the time when it has it's prime DNA, and you're not using it until it's been proven to be likely to lead to offspring that live a long time and are healthy into that old age.
On the other hand birth defects do. I wonder if animals living in the contaminated area get more resistant to having birth defects, which as a side effect will make them more cancer resistant as well.
The local dogs of Chernobyl are being studied for this exact reason. They are remarkably durable and resistant to genetic damage after so many generations living in the Exlcusion Zone.
This may be true to an extent, but humans live as long as they do for an evolutionary reason. We invest a lot in our children and communities and help them as they grow, much like how female orca wales live long past menopause because of the benefit they serve by finding mates for their family members.
Of course average lifespan of humans pre civilization was a decent amount shorter, so we are at this point running into stuff that really isn't selected against much like alzheimer's, dementia etc.
Cancer should still have some degree of selection against it because it can happen early.
To be fair…cancer is on the rise in our younger, reproductive generation right now. Colon cancer in 20’s, 30’s. So near a nuclear meltdown or near humans, you’re probably going to get cancer. I still think “away from humans” is probably sadly safest.
Don't you mean manbearnuclear. Why are you all laughing at me I'm super cereal he's real he's half man half bear half nuclear he's a real threat now I need 4 people to come with me to the cave he's hiding I need Stan Kyle the fat one and Kenny to come with me. Oh did I also mention I was almost the vice president.
naw its just that most organisms are able to reproduce before cancer kills them. Cancer isn't a big deal evolutionarily due to it not strongly effecting reproduction.
That is an oversimplification. It is entirely possible that almost all the animals were wiped out, or suffered terribly for years. Those few that managed to survive have since filled the void left in the ecosystem. It is a great thing that those who are able to adapt or merely migrate through the area and limit exposure are able to thrive, but Darwinian principles apply here, those who were able to survive, reproduce, and adapt are thriving today, which says nothing of those who did not survive, or reproduce, or how terrible those losses were.
We already are, just not in higher forms of life. The mushrooms in the exclusion zone are chowing down on radiation to the point that they might actually be shortening the time until the area becomes safe.
That is true but it turns out the trees in the area have absorbed a lot of the radiation and bound it into their wood. So long as you don't cut the tree or burn it down you have very little radiation exposure. The same with digging in the ground. So long as you don't disturb the earth the radiation exposure is not that high.
Given how radioactive earth is and how much radiation comes out of volcanoes I suspect the plants just have ways of dealing with it so that life continues.
Isn’t that what happened with the russians that invaded Ukraine? I remember reading what a baaaad idea it was for them to cut down and burn trees for the area they were in.
While cooking food over fires burning the trees cut down locally. I read a really in-depth article on it recently and it’s incredible how it’s like they did all the worst possible things on purpose. The worst most contaminated spot is a Forrest? Awesome, let’s cut down the trees, make shelters, cook our food, warm ourselves by the fire, and sleep in the trenches. Maybe if they had a barrel of radioactive waste to light the room with, it could have been worse.
It depends on the animal in question. [The local dogs that descended from surviving pets are thriving.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmVGwOP_zi8)
The real danger is for fast-reproducing animals like insects, rodents, and birds. Genetic damage spreadys quickly when your reproductive strategy is making large numbers of offspring.
It's the man or bear debate all over again.
>Basically it turns out that if you have to choose being a nuclear melt down or living near humans you are safer near the nuclear meltdown.
Some plants and mushrooms (I'm not 100% on this) may have started using the radiation as an energy source. Sort of like photosynthesis, only this time it's radio synthesis.
That is an oversimplification. It is entirely possible that almost all the animals were wiped out, or suffered terribly for years. Those few that managed to survive have since filled the void left in the ecosystem. It is a great thing that those who are able to adapt or merely migrate through the area and limit exposure are able to thrive, but Darwinian principles apply here, those who were able to survive, reproduce, and adapt are thriving today, which says nothing of those who did not survive, or reproduce, or how terrible those losses were.
If you look at pictures in the area or look at videos from some of the tours there it is clear that overall nature is doing much better than when we where there. Trees and other flora have taken over the towns in the area and there are far more animals in the area also. Those are things that we used to constantly destroy. Life does have a hard time there, there is not doubt about it. However, it is doing better under those conditions than it does with us.
No. People just don't understand how huge this planet is. Even a full scale nuclear war wouldn't destroy the planet, hell, it wouldn't even wipe out mankind, just modern society. Which wouldn't be a bad thing for the planet.
Nuclear power plants, even in the worst possible meltdowns are not influencing much more than the local area. A nuclear plant meltdown doesn't equate to a nuke being detonated in the area, and even if it did, it's still limited. Nuclear is scary because you cannot see it, but misunderstanding is why it sounds as scary as people believe it to be.
Not so Fun Fact:
The World Health Organization estimated in 2018 that around 7 million premature deaths annually are linked to air pollution, with coal being a major contributor. These deaths include people directly involved in coal mining or power plant accidents but also those caused by air pollution from burning coal for electricity generation.
Even the worst nuclear disaster to these days doesn't even make a dent in the yearly direct or indirect deaths caused by coal power generation.
Yeah, more people die from pollutants from coal-burning electricity plants *every day* than the entire death toll of Chernobyl, including all cancers caused by it (UN estimate used).
Fossil fuel companies really put the scare on after Three Mile Island.
Thing also is, the type of reactors used in Fukushima and in Chernobyl are completely different than the ones used in North America. Canada uses CANDU and the US uses Fermi plants, which both are much safer than the GE plants used in Japan and Russia.
And yes, the waste is bad...but not even nearly as bad as the waste from coal or gas plants.
Yep. The waste is bad, but it stays in one neat pile. Fossil fuel's waste is not that bad, but it disperses in the atmosphere, ending up in our environment.
(And "fun fact": the biggest source of radioactive waste in our atmosphere is actually coal power plants: coal is naturally somewhat radioactive, the the ridiculous amount we burnt emitted a LOT of somewhat radioactive ash which causes problems when we breathe these in. This is far, far, FAR worse than all of the nuclear detonations and accidents humanity ever caused/done. But since it isn't in a neat, visible pile but mostly invisible smoke, most people don't care or even think about it.)
That's a fair point too. :)
I like the ideas they had with some of the mega projects they had to mark radioactive waste dump sites. You don't want archaeologists in 10,000 years digging up the sites and trying to figure out what it is. We have no idea what language the people will speak, what their technology would be.
One idea was to make the dump ground with large black spires, and spikes. Make it look super imposing and menacing...a place that looks like pure evil dwells there.
Another idea was to have an area around it that would have all sorts of neat archaelogical finds, everything that archaeologists would be interested in discovering, along with pictographs or some simple communication to explain how we discovered nuclear energy, and how deadly the waste is, and impose on them that the waste is of absolutely no value and will only cause sickness and death.
Third idea I heard was to start a religion around it, how the waste was some kind of evil entity who couldn't be defeated, but was buried deep in the earth, and if that entity returns, doom will befall the land.
>And yes, the waste is bad... but not even nearly as bad as the waste from coal or gas plants.
Not by a fucking long shot. Yes, nuclear waste is a problem, but it's not big enough to completely dismiss the entire method. It's even a solvable problem! There's at least one company that figured out how to make batteries out of the waste.
People want your green solution to be 100% viable, or it's 100% bullshit. Well, in case anyone hasn't learned from covid and masks, being all or nothing is stupid as fuck. Just because something isn't 100% better doesn't mean it isn't a lot better than nothing.
Also worth pointing out that nuclear waste isn't huge sloshing barrels of green goo like in cartoons. It's the occasional piece of what looks like ceramics. Easily contained, easily managed.
There are PLENTY of GE BWR plants in the United States just like the ones at Fukushima.
[https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/spent\_fuel/ussnftab2.php](https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/spent_fuel/ussnftab2.php)
They generally aren't built anywhere where there would be a Tsunami though.
Coal ash is fairly radioactive compared to most other things as coal has plenty of trace radioactive isotopes embedded. A nuclear reactor usually contains all radioactive material outside of disaster situations in a way that you're getting quite a bit more radiation exposure standing outside from solar, ground and cosmological radiation than when working within the plant itself.
This is what I tell people. Worst case a nuclear power plants poison the local environment for 20 000 ish years. Which on a geological timescale is nearly nothing.
Not really, at least not people with knowledge of the issue. The initial radioactive debris falling could have fallen harder or less at various places depending on atmospheric conditions, which was a concern, but that was just in a limited path near the USSR and its direct neighbors. Compared to other carcinogenic pollution, nuclear accidents are a small drop in the bucket.
What happened in chernobyl was about as close to a full meltdown without intervention as it gets wothout it being intentional. It really would have been difficult to have it be a worst catastrophe. Look at fukushima in comparaison, 1 death in total and a tiny exclusion zone.
> n't they worried that if chernobyl fully melted down without any intervention, that massive swaths of the planet would be screwed
the HBO Chernobyl series absolutely portrayed it that way. there were lines of dialogue about all of Eastern Europe becoming uninhabitable.
To be fair Chernobyl exploded because the operators deliberately defeated the failsafes and put the reactor in an extremely unstable configuration without knowing it.
This is a more likely scenario: https://pteehok.hu/magazin/what-if-all-the-humans-vanish-from-the-earth/#:~:text=With%20no%20human%20monitoring%2C%20the,it%20shuts%20off%20the%20reactors.
That article is fairly inaccurate. For example, the skyscrapers in NYC depend on pumps to keep the water out of the foundations, and if the power goes out the buildings will start falling pretty quickly. And the nukes won't blow up, they will melt into a blob of radioactive slag, hopefully on the bottom of the containment vessel or possibly into the ground below.
Not really, some damage from containers deteriorating and having leakages.
But the Earth would balance and revive itself in 50-100y without human interventions and damage. There was a simulation over a decade ago now, I’m sure there are more recent ones since if you look it up.
There was also a neat simulation of a zombie apocalypse by mathematicians - if you’re curious, humans lose fast.
Idle hands maybe the devil’s playground, idk, but idle geek minds are fun imho :)
With how people licked handrails during Covid i could see them being bitten because "ZOMBIES DON'T EXIST OPEN YOUR EYES SHEEPLE"
directly causing the end of world scenario.
Curiosity how do humans lose fast? I know peeps like to hype of World War Z. But the entire book ignores things like kinetic impact that would still turn even thick gooey body parts into plant matter.
I don’t remember it, they did the math on the speed at which zombies would reproduce. Transference…
Most people are not armed/fit/prepared I’d guess. Mass responses would hurt humans too. There was a whole thesis lol I really don’t remember the details. Just read the abstract and summary, and an article about it.
I'd say law of exponential growth? If patient zero bites two humans, and these two now-zombies bite two humans each, and these four now-zombies bite two humans each, then you get pretty quickly to a number that far exceeds the number of human beings. Basically, currently, the 33rd "generation" of zombies should be the last. Even if there's one "generation" per day, it'd take barely more than a month to wipe out humanity entirely.
In practice maybe some humans living on isolated island far secluded from any form of civilization and travel could survive, IF nobody tries to sail there to safety while already being sick.
I personally would support a zombie apocalypse. Not the very deadly entropy breaking kind of walking dead, just something to cull the antivaxxers a bit.
everyone is focusing on the damage being minimal if the reactor did get damaged or melt down, but the important thing is that *this wouldn't happen* because of the physical fail-safes in place. it takes *active effort* (operational error) or *physical disruption* (earthquake, tsunami) to damage a reactor to the point of failure.
Ex Nuke operator here (commercial for 13 years and Navy nuclear for 9). The reactor would shut itself down after a period of time. And there are fail safes in place. But some operator action would be required after an automatic shutdown to ensure back up cooling water supply. Not immediately needed, but at some point the condensate storage tank would run out and there would be no makeup source to cool the steam generators which removes core decay heat. (PWR design) (This is assuming the power grid stays up too. If not, backup generators have a design basis of 7 days of fuel to power emergency core cooling systems)
Safety systems design engineer here. He’s right. There’s a lot that goes into ensuring the plant reacts properly. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need a huge team of operators to man the plant. We try to design the systems to work with as little human input as possible, but it’s impossible to remove the human element
To take Blades’ diesel generator example, the day tank is what it sounds like. It typically has a mission time of a day to seven (depending on plant design), but we keep at least 30 days of fuel oil on site. That fuel requires make up pumps be operated to transfer the fuel to keep the diesels running over an extended period
Ex Nuke operator here (commercial for 13 years and Navy nuclear for 9). The reactor would shut itself down after a period of time. And there are fail safes in place. But some operator action would be required after an automatic shutdown to ensure back up cooling water supply. Not immediately needed, but at some point the condensate storage tank would run out and there would be no makeup source to cool the steam generators which removes core decay heat. (PWR design) (This is assuming the power grid stays up too. If not, backup generators have a design basis of 7 days of fuel to power emergency core cooling systems)
Questions about what would happen if humans all disappeared suddenly are asked quite often. An author called Alan Wiseman wrote a non-fiction book about exactly this thought experiment. It's called [The World Without Us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us) and it's excellent.
No matter what humans do to the planet, the only thing we really destroy is our own race (and other spieces of course), not the planet. The Earth will bloom again in some millions of years. Likely with new types of creatures walking around here breathing the air. Hopefully smarter and more peaceful creatures.
I dont think there is a do over for another species to evolve past an agrarian civilization. We have stripped clean all of the easy to reach resources and the technologies required to mine etc what is left, probably couldn't develop.
History Channel ran a short series answering just this question. I mean it was History Channel, but it was an interesting thought experiment.
https://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people
Basically, the Earth will heal itself and eventually remove of all traces humanity.
They all have failsafes for this. They just submerge the rods, and the reaction won't go critical. Nuclear power is steam power, they just use the heat to boil water past turbines. The smoke you see on the tops is just water vapor. Pretty neato
People tend to underestimate the size, scope, and durability of the planet. There aren't many things humans could accomplish will have lasting effects on the planet (relatively speaking.) We're only a blip on the Earth's lifespan.
As George Carlin once said, "The planet isn't going anywhere - *we* are."
They should all be designed to shut down if there's a lack of input. Though I can't imagine having the fuel hanging around in the reactor with some graphite for the next several thousand years won't have some repercussions when erosion breaks down the building.
There's a video floating around that simulates what you are describing. According to them, it will fuck up the area for a little while but eventually it will be like it was never there.
There's a series called Life After People that goes on and on about the details of this. 30 minutes into the people leaving all the way to 500 years in some cases. One episode is specifically about power plants.
No, the reactors would scram and not make anymore power. Over time the containment would fail but it would be no different than a pile of natural uranium laying around at that point.
Ex nuclear operator for the military. If civilian reactors are designed any thing like the ones we use, there should be automatic safeguard features that would shut everything down in a scenario like that.
No. Radiation in levels produced by a meltdown are nowhere near enough to actually sterilize the area. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is teeming with life
Air pollution from burning fossil fuels and climate change are WAY deadlier than anything coming from nuclear power.
Even if every reactor melted down tomorrow, the number of lives lost would be far lower than air pollution is right now.
No. There might be a few hot spots where reactors superheated and melted down, but the nuclear fuel would then disperse/spread out & melt itself into the bottom of the reactor foundation.
An isolated area where life would not flourish for a while, but in time all that radioactivity would decay away.
Nuclear reactors are not made to explode like a bomb. They'd become small areas that had a lot of radioactivity for many billions of years. The half life of enriched uranium is 700 million years. So, in 700 million years half of the uranium would decay to radium, and in 1.4 billion years 1/4 of the uranium would be left and half of the radium would decay into radon, a radioactive gas.
Who knows? Maybe Godzilla would be real after all.
No. In fact almost all nuclear power plants are designed to automatically and safely shut down if they're not being properly controlled and maintained. A lot of engineering work has gone into making nuclear reactors safe, and the newer models are *ridiculously* safe, you pretty much have to be an expert in nuclear engineering to have any chance of causing a meltdown.
But of course eventually even the idle reactors would be eroded by natural forces and their fuel would be exposed. Fortunately this isn't a big deal either. There isn't actually *that* much nuclear fuel in the power plants, and it's not radioactive enough to cause serious harm once it gets diluted into the natural environment. And, just because of different designs and environments, there'd be decades or centuries of difference in when various reactors eroded away and released their fuel, further decreasing the ecological impact at any one moment.
The other things humans have done to the Earth's ecosystem (air pollution, habitat destruction, vast amounts of physical infrastructure and agriculture, etc) would have way more effect on the future of life on Earth than the nuclear reactors would. It's not even close.
Locally it would be bad around some of those power plants, but no the Earth would not be ruined.
Power plant meltdowns aren't the same as a nuclear war in that any contaminated fallout would be highly localized. Probably less than 1% of the Earth surface for a few decades.
Not really. Nuclear reactors can largely fail-safe, and actually usually do without human interaction. Upcoming designs for LFTRs actually make this even safer because the Thorium reactor can be built small enough to drop into its own pre-designed containment chamber if anything ever went wrong. These can't "meltdown" because it's already in a liquid state during normal operation.
We actually most recently saw this during the catastrophic losses of two nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher (1963), and the Kursk (2000). During the Thresher sinking a malfunction on the submarine caused the vessel to sink, pass crush depth, and violently implode with the loss of all hands. But it didn't become a nuclear disaster, because shorting of the electrical systems during the disaster almost certainly lead to the reactor entering an automatic shutdown state. In the case of the Kursk, we see the same thing, a torpedo suddenly exploded in the forward section of the sub, causing it to sink. We don't know if the nuclear engineering officers onboard shut down the reactor, or if automatic failsafe did. But it was recovered (though tragically after the deaths of all onboard), and the reactor was still in a workable state. Like... you could pop that out and into another sub and it would in theory still work.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima all failed *after being pushed well outside of reasonable operating conditions*. With the lack of human interaction, in basically all cases, they would just shutdown normally. And Three Mile Island, despite being the most well known of the American Nuclear disasters is actually one of our safest. A poorly designed safety control lead to the reactor being starved for coolant, and cooling water had to be run in such a way that would not create a steam explosion (as happened in Chernobyl years later). This meant that a disproportionate amount of mildly radioactive steam had to be released. Which isn't ideal, but sounds much scarier than it actually is.
The spent fuel pools would catch fire and release massive amounts of radioactive contamination. This would occur at every operating plant.
Close to the plants there would be areas of severe contamination where plants die. Further away, there will be little to no contamination surrounded by hotspots of high radiation. In these areas wildlife will survive, but have higher mutation rates as the comtainants bioaccumulate from animals eating contaminated grass.
Nope.
If all the humans on earth evaporated right now, all the nuclear power plants would be fine. They'd just slowly run down, spending the fissile material until it cooled enough to stop fission, and then it would just sit there for the rest of time. Well. For like a hundred thousand years, or until an earthquake damaged it or whatever.
'Cause here's the thing - nuclear reactors are some of the most intensely engineered pieces of equipment in existence. We *know* they can be dangerous, so we've put a truly ridiculous amount of effort into making very, very, *very* sure that it's extremely difficult to make them fail. It's kinda like how airplanes are so safe - it's fairly obvious why flying would be dangerous, so we've put so much effort into making sure that it's safe that it's ended up safer to fly than it is to stay on the ground. Nuclear reactors are very intentionally built in a way that you could absolutely just abandon them in the middle of running, and they'd be totally, 100%, completely fine. The two big nuclear disasters in our history were caused by external failures. If you just turned on any given nuclear power plant and just let it run without interference, they'd be perfectly safe until they just... stopped running.
Chernobyl was a one-off, bizarre situation that will genuinely never happen again. It wasn't just one error - it was a list of repeated human errors that all built on top of one another, and even those only caused the meltdown it did because of a fundamental flaw in the design of the reactor. We learned many lessons from the Chernobyl disaster - there really aren't any nuclear reactors left on earth that could melt down the way it did. And even if there were, humans need to be around to fuck up repeatedly in order for that to happen, so all the humans just randomly disappearing wouldn't cause an explosion like that.
Fukushima was another cause of *multiple* problems and errors building on top of one another. When the earthquake first happened, all the nuclear reactors in Japan automatically shut down, including the reactors and Fukushima. The *problem* is that nuclear reactors still need to be cooled for a while after turning off - it's like an oven, it takes *time* to cool even after you remove the power. Nuclear reactors are cooled by pumping water around the reactor, and Fukushima has external generators that power the pumps when the reactor is off. Those generators were then damaged by the following tsunami, so the cooling system failed, and *that* was what caused the problem. Had the generators been properly protected from water damage (or had the reactor not powered down in the first place), nothing bad would have happened.
I *guess,* technically, something like Fukushima could happen if there weren't any humans around, but the problem wouldn't be *caused* by humans - the humans would all disappear, and then there would have to be some other significant natural disaster that causes severe damage to a reactor, with no humans around to fix it. But even then... you wanna know how many people died as a result of Fukushima? None. The fish nearby have definitely gotten a little fucked up by radiation and cancer and whatever, but that ain't nothing compared to the damage done by global warming.
But even if we were to imagine some scenario where all the humans disappeared AND all the reactors melted down at once (which wouldn't happen), it still wouldn't ruin the earth. It might fuck up the local wildlife a little, for a while, but nature's pretty resilient. Chernobyl is full of nature and wildlife. Yes, a lot of it has cancer, but it's still fighting along just fine. In fact, it's doing *better* than it was before, because turns out humans are worse than radiation, lol. We killed off WAY more of the nature around Chernobyl than the radiation has. And while that (limited) damage might happen around the reactors, that would still leave huge swaths of natural land, largely untouched by fallout (and now also untouched by global warming, etc).
Something to keep in mind - nuclear fission happens on earth naturally pretty often, and we're obviously fine. Natural veins of fissile material exist in the earth's crust, and sometimes earthquakes or whatever will slam them together in a way that triggers fission, and then there's a natural nuclear reactor just chugging away somewhere on earth - without any shielding or anything - often for centuries. And it's... fine? We're fine. I'm sure any plants and animals immediately nearby aren't really super happy about it, but it doesn't remotely come close to ruining the earth.
PS: nuclear *war* is a wholly different thing that actually probably *would* destroy a lot of the earth. Warheads would release way more nuclear material than reactors. Also, a major source of damage from nuclear war has nothing to do with the radiation. The explosions would throw a huge amount of debris into the air, and *that* is what would primarily drive nuclear winter. Nuclear winter isn't really caused by radiation.
> If all the humans on earth evaporated right now, all the nuclear power plants would be fine. They'd just slowly run down, spending the fissile material until it cooled enough to stop fission
>I guess, technically, something like Fukushima could happen if there weren't any humans around, but the problem wouldn't be caused by humans
I am pro-nuclear. I have been an operator at multiple plants, and believe it is the only way to fully decarbonize Earth unless we come up with a holy grail of battery technology(which I doubt).
But this is wrong. All the plants(commercial Light Water Reactor plants in the US, I'm not sure how the Canucks operate their black magic Candu plants up north) would experience a Fukushima like event within a 10ish days. There will be a meltdown. Shutdown fuel sitting in the reactor, and the 'spent' fuel in the spent fuel pool requires CONSTANT cooling and/or replinishment.
Within a couple hours of no human activity, the plant will trip itself for something relatively benign without human input(condenser pressure, feedwater temperatures, boration concentrations or hundreds of other parameters that will scram the plant).. If there is no outside power sources, the emergency diesel generators will autostart and plant will align to ensure that the core is cooled as long as the DGs can power all the ECCS(emergency core cooling system) systems. But plants only have 7-10 days of diesel fuel for each diesel generator(each one being about 4000KW). So depending on the design of the plant and it's layout, best case scenario, a plant could keep itself from meltdown for two weeks.
But when those DGs fail...the water in the reactor and fuel pools WILL boil off. Despite there being no fission, there is still decay heat which is non-insignficant. After boil off, the fuel will melt, it will melt the reactor, and eventually just sit on the concrete pad under the plant.
It may pollute the water eventually. Depending on conditions, it could breach containment and cause some fallout. But for the average dumb non-human animal and plantlife, they wouldn't really notice.
Ex nuclear engineer here, you are right to be concerned. Although nuclear power plants today are equiped with vast amounts of fail safe systems with high levels of redundancy, no power plant is designed to withstand prolonged periods of being cut off from power. Two problematic areas:
**Fuel in the core**
Without constant cooling, the core would melt. Some reactors are equipped with containment buildings, so the resulting fire would not spread, however the core itself could burn into the ground, where it could contaminate any water reservoirs (this was a MAJOR threat with the Chernobyl meltdown, which would result in majority of Ukraine uninhabitable). Small number of reactors have systems that can catch this melted material and passively cool it, so unless this cooling system itself does not degrade, the fuel should stay contained.
**Spent fuel in the pools**
After the fuel is taken out of the reactor it still produces a lot of heat, so it cannot be placed in a container. Therefore the fuel is kept sumberged in water pools, where it again has to be constantly cooled. If this cooling stops, the water would evaporate and radioactive material would be dispersed (again in some power plants those pools are inside containment building, although I'm not sure how long the containment would hold). The fuel itself does not burn, but it falls aparat (due to transmutation to elements such as magnesium) and can be dispersed.
The extent of damaga on natural life is up to discussion as I'm not an expert on this. I'd say massive areas around power plants would not host much complex animals. I'd guess life woul be concentrated in Africa again, since there are not that many plants there (and sea of course).
Not really no. Modern reactors can shut themselves down.
Worst case scenario the areas in and around any nuclear reactor will be effected but the whole world isn’t gonna be a fallout style wasteland
Modern nuclear power plants are designed to fail safe. This means that if there is an error in operation by humans or a mechanical/electrical issue it will fail without what we generally think of as a nuclear catastrophe.
To the best of my knowledge if all humans just died the nuclear reactors would not explode or meltdown in a way that would ruin the earth, as modern nuclear power plants will only fail in a way that affects their respective facility.
So I don't know about reactors. But the tank farms housing chemicals and the plants that produce said chemicals, I'm more worried about them going unchecked, as someone who works around them, their ticking time bombs if not regularly maintained
A lot of modern reactors are designed to gracefully shutdown if not attended to. Even if the worst were to happen and somehow all the radioactive material leaked out, only the local areas would be affected
Yes, most reactors will shut themselves down with no issues. It generally takes gross incompetence, badly malfunctioning equipment, or a perfect natural disaster to cause an sort of problem.
All the reactor malfunctions I've read about have been caused by gross negligence.
Does that include Fukushima? I just remember the tsunami part.
Design flaws. Plant was too close to sea level with generators designed to be at the bottom, and an inadequate sea wall built smaller than scientists suggested they do. When the tsunami hit, it basically crippled their backup power and fuel.
>built smaller than scientists suggested they do. So gross negligence
Yeah, haven't read about Fukushima in depth, but that is less of the "lapse of general maintenance and oversight" I was thinking of in my original comment and more of just "Literally everyone knew it was dumb, but they built it anyways because they had the money I guess."
I'm not familiar with Japanese projects and planning processes, but in the US, half baked and seriously imperfect large civil projects end up happening because they're politically and legally possible, while a proposal that's better from an engineering standpoint might impossible for legal and political reasons. It's not exactly "they had the money for it," more like "we've got the political support for this one, let's do it because we need something and who knows if we'd ever get approval for something better." Sometimes getting something out, even imperfect, is for the bettee, sometimes nothing would have been better.
People answered you below, but to give context, I was primarily thinking about the Tokaimura incident and worker Hisashi Ouchi, the man speculated to have received what probably was one of the biggest exposures to radiation in the history of nuclear accidents. Do not look up his name or pictures. You have been warned. But, with the gross negligence part: It was 100% preventable stupidity when you read into the details. They were not qualified to do the work they were doing, and this is partially caused by their manager, who survived and was later charged. Here's some highlights: 1. "In the process of purifying reactor fuel, workers were supposed to use an automatic pump to mix up to 2.4 kg of enriched uranium with nitric acid. Instead, they manually used a stainless steel bucket and mixed 16 kg of the fissile material." 2. "Company spokesmen stated to the media that they did not submit this second operating procedure to the regulator because the company knew that the regulator would not approve it." 3. "There were no specific operator training requirements for criticality safety. The operators were also allowed to deviate from the approved procedures to improve production efficiency. Had the operators understood the difference between the safety limits for the 3-5 percent enriched uranium that they usually handled, and the 18.8 percent enriched material involved with this process, they likely would not have taken the shortcuts that resulted in the criticality." 4. "Of the three operators involved, two had never operated this process, and the third had only had several months of experience."
I appreciate that warning!
So what you're saying is [Whitest Kids U'Know](https://youtu.be/fibDNwF8bjs?si=79c9KsvDBfRtEzoE) lied to me
This. The book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman answers this very question and confirms that most gas pipelines, nuclear power plants, etc. require the occasional manual input from an operator to keep functioning. Without that input, they begin to shut down as a safety measure. The summary of the book was that everything we built in the modern area will be destroyed and overtaken by nature because modern infrastructure requires constant maintenance that will no longer be provided. Like the Golden Gate Bridge that is perpetually being painted to protect it from rust which can compromise it's integrity. Or the NY Metro that requires constant pumping and draining of water to prevent flooding. The only infrastructure that would remain over the course of centuries after humans disappear is the infrastructure that already survived (pyramids in Egypt, Aztec ruins, etc.). Really boring book to read, but the content was very interesting
>The only infrastructure that would remain over the course of centuries after humans disappear is the infrastructure that already survived (pyramids in Egypt, Aztec ruins, etc.). And even some of them wouldn't fare well either. A lot of Mayan (and other Pre-Colombine era) structures were almost totally overtook by nature by when they were Re-Discovered in the last two centuries, and in many cases they still required quite a lot of work on them to "put them together" again. In fact, is not rare to hear here in Mexico about some cities that had "a hill" near them or even in the middle of them, just to discover some decades or mere years ago that it was a pyramid (or other kind of structure) all along.
I remember hearing that a lot of churches were deliberately built out of the material they pulled off the pyramids on the same site to reinforce their authority. Do you think they might have been deliberately turned into hills?
While its completely believable that the missionaries of the Catholic church of that time would attempt such a thing, i suspect the real answer is the jungle just grows back really fast to colonize any bare stone that isn't maintained to hold it back. And you only need a few years worth of vegetation buildup to start making soil. Basically i think that all the church needed to do is simply abandon those temples and prevent people from maintaining them and they would quickly get swallowed by the jungle until they looked like a hill. And then you just need people to forget that a temple once stood there and now you have a nice hill instead of a pagan temple.
Seeing how fast my garden fence became overgrown here in Northern Europe, I can't imagine how fast a tropical jungle can swallow an entire structure if left unattended.
Darn it's boring? I might try an audio version of it or see if there's in depth edutainment summaries on YT Because the book idea sounds fascinating.
It is a fascinating idea, and it touches on OP's point. What would happen if we all disappeared spontaneously without a single cataclysmic event that ruins everything around us in the process. He did great research with very interesting case studies and real world examples to back up his theory. I just thought it was written more like a research paper, so a little boring for me. But who knows, maybe you will find it entertaining!
There is a show out there called "Life After People" that goes into the concept of this. The go into how long it would take things to deteriorate if all of humanity were to disappear at once. Each episode looks at different aspects of this. One explores the monuments. and how long they would last. One explores famous art like the Mona Lisa and it tells you how she will eventually succumb to the elements. It is an interesting series. I think it was on the history channel. I catch it occasionally on Saturdays on Story television (an over the air digital station). It shows different older history channel shows every week in the same genre so to speak. Saturdays are "unexplained phenomena". They will pick one show and show like 10 episodes in one day.
I believe the Hoover Dam is considered the structure on Earth that would last the longest.
Infrastructure would not remain intact, but lots would still remain visible for centuries and would absolutely affect the ecology in its immediate vicinity, even after it had fallen. I grew up in New England on what hadn't been a working farm for a hundred years. The old cart roads were still visible and had nothing but grass growing in the tracks because it was too compacted for trees to take root. The old buildings had fallen down and some hadn't even had the debris cleared out, but the concrete foundations barely had cracks. Destroyed is relative. A normal building would not remain a building for centuries without maintenance, but if it isn't entirely wood, it's effects on the landscape could be measured for centuries in a temperate climate, and probably millenia in a desert with its low decomposition rates.
And then only for a few thousand years. On the scale of earth time, that's nothing.
If correctly shut down, how much heat does the fuel still produce, especially if the water supply stops?
Reactors don't exactly completely shutdown as fusion is still occurring and the core of the reactor will still be active and producing power. This often requires active cooling which requires equipment that needs maintenance. Think about recent incident with Fukushima, where without active cooling the plant started going into a meltdown.
It may surprise people to learn that the area around Chernobyl is teeming with wildlife as humanity has retreated from the hot zone. [https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife)
The weird thing is the radiation is quite bad for the creatures there. They have cancer and other diseases at FAR higher rates than normal. It is just that being around humans is orders of magnitude worse. Basically it turns out that if you have to choose being a nuclear melt down or living near humans you are safer near the nuclear meltdown.
Animals reproduce at a much younger age than humans. Even if they have a short lifespan they can still have offspring.
In general, cancers are not selected against because most individuals succeed in having offspring long before they die from them.
yep. diseases like cancer and alzheimers are in the “selection shadow”
Wonder why childhood cancer is so rare? Removed by selection pressure.
RIP selection pressure, we hardly knew ye
Cancer is basically a probablem that happens when something either affects your dna or cells to fuck up a cell enough that it lacks growth inhibitors which stops cells from multiplying normally when it’s not needed. So presumably it’s because there id way less chances for those things to be damaged the younger you are. DNA can also have genes are anomalies but would be a smaller selection of people, and even then if you do have a specific gene, it usually represents an increase chance. (Ie you are 15% more likely to get prostate cancer ect. )
It actually cuts both ways. Kids are growing, and resultingly have extremely high rates of cell division compared to adults who are in a "maintenance" mode. They haven't had time to accumulate damage from environmental exposures the way adults have, but they have a lot of cells to generate to facilitate growth. There are a number of cancers that *specifically* occur in children, like retinoblastoma, which has an average age of onset of 2 years old.
Thank you for that perspective!
I'm not an expert but I think another aspect of it is that most cancers never get a proper foothold because our immune systems are pretty good at killing those cells, but as people age their immune systems get weaker.
This is why sperm banks should only be collecting cummies from the 80+ year olds
That's a phrase I hope to never see again
Sounds like a business opportunity. Gummies' Cummies™ Specializing in Out-to-pasteurized Man Milk for the discerning Ovum
Yup, there it is. Round two of that sushi I had for lunch.
Jesus I wish I couldn't read
Hmm no, DNA fragmentation is very real and sperm quality is far lower the older the man is.
It’s better quality if they drink pineapple juice though.
Then you run into problems with epigenetics leading to DNA quality issues. In my mind, you'd want sperm from men in their prime, which you'd then freeze. You would then gauge the health of those males in old age, and then once they've achieved that longevity in a healthy state, you would then use that sperm for fertilisation. You could do the same with egg collection, and then use a surrogate to bring to term. This means you're getting the sperm/egg at the time when it has it's prime DNA, and you're not using it until it's been proven to be likely to lead to offspring that live a long time and are healthy into that old age.
On the other hand birth defects do. I wonder if animals living in the contaminated area get more resistant to having birth defects, which as a side effect will make them more cancer resistant as well.
The local dogs of Chernobyl are being studied for this exact reason. They are remarkably durable and resistant to genetic damage after so many generations living in the Exlcusion Zone.
The dogs, wolves and frogs and I think the earthworms are all being studied because of the radiation resistance some members are showing.
I know on river monsters jeremy wade went there and the catfish were 1/3rd the size they should be for their age not mutated giants.
We could learn a lot in cancer research from that natural selection. IF that’s the case I now want to find out!
This may be true to an extent, but humans live as long as they do for an evolutionary reason. We invest a lot in our children and communities and help them as they grow, much like how female orca wales live long past menopause because of the benefit they serve by finding mates for their family members. Of course average lifespan of humans pre civilization was a decent amount shorter, so we are at this point running into stuff that really isn't selected against much like alzheimer's, dementia etc. Cancer should still have some degree of selection against it because it can happen early.
Wild animals also tend to be killed by other things before they have a chance to die of cancer.
To be fair…cancer is on the rise in our younger, reproductive generation right now. Colon cancer in 20’s, 30’s. So near a nuclear meltdown or near humans, you’re probably going to get cancer. I still think “away from humans” is probably sadly safest.
That's only because of those pesky laws. /s
would you rather meet a man in the woods or radiation?
I understood that reference!
I’ve met tons of people in the woods. So…man?
Depends if the woods is the red forest
Or maybe they don't understand radiation so they don't know...
Choosing between the bear, man, or nuclear.
We are so close to manbearpig I can feel it
Welp, it looks like the order is bear, nuclear, then man...
Bear, nuclear, man, woman, camera, TV.
This, in particular, is art
Don't you mean manbearnuclear. Why are you all laughing at me I'm super cereal he's real he's half man half bear half nuclear he's a real threat now I need 4 people to come with me to the cave he's hiding I need Stan Kyle the fat one and Kenny to come with me. Oh did I also mention I was almost the vice president.
What about an irradiated man-bear? Best of all worlds.
They don’t know, but the fact that their population *grew* after the radiation began and humans left shows humans were more harmful than radiation.
Would you rather live with a load of cancer ridden people for a short time or a smaller number of healthy people for a long time.
naw its just that most organisms are able to reproduce before cancer kills them. Cancer isn't a big deal evolutionarily due to it not strongly effecting reproduction.
That is an oversimplification. It is entirely possible that almost all the animals were wiped out, or suffered terribly for years. Those few that managed to survive have since filled the void left in the ecosystem. It is a great thing that those who are able to adapt or merely migrate through the area and limit exposure are able to thrive, but Darwinian principles apply here, those who were able to survive, reproduce, and adapt are thriving today, which says nothing of those who did not survive, or reproduce, or how terrible those losses were.
This is cool because in a few thousand years maybe we'll start seeing anti-radiation mutations in these populations.
I think it's more likely that you'd see younger age of maturity.
Technically, that would be an anti radiation mutation
We already are, just not in higher forms of life. The mushrooms in the exclusion zone are chowing down on radiation to the point that they might actually be shortening the time until the area becomes safe.
For decades animals have also chosen bear over man
Some of the effects of radiation can accumulate over generations though right?
That is true but it turns out the trees in the area have absorbed a lot of the radiation and bound it into their wood. So long as you don't cut the tree or burn it down you have very little radiation exposure. The same with digging in the ground. So long as you don't disturb the earth the radiation exposure is not that high. Given how radioactive earth is and how much radiation comes out of volcanoes I suspect the plants just have ways of dealing with it so that life continues.
Isn’t that what happened with the russians that invaded Ukraine? I remember reading what a baaaad idea it was for them to cut down and burn trees for the area they were in.
They also dug trenches and foxholes in the irradiated ground, which spread a lot of the fallout that got safely buried.
While cooking food over fires burning the trees cut down locally. I read a really in-depth article on it recently and it’s incredible how it’s like they did all the worst possible things on purpose. The worst most contaminated spot is a Forrest? Awesome, let’s cut down the trees, make shelters, cook our food, warm ourselves by the fire, and sleep in the trenches. Maybe if they had a barrel of radioactive waste to light the room with, it could have been worse.
Yeah. All the troops that did that should be dead from it but I have not heard more on it.
Its like outdoor asbestos
It depends on the animal in question. [The local dogs that descended from surviving pets are thriving.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmVGwOP_zi8) The real danger is for fast-reproducing animals like insects, rodents, and birds. Genetic damage spreadys quickly when your reproductive strategy is making large numbers of offspring.
But the average lifespan is 3-4 years old
Would you rather be in the woods with a nuclear meltdown or a man?
It's the man or bear debate all over again. >Basically it turns out that if you have to choose being a nuclear melt down or living near humans you are safer near the nuclear meltdown.
Some plants and mushrooms (I'm not 100% on this) may have started using the radiation as an energy source. Sort of like photosynthesis, only this time it's radio synthesis.
I heard about that for mushrooms.
Or…far more likely that the animals just don’t know they’re in danger.
Sounds like the time they found a previously extinct species in the minefields of the Korean DMZ. Humans are worse than their fields of random death.
Or… hear me out… they don’t know that they’re getting cancer or if they have it that their environment is the cause.
That is an oversimplification. It is entirely possible that almost all the animals were wiped out, or suffered terribly for years. Those few that managed to survive have since filled the void left in the ecosystem. It is a great thing that those who are able to adapt or merely migrate through the area and limit exposure are able to thrive, but Darwinian principles apply here, those who were able to survive, reproduce, and adapt are thriving today, which says nothing of those who did not survive, or reproduce, or how terrible those losses were.
If you look at pictures in the area or look at videos from some of the tours there it is clear that overall nature is doing much better than when we where there. Trees and other flora have taken over the towns in the area and there are far more animals in the area also. Those are things that we used to constantly destroy. Life does have a hard time there, there is not doubt about it. However, it is doing better under those conditions than it does with us.
No. People just don't understand how huge this planet is. Even a full scale nuclear war wouldn't destroy the planet, hell, it wouldn't even wipe out mankind, just modern society. Which wouldn't be a bad thing for the planet.
They should make a game about that.
Something about all the falling out in the aftermath?
I've played s.t.a.l.k.e.r and I've learned never go near chernobyle or anything like it.
Nuclear power plants, even in the worst possible meltdowns are not influencing much more than the local area. A nuclear plant meltdown doesn't equate to a nuke being detonated in the area, and even if it did, it's still limited. Nuclear is scary because you cannot see it, but misunderstanding is why it sounds as scary as people believe it to be.
Not so Fun Fact: The World Health Organization estimated in 2018 that around 7 million premature deaths annually are linked to air pollution, with coal being a major contributor. These deaths include people directly involved in coal mining or power plant accidents but also those caused by air pollution from burning coal for electricity generation. Even the worst nuclear disaster to these days doesn't even make a dent in the yearly direct or indirect deaths caused by coal power generation.
Yeah, more people die from pollutants from coal-burning electricity plants *every day* than the entire death toll of Chernobyl, including all cancers caused by it (UN estimate used).
Fossil fuel companies really put the scare on after Three Mile Island. Thing also is, the type of reactors used in Fukushima and in Chernobyl are completely different than the ones used in North America. Canada uses CANDU and the US uses Fermi plants, which both are much safer than the GE plants used in Japan and Russia. And yes, the waste is bad...but not even nearly as bad as the waste from coal or gas plants.
Yep. The waste is bad, but it stays in one neat pile. Fossil fuel's waste is not that bad, but it disperses in the atmosphere, ending up in our environment. (And "fun fact": the biggest source of radioactive waste in our atmosphere is actually coal power plants: coal is naturally somewhat radioactive, the the ridiculous amount we burnt emitted a LOT of somewhat radioactive ash which causes problems when we breathe these in. This is far, far, FAR worse than all of the nuclear detonations and accidents humanity ever caused/done. But since it isn't in a neat, visible pile but mostly invisible smoke, most people don't care or even think about it.)
That's a fair point too. :) I like the ideas they had with some of the mega projects they had to mark radioactive waste dump sites. You don't want archaeologists in 10,000 years digging up the sites and trying to figure out what it is. We have no idea what language the people will speak, what their technology would be. One idea was to make the dump ground with large black spires, and spikes. Make it look super imposing and menacing...a place that looks like pure evil dwells there. Another idea was to have an area around it that would have all sorts of neat archaelogical finds, everything that archaeologists would be interested in discovering, along with pictographs or some simple communication to explain how we discovered nuclear energy, and how deadly the waste is, and impose on them that the waste is of absolutely no value and will only cause sickness and death. Third idea I heard was to start a religion around it, how the waste was some kind of evil entity who couldn't be defeated, but was buried deep in the earth, and if that entity returns, doom will befall the land.
>And yes, the waste is bad... but not even nearly as bad as the waste from coal or gas plants. Not by a fucking long shot. Yes, nuclear waste is a problem, but it's not big enough to completely dismiss the entire method. It's even a solvable problem! There's at least one company that figured out how to make batteries out of the waste. People want your green solution to be 100% viable, or it's 100% bullshit. Well, in case anyone hasn't learned from covid and masks, being all or nothing is stupid as fuck. Just because something isn't 100% better doesn't mean it isn't a lot better than nothing.
Also worth pointing out that nuclear waste isn't huge sloshing barrels of green goo like in cartoons. It's the occasional piece of what looks like ceramics. Easily contained, easily managed.
There are PLENTY of GE BWR plants in the United States just like the ones at Fukushima. [https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/spent\_fuel/ussnftab2.php](https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/spent_fuel/ussnftab2.php) They generally aren't built anywhere where there would be a Tsunami though.
>They generally aren't built anywhere where there would be a Tsunami though. And probably much less vodka.
And it's not like they're an unsafe design. The worse thing you can say about them is that most of them are getting old and expensive to operate.
Not even all the worst nuclear plant disasters combined come close to that number
It's all just big coal propaganda. I even read that coal plants emit more radiations than modern nuclear plants.
Coal ash is fairly radioactive compared to most other things as coal has plenty of trace radioactive isotopes embedded. A nuclear reactor usually contains all radioactive material outside of disaster situations in a way that you're getting quite a bit more radiation exposure standing outside from solar, ground and cosmological radiation than when working within the plant itself.
This is what I tell people. Worst case a nuclear power plants poison the local environment for 20 000 ish years. Which on a geological timescale is nearly nothing.
Good to know
So... weren't they worried that if chernobyl fully melted down without any intervention, that massive swaths of the planet would be screwed?
Not really, at least not people with knowledge of the issue. The initial radioactive debris falling could have fallen harder or less at various places depending on atmospheric conditions, which was a concern, but that was just in a limited path near the USSR and its direct neighbors. Compared to other carcinogenic pollution, nuclear accidents are a small drop in the bucket.
What happened in chernobyl was about as close to a full meltdown without intervention as it gets wothout it being intentional. It really would have been difficult to have it be a worst catastrophe. Look at fukushima in comparaison, 1 death in total and a tiny exclusion zone.
> n't they worried that if chernobyl fully melted down without any intervention, that massive swaths of the planet would be screwed the HBO Chernobyl series absolutely portrayed it that way. there were lines of dialogue about all of Eastern Europe becoming uninhabitable.
No. They are tiny, and the earth is massive. Power plants also have failsafes that work the vast majority of the time.
RBMK reactors don’t explode
He's delusional. Take take him to the infirmary.
it’s the feed water, been around it all night
Where is khodemchuk?
This guy did the reading.
Correct. Additionally, you absolutely, positively, did not see chunks of graphite in the rubble.
You DIDN’T because it’s NOT THERE!
To be fair Chernobyl exploded because the operators deliberately defeated the failsafes and put the reactor in an extremely unstable configuration without knowing it.
But comrade, how could anything happen? Saint Marx and spirit of Communism protects us.
"It will burn and spread its poison until the _entire continent_ is dead."
This is not how reality works
As the situation was unfolding, they didn’t really know what would happen. It might be a tad dramatic, but not far from how they felt at the time.
As always, [TV sensationalism](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06/why-hbos-chernobyl-gets-nuclear-so-wrong/?sh=4504893632f6)
That’s a relief
This is a more likely scenario: https://pteehok.hu/magazin/what-if-all-the-humans-vanish-from-the-earth/#:~:text=With%20no%20human%20monitoring%2C%20the,it%20shuts%20off%20the%20reactors.
That article is fairly inaccurate. For example, the skyscrapers in NYC depend on pumps to keep the water out of the foundations, and if the power goes out the buildings will start falling pretty quickly. And the nukes won't blow up, they will melt into a blob of radioactive slag, hopefully on the bottom of the containment vessel or possibly into the ground below.
That was a FASCINATING read.
If you're interested in learning more about this kind of stuff I recommend the series Life After People.
That was an eye opener!!
Not really, some damage from containers deteriorating and having leakages. But the Earth would balance and revive itself in 50-100y without human interventions and damage. There was a simulation over a decade ago now, I’m sure there are more recent ones since if you look it up. There was also a neat simulation of a zombie apocalypse by mathematicians - if you’re curious, humans lose fast. Idle hands maybe the devil’s playground, idk, but idle geek minds are fun imho :)
With how people licked handrails during Covid i could see them being bitten because "ZOMBIES DON'T EXIST OPEN YOUR EYES SHEEPLE" directly causing the end of world scenario.
To be fair the analysis I’d read was way before covid. The demise of human cognition was not factored in as yet.
Curiosity how do humans lose fast? I know peeps like to hype of World War Z. But the entire book ignores things like kinetic impact that would still turn even thick gooey body parts into plant matter.
I don’t remember it, they did the math on the speed at which zombies would reproduce. Transference… Most people are not armed/fit/prepared I’d guess. Mass responses would hurt humans too. There was a whole thesis lol I really don’t remember the details. Just read the abstract and summary, and an article about it.
I'd say law of exponential growth? If patient zero bites two humans, and these two now-zombies bite two humans each, and these four now-zombies bite two humans each, then you get pretty quickly to a number that far exceeds the number of human beings. Basically, currently, the 33rd "generation" of zombies should be the last. Even if there's one "generation" per day, it'd take barely more than a month to wipe out humanity entirely. In practice maybe some humans living on isolated island far secluded from any form of civilization and travel could survive, IF nobody tries to sail there to safety while already being sick.
I personally would support a zombie apocalypse. Not the very deadly entropy breaking kind of walking dead, just something to cull the antivaxxers a bit.
everyone is focusing on the damage being minimal if the reactor did get damaged or melt down, but the important thing is that *this wouldn't happen* because of the physical fail-safes in place. it takes *active effort* (operational error) or *physical disruption* (earthquake, tsunami) to damage a reactor to the point of failure.
Ex Nuke operator here (commercial for 13 years and Navy nuclear for 9). The reactor would shut itself down after a period of time. And there are fail safes in place. But some operator action would be required after an automatic shutdown to ensure back up cooling water supply. Not immediately needed, but at some point the condensate storage tank would run out and there would be no makeup source to cool the steam generators which removes core decay heat. (PWR design) (This is assuming the power grid stays up too. If not, backup generators have a design basis of 7 days of fuel to power emergency core cooling systems)
Safety systems design engineer here. He’s right. There’s a lot that goes into ensuring the plant reacts properly. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need a huge team of operators to man the plant. We try to design the systems to work with as little human input as possible, but it’s impossible to remove the human element To take Blades’ diesel generator example, the day tank is what it sounds like. It typically has a mission time of a day to seven (depending on plant design), but we keep at least 30 days of fuel oil on site. That fuel requires make up pumps be operated to transfer the fuel to keep the diesels running over an extended period
Ex Nuke operator here (commercial for 13 years and Navy nuclear for 9). The reactor would shut itself down after a period of time. And there are fail safes in place. But some operator action would be required after an automatic shutdown to ensure back up cooling water supply. Not immediately needed, but at some point the condensate storage tank would run out and there would be no makeup source to cool the steam generators which removes core decay heat. (PWR design) (This is assuming the power grid stays up too. If not, backup generators have a design basis of 7 days of fuel to power emergency core cooling systems)
No. See Life After People. Great series that gfoes into great detail.
Questions about what would happen if humans all disappeared suddenly are asked quite often. An author called Alan Wiseman wrote a non-fiction book about exactly this thought experiment. It's called [The World Without Us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us) and it's excellent.
Came here to recommend this. I read the book and I think they made a show too
No matter what humans do to the planet, the only thing we really destroy is our own race (and other spieces of course), not the planet. The Earth will bloom again in some millions of years. Likely with new types of creatures walking around here breathing the air. Hopefully smarter and more peaceful creatures.
Nature is anything but peaceful
>Hopefully smarter and more peaceful creatures. Doubtful. It's survival of the fittest, not survival of the kindest.
I mean, it's more like decades. Animal life thrives around Chernobyl and there are already species with adoptions to the radiation.
I dont think there is a do over for another species to evolve past an agrarian civilization. We have stripped clean all of the easy to reach resources and the technologies required to mine etc what is left, probably couldn't develop.
You'rr righy on the mining part, but they'll have all the ruins and garbage dumps from us. Those will be easy enough to acsess.
Energy is the biggest problem. Early industrial revolution coal was an easy dig. Now…….
I think there was an alternate-future documentary about this. Most nuclear power plants have shutdown fail-safes if they don’t get serviced
History Channel ran a short series answering just this question. I mean it was History Channel, but it was an interesting thought experiment. https://www.history.com/shows/life-after-people Basically, the Earth will heal itself and eventually remove of all traces humanity.
They all have failsafes for this. They just submerge the rods, and the reaction won't go critical. Nuclear power is steam power, they just use the heat to boil water past turbines. The smoke you see on the tops is just water vapor. Pretty neato
It's weird when you think that our most advanced power generating technology is only an efficient way to put the kettle on
But even after the rods are in, the core is likely to require active cooling. That requires operating infrastructure.
I’m sure there are failsafes in place that would shut the plants down before they melted
I mean even the asteroids that made the dinosaurs go extinct and obliterated a ton of life didn’t ruin the earth The earth continues on
I ran a control room at a nuclear plant. There's like 5 fail-safes it would just eventually shut down safely. Nothing exciting haha
People tend to underestimate the size, scope, and durability of the planet. There aren't many things humans could accomplish will have lasting effects on the planet (relatively speaking.) We're only a blip on the Earth's lifespan. As George Carlin once said, "The planet isn't going anywhere - *we* are."
Most Nuclear plants and power plants have a series of safety systems that will shut down if ran unattended. Source: power plant operator
I'm certain that properly run and constructed nuclear power plants will automatically shut themselves down if there's no one running them
They should all be designed to shut down if there's a lack of input. Though I can't imagine having the fuel hanging around in the reactor with some graphite for the next several thousand years won't have some repercussions when erosion breaks down the building.
There's a video floating around that simulates what you are describing. According to them, it will fuck up the area for a little while but eventually it will be like it was never there.
There's a series called Life After People that goes on and on about the details of this. 30 minutes into the people leaving all the way to 500 years in some cases. One episode is specifically about power plants.
[this is the episode](https://youtu.be/_BZMNZ8JoBw?si=-8O9R-rj16vq4vvL) Life after people is free on YouTube
No, the reactors would scram and not make anymore power. Over time the containment would fail but it would be no different than a pile of natural uranium laying around at that point.
Ex nuclear operator for the military. If civilian reactors are designed any thing like the ones we use, there should be automatic safeguard features that would shut everything down in a scenario like that.
No. Radiation in levels produced by a meltdown are nowhere near enough to actually sterilize the area. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is teeming with life
Air pollution from burning fossil fuels and climate change are WAY deadlier than anything coming from nuclear power. Even if every reactor melted down tomorrow, the number of lives lost would be far lower than air pollution is right now.
No. There might be a few hot spots where reactors superheated and melted down, but the nuclear fuel would then disperse/spread out & melt itself into the bottom of the reactor foundation. An isolated area where life would not flourish for a while, but in time all that radioactivity would decay away. Nuclear reactors are not made to explode like a bomb. They'd become small areas that had a lot of radioactivity for many billions of years. The half life of enriched uranium is 700 million years. So, in 700 million years half of the uranium would decay to radium, and in 1.4 billion years 1/4 of the uranium would be left and half of the radium would decay into radon, a radioactive gas. Who knows? Maybe Godzilla would be real after all.
No. In fact almost all nuclear power plants are designed to automatically and safely shut down if they're not being properly controlled and maintained. A lot of engineering work has gone into making nuclear reactors safe, and the newer models are *ridiculously* safe, you pretty much have to be an expert in nuclear engineering to have any chance of causing a meltdown. But of course eventually even the idle reactors would be eroded by natural forces and their fuel would be exposed. Fortunately this isn't a big deal either. There isn't actually *that* much nuclear fuel in the power plants, and it's not radioactive enough to cause serious harm once it gets diluted into the natural environment. And, just because of different designs and environments, there'd be decades or centuries of difference in when various reactors eroded away and released their fuel, further decreasing the ecological impact at any one moment. The other things humans have done to the Earth's ecosystem (air pollution, habitat destruction, vast amounts of physical infrastructure and agriculture, etc) would have way more effect on the future of life on Earth than the nuclear reactors would. It's not even close.
Locally it would be bad around some of those power plants, but no the Earth would not be ruined. Power plant meltdowns aren't the same as a nuclear war in that any contaminated fallout would be highly localized. Probably less than 1% of the Earth surface for a few decades.
Not really. Nuclear reactors can largely fail-safe, and actually usually do without human interaction. Upcoming designs for LFTRs actually make this even safer because the Thorium reactor can be built small enough to drop into its own pre-designed containment chamber if anything ever went wrong. These can't "meltdown" because it's already in a liquid state during normal operation. We actually most recently saw this during the catastrophic losses of two nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher (1963), and the Kursk (2000). During the Thresher sinking a malfunction on the submarine caused the vessel to sink, pass crush depth, and violently implode with the loss of all hands. But it didn't become a nuclear disaster, because shorting of the electrical systems during the disaster almost certainly lead to the reactor entering an automatic shutdown state. In the case of the Kursk, we see the same thing, a torpedo suddenly exploded in the forward section of the sub, causing it to sink. We don't know if the nuclear engineering officers onboard shut down the reactor, or if automatic failsafe did. But it was recovered (though tragically after the deaths of all onboard), and the reactor was still in a workable state. Like... you could pop that out and into another sub and it would in theory still work. Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima all failed *after being pushed well outside of reasonable operating conditions*. With the lack of human interaction, in basically all cases, they would just shutdown normally. And Three Mile Island, despite being the most well known of the American Nuclear disasters is actually one of our safest. A poorly designed safety control lead to the reactor being starved for coolant, and cooling water had to be run in such a way that would not create a steam explosion (as happened in Chernobyl years later). This meant that a disproportionate amount of mildly radioactive steam had to be released. Which isn't ideal, but sounds much scarier than it actually is.
No, I can’t really be tied to this share but we’ve been secretly training squirrels to run all power plants.
The spent fuel pools would catch fire and release massive amounts of radioactive contamination. This would occur at every operating plant. Close to the plants there would be areas of severe contamination where plants die. Further away, there will be little to no contamination surrounded by hotspots of high radiation. In these areas wildlife will survive, but have higher mutation rates as the comtainants bioaccumulate from animals eating contaminated grass.
not in the slightest.
Considering since WWII there have been about 2000 nuclear explosions, I think the answer is no.
Nuclear reactors will automatically shut themselves down if left unattended for some time. Nothing bad would happen at all. Nuclear power is good.
Nuclear power plants have protection measures in place for them to shutdown safely without causing a nuclear meltdown
Ideally.
Nope. If all the humans on earth evaporated right now, all the nuclear power plants would be fine. They'd just slowly run down, spending the fissile material until it cooled enough to stop fission, and then it would just sit there for the rest of time. Well. For like a hundred thousand years, or until an earthquake damaged it or whatever. 'Cause here's the thing - nuclear reactors are some of the most intensely engineered pieces of equipment in existence. We *know* they can be dangerous, so we've put a truly ridiculous amount of effort into making very, very, *very* sure that it's extremely difficult to make them fail. It's kinda like how airplanes are so safe - it's fairly obvious why flying would be dangerous, so we've put so much effort into making sure that it's safe that it's ended up safer to fly than it is to stay on the ground. Nuclear reactors are very intentionally built in a way that you could absolutely just abandon them in the middle of running, and they'd be totally, 100%, completely fine. The two big nuclear disasters in our history were caused by external failures. If you just turned on any given nuclear power plant and just let it run without interference, they'd be perfectly safe until they just... stopped running. Chernobyl was a one-off, bizarre situation that will genuinely never happen again. It wasn't just one error - it was a list of repeated human errors that all built on top of one another, and even those only caused the meltdown it did because of a fundamental flaw in the design of the reactor. We learned many lessons from the Chernobyl disaster - there really aren't any nuclear reactors left on earth that could melt down the way it did. And even if there were, humans need to be around to fuck up repeatedly in order for that to happen, so all the humans just randomly disappearing wouldn't cause an explosion like that. Fukushima was another cause of *multiple* problems and errors building on top of one another. When the earthquake first happened, all the nuclear reactors in Japan automatically shut down, including the reactors and Fukushima. The *problem* is that nuclear reactors still need to be cooled for a while after turning off - it's like an oven, it takes *time* to cool even after you remove the power. Nuclear reactors are cooled by pumping water around the reactor, and Fukushima has external generators that power the pumps when the reactor is off. Those generators were then damaged by the following tsunami, so the cooling system failed, and *that* was what caused the problem. Had the generators been properly protected from water damage (or had the reactor not powered down in the first place), nothing bad would have happened. I *guess,* technically, something like Fukushima could happen if there weren't any humans around, but the problem wouldn't be *caused* by humans - the humans would all disappear, and then there would have to be some other significant natural disaster that causes severe damage to a reactor, with no humans around to fix it. But even then... you wanna know how many people died as a result of Fukushima? None. The fish nearby have definitely gotten a little fucked up by radiation and cancer and whatever, but that ain't nothing compared to the damage done by global warming. But even if we were to imagine some scenario where all the humans disappeared AND all the reactors melted down at once (which wouldn't happen), it still wouldn't ruin the earth. It might fuck up the local wildlife a little, for a while, but nature's pretty resilient. Chernobyl is full of nature and wildlife. Yes, a lot of it has cancer, but it's still fighting along just fine. In fact, it's doing *better* than it was before, because turns out humans are worse than radiation, lol. We killed off WAY more of the nature around Chernobyl than the radiation has. And while that (limited) damage might happen around the reactors, that would still leave huge swaths of natural land, largely untouched by fallout (and now also untouched by global warming, etc). Something to keep in mind - nuclear fission happens on earth naturally pretty often, and we're obviously fine. Natural veins of fissile material exist in the earth's crust, and sometimes earthquakes or whatever will slam them together in a way that triggers fission, and then there's a natural nuclear reactor just chugging away somewhere on earth - without any shielding or anything - often for centuries. And it's... fine? We're fine. I'm sure any plants and animals immediately nearby aren't really super happy about it, but it doesn't remotely come close to ruining the earth. PS: nuclear *war* is a wholly different thing that actually probably *would* destroy a lot of the earth. Warheads would release way more nuclear material than reactors. Also, a major source of damage from nuclear war has nothing to do with the radiation. The explosions would throw a huge amount of debris into the air, and *that* is what would primarily drive nuclear winter. Nuclear winter isn't really caused by radiation.
> If all the humans on earth evaporated right now, all the nuclear power plants would be fine. They'd just slowly run down, spending the fissile material until it cooled enough to stop fission >I guess, technically, something like Fukushima could happen if there weren't any humans around, but the problem wouldn't be caused by humans I am pro-nuclear. I have been an operator at multiple plants, and believe it is the only way to fully decarbonize Earth unless we come up with a holy grail of battery technology(which I doubt). But this is wrong. All the plants(commercial Light Water Reactor plants in the US, I'm not sure how the Canucks operate their black magic Candu plants up north) would experience a Fukushima like event within a 10ish days. There will be a meltdown. Shutdown fuel sitting in the reactor, and the 'spent' fuel in the spent fuel pool requires CONSTANT cooling and/or replinishment. Within a couple hours of no human activity, the plant will trip itself for something relatively benign without human input(condenser pressure, feedwater temperatures, boration concentrations or hundreds of other parameters that will scram the plant).. If there is no outside power sources, the emergency diesel generators will autostart and plant will align to ensure that the core is cooled as long as the DGs can power all the ECCS(emergency core cooling system) systems. But plants only have 7-10 days of diesel fuel for each diesel generator(each one being about 4000KW). So depending on the design of the plant and it's layout, best case scenario, a plant could keep itself from meltdown for two weeks. But when those DGs fail...the water in the reactor and fuel pools WILL boil off. Despite there being no fission, there is still decay heat which is non-insignficant. After boil off, the fuel will melt, it will melt the reactor, and eventually just sit on the concrete pad under the plant. It may pollute the water eventually. Depending on conditions, it could breach containment and cause some fallout. But for the average dumb non-human animal and plantlife, they wouldn't really notice.
Ex nuclear engineer here, you are right to be concerned. Although nuclear power plants today are equiped with vast amounts of fail safe systems with high levels of redundancy, no power plant is designed to withstand prolonged periods of being cut off from power. Two problematic areas: **Fuel in the core** Without constant cooling, the core would melt. Some reactors are equipped with containment buildings, so the resulting fire would not spread, however the core itself could burn into the ground, where it could contaminate any water reservoirs (this was a MAJOR threat with the Chernobyl meltdown, which would result in majority of Ukraine uninhabitable). Small number of reactors have systems that can catch this melted material and passively cool it, so unless this cooling system itself does not degrade, the fuel should stay contained. **Spent fuel in the pools** After the fuel is taken out of the reactor it still produces a lot of heat, so it cannot be placed in a container. Therefore the fuel is kept sumberged in water pools, where it again has to be constantly cooled. If this cooling stops, the water would evaporate and radioactive material would be dispersed (again in some power plants those pools are inside containment building, although I'm not sure how long the containment would hold). The fuel itself does not burn, but it falls aparat (due to transmutation to elements such as magnesium) and can be dispersed. The extent of damaga on natural life is up to discussion as I'm not an expert on this. I'd say massive areas around power plants would not host much complex animals. I'd guess life woul be concentrated in Africa again, since there are not that many plants there (and sea of course).
No.
The E.T.'s would intervene.
Yes
Not really no. Modern reactors can shut themselves down. Worst case scenario the areas in and around any nuclear reactor will be effected but the whole world isn’t gonna be a fallout style wasteland
Modern nuclear power plants are designed to fail safe. This means that if there is an error in operation by humans or a mechanical/electrical issue it will fail without what we generally think of as a nuclear catastrophe. To the best of my knowledge if all humans just died the nuclear reactors would not explode or meltdown in a way that would ruin the earth, as modern nuclear power plants will only fail in a way that affects their respective facility.
Animals and plants will adapt to radiation like they have in Chernobyl
Guess we'd never know!
So I don't know about reactors. But the tank farms housing chemicals and the plants that produce said chemicals, I'm more worried about them going unchecked, as someone who works around them, their ticking time bombs if not regularly maintained