[HN Gopher] What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
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What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
Author : voxadam
Score : 89 points
Date : 2025-03-11 19:11 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| abound wrote:
| The note about using C-14 (introduced from nuclear blasts) to
| date the age of living cells is fascinating.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I read this several times as C-4 not C-14 and was very curious
| how one would date the age of living cells with plastic
| explosives. I think I need more coffee.
| prerok wrote:
| Sorry, say what? C-14 comes from exposure to radiation also
| from the sun. Dating by it would make no sense in recent
| history because it would be too hard. Am I missing something?
| prerok wrote:
| Answering my own question, after rereading TFA. It's more
| because the C-14 was doubled and not because C-14 did not
| exist before.
| blendergeek wrote:
| https://archive.is/oGLO7
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear
| power more.
|
| When it works right we have unlimited clean energy.
|
| And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Because we talk about the harms of radiation far more than we
| discuss the harms of pollution and CO2, despite the latter
| having orders of magnitude more health impacts. We'd have to
| have hundreds or maybe thousands of chernobyls a year to
| compete.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination
| can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just
| deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its
| pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet
| usually only deaths are factored in.
|
| And the biggest issue is that one incident can cause so much
| of it. Add to the fact that we tend to rely on the lowest
| bidder who will then inevitably cut corners to make as much
| of a profit for their shareholders, and accidents will
| happen. Also, there's proliferation risk. No, nuclear
| material from power plants isn't useable for nuclear bombs
| but it is for dirty bombs.
|
| If we do it, it should be state managed like the military. We
| don't let commercial parties play around with nuclear bombs.
| Why should they be trusted with power plants that contain a
| hell of a lot more nuclear material?
|
| Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting
| business.
|
| I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable certainly
| is. That should be the #1 goal, and the base load met by
| power storage. Only by nukes if there's no other way.
|
| Anyway that's my opinion as an environmental type.
| richardw wrote:
| And if nuclear became the default clean energy technology,
| it would have to be shared worldwide. Every country with
| the same issues, but varying levels of competence,
| political alignment, terror risks etc. do we want 100 000
| nuclear power stations?
|
| (Edit: although maybe thorium might shift the calculation.)
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Focusing on anything except damage/kWh tends to increase
| damage/kWh.
|
| > its pollution was detected all the way across the
| Atlantic
|
| Ostrich Worship -- using detection limits as a proxy for
| harm -- implicitly promotes damage that is difficult to
| quantify over damage that is easy to detect in the most
| minute quantities. It elevates burying your head in the
| sand into a principle. The fact that nuclear pollution can
| be detected in mind-bendingly minute quantities is a very
| dumb reason to be anti-nuclear.
|
| > one incident can cause so much of it
|
| Headline Bias is usually something people aim to avoid
| rather than celebrate. Hundreds of thousands of slip-and-
| fall accidents from contractors running around rooftops
| can't reasonably be rounded to 0 on account of being
| individually "boring," yet that's what you do when you
| focus on the biggest incident. Speaking of which, do you
| oppose hydro-power on the basis of the Banqiao Dam
| disaster?
|
| > Edit: oh and uranium mining is also pretty polluting
| business.
|
| Single Ended Comparisons are the root of all evil. PV cells
| and windmills don't pop into existence without side
| effects. Their big problem is that you need a lot of them
| to generate electricity, leading to a lot of side effects.
|
| > I'm not saying that coal is better. But renewable
| certainly is.
|
| It's not. Or it wasn't. I'm extremely relieved that after
| 50 years we finally found a low-CO2 power solution that
| self-styled greens don't fight tooth and nail, and on that
| count solar and wind are unbeatable. But we had the
| solution. We could have been done phasing out CO2-emitting
| sources if we had just kept up the pace on nuclear rollout.
| Instead, we have just begun. The 50 gigatons excess CO2
| emissions (so far, USA only) in order to wait for solar and
| wind to become economical were an absolute travesty.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Being detectable isn't very interesting. Modern technology
| can detect vanishingly small concentrations of weird
| isotopes. No harm came to anybody on the other side of the
| ocean from that stuff.
|
| Now consider a pollutant like mercury. It goes far beyond
| being merely detectable. There's so much mercury in the
| oceans that it's unsafe to eat seafood too often. Most of
| that came from human activity. A huge chunk of it came from
| burning coal. An entire category of food poisoned
| planetwide!
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| Because their stated purpose and their real intents are not
| aligned.
| hijinks wrote:
| people have seemed to forget that there were some people in LA
| that use to walk outside in gas masks due to all the air
| pollution.
| serviceberry wrote:
| Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in
| utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit
| of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and
| wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've
| already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc.
|
| This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant
| energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution or less
| climate change, but it would allow humans to "consume" more of
| the ecosystem.
|
| To be clear, this isn't my worldview. But as with most other
| movements advocating for social change, the underlying ideology
| is usually more complex than it appears.
| zenolijo wrote:
| I only personally know one person who had been an active
| member in Extinction Rebellion and I think it's a bit more
| nuanced than that. It seems like they all agree that the
| amount of growth we have today is unsustainable, but what
| sustainable growth exactly is and in turn how much growth
| needs to be compromised is not agreed upon. So I don't
| believe that endless pursuit of growth is against most of
| their members opinion, they just have a much stricter view on
| what sustainable growth is (and that some degrowth might be
| needed to achieve sustainable growth in the long term).
| forinti wrote:
| The Sustainable Development Index had Cuba and Equador as
| the sole sustainable economies in years past.
|
| There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes
| of the central economies to reduce consumption to that
| level, or even to convince people in that class of
| development economy to stop aiming for more.
| genewitch wrote:
| There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes
| of the central economies to reduce consumption to that
| level, or even to convince people in that class of
| development economy to stop aiming for more.
|
| What if there is 200% tariffs on junk they shouldn't be
| buying anyhow? What if a new car becomes so expensive
| that the idea of having to replace it in 3-5/years
| induces outrage and class action lawsuits? What if you
| were only allowed to own one residence? What if out of
| season foods were fantastically expensive unless you had
| a community "garden"?
|
| I know, HN, straight to -4. I'll meet you down there.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I think this is probably a misrepresentation of degrowth.
| Perhaps there are some that take an extreme view like that,
| but it is more that we are very very obviously beyond the
| limits of sustainable living and something will have to give,
| now, or worse in the future as we deplete even more
| resources.
|
| Some of these differences won't be "degrowth" but changes,
| like shifting to high speed rail and buses over personal
| cars. Reducing meat in our diets. Giving nature some
| breathing room. In other words, a different way of living
| that might take some adjustment but would also be perfectly
| fine.
|
| Furthermore, we need to consider developing societies. If we
| continue to consume finite natural resources unsustainably,
| we cut into the share that could be used to better the lives
| of the poorest societies on Earth.
|
| I'm not involved in XR though. However, I think it's
| important to present a highly materialist viewpoint. It's not
| only about morality, but about ensuring as many people as
| possible can live decent lives in a renewed balance with
| nature.
| concordDance wrote:
| > Hence the degrowth movement, etc.
|
| The oddest thing about this to me is that they don't seem to
| think through what exactly this implies.
|
| If one truly believes in the need to reduce human population
| then by far the highest margin things are not things like
| preserving a few hundred year old forest in England, but mass
| introduction of contraceptives to the DRC. It'll be places
| like Nigeria and Congo that dominate in terms of number of
| humans next century, not dying Europe (whose resource usage
| will decline even faster as fertility free falls), and those
| countries are not going to remain low resource consumption
| for too long.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > a 50,000 year nature preserve
|
| that begins with none of the existing lifeforms that were there
| beforehand.
| Animats wrote:
| What, did Medium just copy over Stanford's alumni magazine?
| Here's the original story.[1]
|
| [1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-bikini-atoll-looks-
| lik...
| tanaros wrote:
| Medium is a publishing/hosting platform for authors. This
| Medium account is (or purports to be) the official account of
| the Stanford alumni magazine.
| crusty wrote:
| It appears that it was published on medium and subsequently
| added to the standfordmag site, hence the 2 links to it
| they're and the notice that new articles are published there.
| It probably just remains because they have no control over
| medium, so they can't turn the page into a permanent
| redirect, and they don't want to just take it down and break
| links.
| labster wrote:
| If I may go off-topic, I wonder why the "Standford"
| spelling is such a common typo? Is there a linguistic
| reason for it, or is it some sort of infectious meme?
| RIMR wrote:
| 1. This is the official Medium publication for the Stanford
| Alumni Magazine.
|
| 2. The Medium version of this story was published 1 month
| before the stanfordmag.org version, so this is the "original"
| story.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Right under the title there's a note that says "We've moved!
| Read this article and new stories from STANFORD on
| Stanfordmag.org."
| jmyeet wrote:
| I only learned last year that you can dive the atomic fleet
| [1][2]. What is the atomic fleet? As part of the nuclear testing
| at Bikini Atoll, they dragged a bunch of WW2 ships (from both the
| US and Japan) and detonated bombs above them to test how
| effective such weapons were at sinking ships.
|
| As part of this, you can often get to set foot on Bikini Atoll,
| something normally not possible AFAIK where you can only stay a
| few hours to stay below radiation thresholds.
|
| A whole bunch of people used to live there but were essentially
| bullied into leaving and now essentially live as refugess, still
| unable to return [3].
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5bKzTbHu4A
|
| [2]: https://www.scubadoctor.com.au/article-diving-the-nuclear-
| fl...
|
| [3]: https://thebikiniproject.org/the-bikini-people/
| margalabargala wrote:
| > something normally not possible AFAIK where you can only stay
| a few hours to stay below radiation thresholds.
|
| As one learns by reading the linked article, radiation levels
| on the island are either equal to or below the levels that
| aircraft passengers are exposed to at 35k feet. Just don't eat
| the coconuts or crabs.
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