Which country will survive better

[Wastelander]

3 minutes ago, CarolinaSantAngelo said:

We wouldn't have a disaster in hand with Nuclear reactors, there aren't that many around big populated areas (most of them are in patagonia) and the country is a big one, compared to the size of the population, one could escape to better zones. 

 

While I do agree with the rest of your post, just being somewhat far away from a nuclear disaster doesn't mean you get off scot-free. Winds and rivers can carry radiation pretty far. When Chernobyl went pop in 1986, wild mushrooms for example became unfit for human consumption in Germany for a decade.

[CarolinaSantAngelo]

Just now, Wastelander said:

While I do agree with the rest of your post, just being somewhat far away from a nuclear disaster doesn't mean you get off scot-free. Winds and rivers can carry radiation pretty far. When Chernobyl went pop in 1986, wild mushrooms for example became unfit for human consumption in Germany for a decade.

I knew the radiation could spread but I guess I underestimated the power of it. That would be a big problem pretty much all over the world then. 

 

[Wastelander]

Just now, CarolinaSantAngelo said:

I knew the radiation could spread but I guess I underestimated the power of it. That would be a big problem pretty much all over the world then. 

 

Radiation is a weird hazard. I could put an Alpha-radioactive sample in my landlord's place and I wouldn't notice it because the pipes are so dense. If I put the same sample into a random pond, I could poison thousands of people and kill dozens, if not hundreds. It's all about the spread. Nuking deserts would have little effect on the rest of the world because the fallout can't spread very far, nuking a continent rich in fresh water like South America, things go bad.

It's a bit like viruses, except that radiation doesn't procreate - put genetically engineered airborne super-HIV into the desert, few if any people die. Put it in the AC of an airport, you've got genocide.

What I'm basically saying is that radiation is mostly unpredictable. Sure, you can model for winds, water flows and even erosion, but there are factors to this calculation we simply do not know - there was a case in I think it was Brazil where thieves stole metal from an abandoned clinic and spread radioactive Strontium (I think) over an entire city.

In a TLD scenario, even the best - in terms of safety - nuclear power plants will fail, there's no if. Without electricity, there's no control mechanisms, no regulation of reaction intensity etc. They will blow, one way or another. Some plants might contain the radiation if their shells aren't penetrated, but a few decades later, rain and frost will have cracked the concrete, even if they can withstand a direct impact of an F-15 with no problems in pristine condition.

Also, nuclear fuel rods are made to be hot, that's just what they do. Their very reason for existing is to boil water to power a generator - that setup isn't that different from coal power plants. Without regulation, that water boils and boils and boils, pressure increases and things just burst.

TL;DR: If a TLD event happens I'd like to be as far away as possible from any sort of power plant, especially the nuclear ones.

[Wastelander]

Some safety systems work without power, but even the without-power-systems are designed with power coming back in at most a few weeks.

[cekivi]

3 hours ago, Wastelander said:

Some safety systems work without power, but even the without-power-systems are designed with power coming back in at most a few weeks.

In the near term (<5 years) I wouldn't be concerned at all about western style reactors. Properly run (Fukushima was an exception) there's enough safeguards in place to render the reactor inert without any electricity. Control rods are gravity dropped, there's built in manual water condensers, etc. What will get you are the cooling ponds for waste fuel. Once the electricity goes the water will heat up, boil and eventually the waste rods themselves will catch on fire. Life after People is an interesting (if eerie) show to watch

Essentially, everything downwind and in the near vicinity will be toast.

Even better will be all the chlorine, fuels and other fun things kept under pressure all around the world in industrial sites. Basically, anywhere with an industrial economy could essentially get wiped out without prompt and very ingenious human intervention.

[cekivi]

Actually, on the subject of nuclear plants it's actually quite neat all of the built in systems for keeping one from catastrophically failing. In a followup to @Wastelander's video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vggzl9OngaM

Note that this is only for CANDU reactors. If your reactor was not built in Canada by Canadians, good luck to you

[Patrick Carlson]

12 hours ago, cekivi said:

In the near term (<5 years) I wouldn't be concerned at all about western style reactors. Properly run (Fukushima was an exception) there's enough safeguards in place to render the reactor inert without any electricity. Control rods are gravity dropped, there's built in manual water condensers, etc. What will get you are the cooling ponds for waste fuel. Once the electricity goes the water will heat up, boil and eventually the waste rods themselves will catch on fire. Life after People is an interesting (if eerie) show to watch

Essentially, everything downwind and in the near vicinity will be toast.

Even better will be all the chlorine, fuels and other fun things kept under pressure all around the world in industrial sites. Basically, anywhere with an industrial economy could essentially get wiped out without prompt and very ingenious human intervention.

Now we're getting to the dystopic heart of the matter.  Good stuff.

I think with many industrial accidents, it's the "unknown unknowns" that creep up and cause the worst catastrophes. Fukushima had to deal with an earthquake and a tsunami. I wonder about what they are storing over at the Hanford site in Eastern WA state...http://www.wired.com/2016/04/us-playing-dangerous-game-musical-chairs-nuclear-waste/

[Wastelander]

2 minutes ago, Patrick Carlson said:

I think with many industrial accidents, it's the "unknown unknowns" that creep up and cause the worst catastrophes.

Not to mention the myriad of other places things can go wrong on - biological research labs such as Bayer or Monsanto or even the bioweapon-labs of the US military. Then there are oil refineries, gas stations and military stockpiles. Even grain silos can, in the right (or wrong, depending on your fondness of explosions) circumstances go boom - in fact, that's quite a threat even when things go right.

Explosions and runaway bioweapons aren't the only threat though - water pipes will stop working after a while, and how many people know that stagnant water is unsafe? Most people nowadays are very proficient with a smartphone and how to get likes on Facebook, but that's about it unfortunately. What about food preservation? I know how to make a semi-decent fruit jam, but that's it. Without refrigeration, even people who have initially decent food stocks will find themselves struggling in the winter. Then there's also the issue that people don't know how to feed themselves in the first place, and I'm not even talking about planting or hunting here - people just don't know what kind of nutrients they need. This is where third world countries definitely have the advantage, since they know the actual quality of foods instead of being led by TV-ads. In a lot of zombie movies, the zombies could've well been just normal people who had nothing but chocolate bars and frozen pizza for the last six months.

Back to the more interesting threat - fires and explosions: We haven't discussed intentional fire hazards yet. Almost everyone loves a good, roaring fire (in fact, the only person I know who doesn't almost died in a house fire as a child. Poor girl gets squeamish when I do as much as light a cigarette in her general vicinity). Some people love those fires too much, if you catch my drift. If there's an insane person who always wanted to burn down part of a city, who's to stop them in a TLD-event? And isn't such an event where civilization as we know it ends for all intents and purposes the perfect time to get revenge on an ex, a former boss or teacher?

I said it in other threads and I'll say it again: The biggest hazard walks on two legs.

[Wastelander]

Here's another thing, because I love this thread:

Money. In the first weeks, a lot of things will go wrong in the monetary sector. Banks are basically run by computers, millions of welfare receivers will suddenly have no income at all, cash is limited (in fact, a lot of existing money isn't cash at all). People have encountered power outages before, but how will they pay for goods once cash runs out? This is a short-term threat, but once the disaster becomes mid-term, widespread looting and violence will take it's place.

Then there are farm animals. Without electrified fences, what stops cows and pigs from roaming whereever? Large farm animals can become pretty dangerous - it'd be a pretty pitiful end to die at the charge of a cow.

Also, sewage - sewage won't get treated anymore, so the streets will fill with waste water, which spreads disease. Ever seen "The Perfume"? Picture this a thousand times over.

[exeexe]

Countries cant survive anything because they are not alive in the first place. They are made out of dead materials. In order to be alive you have to breathe and be made out of organic material

[ZlatanHazard]

Well tbh any country could survive in TLD if they use the calories exploit 

[Wastelander]

On 6.9.2016 at 2:44 AM, ZlatanHazard said:

Well tbh any country could survive in TLD if they use the calories exploit 

I was going to make a really really mean joke about Zimbabwe but then I decided that would probably be cruel and unfair and now I feel bad about myself 

Back to the topic - water. Freshwater is not a problem in most of Eurasia. Most of it. However, as I said before, many people don't know how to filter and sanitize water and quite frankly, water purification tablets are kind of rare here because we didn't have to deal with any of that stuff past 1945. Personally, I live relatively close to a dam that supplies the entire region with freshwater and holds 20,5 million cubic meters of water, several canals with acceptable water quality (fish live and get quite large there, filter and boil the water and you're probably fine) and a few days of walking away from the Ruhr and the Rhein. There's a food source and a water source right there. However, there's millions of people living here and they get hungry as well. We also get a lot of rain throughout the year, which is good.

Now let's talk diseases. Without inoculation, the flu can get quite deadly - the Spanish Flu killed between 25 and 50 million people in the early 20th century. Granted, it was unusually virulent, but that's just the spread. People suddenly won't have proper heating, medicine and possibly food and water anymore, so even the common cold will become a threat again. Then, as I mentioned before, there will be no more treatment of waste water so even former "First World" (Oh do I abhor this term) cities will be proper breeding grounds for dysentery, the plague (which still exists in Eurasia!), Ebola provided it finds a way here and a myriad of other diseases.

Treatment of smaller and larger injuries becomes more difficult and sometimes impossible - no more CRT, no more Röntgen, no more minimally invasive surgeries with little cameras, no more bright lights... let's just hope the painkillers last at least because surgery will practically overnight revert back to what it was before widespread electricity. Also, smaller injuries will at the same time become more frequent simply because people aren't used to the darkness. On the plus side, we'll go to absolute zero car accidents in an instant.

Ever laughed at your grandma for using old fashioned home remedies? Bet ya won't laugh now, because she is now the most important woman in your community, provided your community survived the initial rioting and looting - she's basically the doctor now, because her stuff works even without power or the chemical industry.

Now, let's talk about a topic we all hold near and dear to our hearts: Guns. In Europe, gun ownership isn't nearly as widespread as in the USA or Canada, with the exception of Switzerland and Finland, which are armed pretty well (and Switzerland can probably survive anything anyway). However, in a total collapse of society, there's still enough weapons to go around - especially in Germany which houses the factories of all those shiny MP5 and MP7 submachineguns the entire world seems to buy nowadays. However, most people don't know how to even load a gun, let alone aim it since most of their knowledge comes from Counter Strike and Hollywood. So basically we have a few dozen million people in arms, desperate and with no idea what they're doing. Your choice whether to put on the menacing music from your N24 End-Of-The-World documentation (I love those btw) or the slapstick music. In America, of course, the situation would be a bit different - same amount of guns but the average skill is higher. I'd say those whom some call "gun nuts" would actually be the best off in such a situation, simply because they have the best chances to survive the initial outbreak of violence.

Now, wildlife. Without human interference, ecosystems can recover surprisingly well. That's nice for your tourism campaign in Tropico, not so nice for the guy getting eaten by a bear. Animals will quickyl move back into the cities, and with them come their predators. Think TLD has a lot of wolves? Try going into an Australian city a year after the apocalypse, there'll be dingoes everywhere, and they'll slowly but surely lose some of their fear of us. And you don't want an animal that doesn't fear you, except when it's a penguin. On the bright side, near-extinct species might finally have some more space to reproduce, such as the Siberian White Tiger, a gorgeous animal. On the other hand though, poaching will hit an all-time high I suppose so there go some herbivorous species right out of the evolutionary window. Goodbye, Bisons. 't was nice knowing you. Say Hi to the Addax's on your way out!

Rats. I don't particularly mind them personally, but a lot of people hate them with a passion, and I can understand their reasoning - after all, diseases carried by rats and their parasites depopulated large swathes of Eurasia and the Americas more than once in history, not to mention what they did to the native wildlife of Hawaii. That's a threat we thought we defeated, but Mother Nature is a harsh mistress (or rather, an uncaring one) - Bubonic Plague pt. 2 - Rattic Bogaloo is a disaster waiting to happen once our control mechanisms fail. An apocalypse within an apocalypse, Xzibit would have a field day.

And that's what I think the actual threat within a TLD scenario is: A cascade of disasters. We can deal with one thing going wrong quite nicely. The water supply has a problem? We'll buy bottled water until it's fixed, because the means to fix it exist. A power outage? We'll light some candles and have a small baby boom nine months later, but it gets fixed. A fire? We'll run, scream and generally act like idiots while others fix the problem. A large-scale terrorist attack? We'll make a new twitter hashtag and hope our politicians fix the problem. However, in a TLD-scenario all of this (except maybe the terrorism though I'm not sure about that, seems like a perfect opportunity to attack almost everything - or follow the much more nefarious plan of leaning back and enjoy watching the West collapse) happens at the same time, and the means to fix it cease to exist. That's the threat right there.