Halving the population of the world would collapse our very complex civilization destroying our food production and distribution chains resulting in total chaos.
There are also 4000 spent fuel ponds that require BAU to be completely functional - otherwise the ponds boil off and epic amounts of radiation would be released for thousands o…
Halving the population of the world would collapse our very complex civilization destroying our food production and distribution chains resulting in total chaos.
There are also 4000 spent fuel ponds that require BAU to be completely functional - otherwise the ponds boil off and epic amounts of radiation would be released for thousands of years killing everyone. (Chernobyl was entombed and the ponds were never involved...)
I spent a while thinking about this last month. I never wrote anything about it so as not to appear crazy and not to turn people off. At first I was also scared that if we lose 40-70% of population, our civilization will end and the lives of the remaining 30-60% will also end due to general disruption.
My final conclusion was that no, the civilization will not end, and the remaining people will keep living for the most part.
There are indeed corner cases like spend nuclear pools or water treatment plants or whatever. But even they are not as bad as we think. If we lose half the population for any reason, we can just abandon the radioactive areas and move somewhere else, there will be plenty of empty homes to take etc. Some city consolidation will occur also. Humans are very adaptable.
Also we will not need as many powerplants, for example, so we can consolidate remaining power plant employees among the plants that we actually need.
Now let's return to our regularly scheduled programming.
I wouldn't want to be alive in that scenario. The grocery stores would go empty as would he petrol stations... no electricity... no security.... hungry humans are dangerous humans.
Cannibalism... rape... murder... all the fun stuff that humans have done over the many centuries of 'civilization'
It would be far worse than this :
One year in Hell...
I am from Bosnia. You know, between 1992 and 1995, it was hell. For one
year, I lived and survived in a city with 6,000 people without water,
electricity, gasoline, medical help, civil defense, distribution service, any
kind of traditional service or centralized rule.
Our city was blockaded by the army; and for one year, life in the city turned
into total crap. We had no army, no police. We only had armed groups; those
armed protected their homes and families.
When it all started, some of us were better prepared. But most of the
neighbors' families had enough food only for a few days. Some had pistols; a
few had AK-47s or shotguns.
After a month or two, gangs started operating, destroying everything.
Hospitals, for example, turned into slaughterhouses. There was no more
police. About 80 percent of the hospital staff were gone. I got lucky. My
family at the time was fairly large (15 people in a large house, six pistols,
three AKs), and we survived (most of us, at least).
Things returned to normal eventually (food medicine govt police electricity petrol hospitals - civilization) so no doubt most survived.
The problem with killing half the world's population is once you smash humpty it's not possible to reassemble him.
Or in other words... you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube or the shaving cream back in the can.
Consider the electrical grid. If half the people who maintain that - from the coal miners to the people who make the machinery to dig the coal to the people who keep thousands of km of power lines operational to the factory workers who make the spare parts to maintain the grid --- are dead... the entire system stops functioning.
Korowicz does a much better job of explaining this than I can -- p.56 is the key section --- if that gets the juices flowing... it's worth reading the entire paper...
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
Assuming a 50-100% Cs137 release during a spent fuel fire, [8] the consequence of the Cs-137 exceed those of the Chernobyl accident 8-17 times (2MCi release from Chernobyl). Based on the wedge model, the contaminated land areas can be estimated. [9] For example, for a scenario of a 50% Cs-137 release from a 400 t SNF pool, about 95,000 km² (as far as 1,350 km) would be contaminated above 15 Ci/km² (as compared to 10,000 km² contaminated area above 15 Ci/km² at Chernobyl).
A typical 1 GWe PWR core contains about 80 t fuels. Each year about one third of the core fuel is discharged into the pool. A pool with 15 year storage capacity will hold about 400 t spent fuel. To estimate the Cs-137 inventory in the pool, for example, we assume the Cs137 inventory at shutdown is about 0.1 MCi/tU with a burn-up of 50,000 MWt-day/tU, thus the pool with 400 t of ten year old SNF would hold about 33 MCi Cs-137. [7]
Containing radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/14/us-japan-fukushima-insight-idUSBRE97D00M20130814
The problem is if the spent fuel gets too close, they will produce a fission reaction and explode with a force much larger than any fission bomb given the total amount of fuel on the site. All the fuel in all the reactors and all the storage pools at this site (1760 tons of Uranium per slide #4) would be consumed in such a mega-explosion. In comparison, Fat Man and Little Boy weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained less than a hundred pounds each of fissile material - See more at: http://www.dcbureau.org/20110314781/natural-resources-news-service/fission-criticality-in-cooling-ponds-threaten-explosion-at-fukushima.html
Once the fuel is uncovered, it could become hot enough to cause the metal cladding encasing the uranium fuel to rupture and catch fire, which in turn could further heat up the fuel until it suffers damage. Such an event could release large amounts of radioactive substances, such as cesium-137, into the environment. This would start in more recently discharged spent fuel, which is hotter than fuel that has been in the pool for a longer time. A typical spent fuel pool in the United States holds several hundred tons of fuel, so if a fire were to propagate from the hotter to the colder fuel a radioactive release could be very large.
According to Dr. Kevin Crowley of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board, “successful terrorist attacks on spent fuel pools, though difficult, are possible. If an attack leads to a propagating zirconium cladding fire, it could result in the release of large amounts of radioactive material.”[12] The Nuclear Regulatory Commission after the September 11, 2001 attacks required American nuclear plants “to protect with high assurance” against specific threats involving certain numbers and capabilities of assailants. Plants were also required to “enhance the number of security officers” and to improve “access controls to the facilities”.
The committee judges that successful terrorist attacks on spent fuel pools, though difficult, are possible. If an attack leads to a propagating zirconium cladding fire, it could result in the release of large amounts of radioactive material. The committee concluded that attacks by knowledgeable terrorists with access to appropriate technical means are possible. The committee identified several terrorist attack scenarios that it believed could partially or completely drain a spent fuel pool and lead to zirconium cladding fires. Details are provided in the committee’s classified report. I cannot discuss the details here.
If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.
“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere.
Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies. One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
A fire from spent fuel stored at a U.S. nuclear power plant could have catastrophic consequences, according to new simulations of such an event.
A major fire “could dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” says Frank von Hippel, a nuclear security expert at Princeton University, who teamed with Princeton’s Michael Schoeppner on the modeling exercise.
….the national academies’s report warns that spent fuel accumulating at U.S. nuclear plants is also vulnerable. After fuel is removed from a reactor core, the radioactive fission products continue to decay, generating heat. All nuclear power plants store the fuel onsite at the bottom of deep pools for at least 4 years while it slowly cools. To keep it safe, the academies report recommends that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nuclear plant operators beef up systems for monitoring the pools and topping up water levels in case a facility is damaged. The panel also says plants should be ready to tighten security after a disaster.
At most U.S. nuclear plants, spent fuel is densely packed in pools, heightening the fire risk. NRC has estimated that a major fire at the spent fuel pool at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania would displace an estimated 3.46 million people from 31,000 square kilometers of contaminated land, an area larger than New Jersey. But Von Hippel and Schoeppner think that NRC has grossly underestimated the scale and societal costs of such a fire.
Spent fuel would never produce a fast nuclear reaction. As soon as the pool of molten fuel gets close to critical mass, it would get somewhat dissipated one way or another. Most reactors are now covered with domes so the horrible mess will be somewhat contained.
It's worth reading through that research dump... I spent a lot of time trying to find out what would happen if a pond was not cooled...
I have a cousin who is an engineer and head of safety at a nuclear installation in the Toronto area.
I saw him 4 or 5 years ago and asked him -- what would happen if the spent fuel ponds lost power permanently. He said - that cannot happen -- and since Fukushima we have added more safety measures to ensure they could continue to spray water onto the ponds in the event of a catatrophe.
I said yes of course -- but what if there was no diesel available to run the pumps... and the water boiled off...
He said - that could not happen.
I said sure -- but what if say civilization collapsed like in those TV shows... and it was not possible to cool the ponds...
He reiterated 'that cannot happen' ... I take that to mean - it's unthinkable.
not really killing everyone - just shortening their lifespans dramatically (perhaps to dark age levels) as long as 20% of the people live to about 20, its not an extinction event. The Chernobyl ecosystem is thriving (not least because of the absence of humans). Definite civilization killer.
Halving the population of the world would collapse our very complex civilization destroying our food production and distribution chains resulting in total chaos.
There are also 4000 spent fuel ponds that require BAU to be completely functional - otherwise the ponds boil off and epic amounts of radiation would be released for thousands of years killing everyone. (Chernobyl was entombed and the ponds were never involved...)
I spent a while thinking about this last month. I never wrote anything about it so as not to appear crazy and not to turn people off. At first I was also scared that if we lose 40-70% of population, our civilization will end and the lives of the remaining 30-60% will also end due to general disruption.
My final conclusion was that no, the civilization will not end, and the remaining people will keep living for the most part.
There are indeed corner cases like spend nuclear pools or water treatment plants or whatever. But even they are not as bad as we think. If we lose half the population for any reason, we can just abandon the radioactive areas and move somewhere else, there will be plenty of empty homes to take etc. Some city consolidation will occur also. Humans are very adaptable.
Also we will not need as many powerplants, for example, so we can consolidate remaining power plant employees among the plants that we actually need.
Now let's return to our regularly scheduled programming.
I wouldn't want to be alive in that scenario. The grocery stores would go empty as would he petrol stations... no electricity... no security.... hungry humans are dangerous humans.
Cannibalism... rape... murder... all the fun stuff that humans have done over the many centuries of 'civilization'
It would be far worse than this :
One year in Hell...
I am from Bosnia. You know, between 1992 and 1995, it was hell. For one
year, I lived and survived in a city with 6,000 people without water,
electricity, gasoline, medical help, civil defense, distribution service, any
kind of traditional service or centralized rule.
Our city was blockaded by the army; and for one year, life in the city turned
into total crap. We had no army, no police. We only had armed groups; those
armed protected their homes and families.
When it all started, some of us were better prepared. But most of the
neighbors' families had enough food only for a few days. Some had pistols; a
few had AK-47s or shotguns.
After a month or two, gangs started operating, destroying everything.
Hospitals, for example, turned into slaughterhouses. There was no more
police. About 80 percent of the hospital staff were gone. I got lucky. My
family at the time was fairly large (15 people in a large house, six pistols,
three AKs), and we survived (most of us, at least).
http://www.hourofthetime.com/1-LF/One%20Year%20In%20Hell.pdf
I am sorry to hear. But most people in your city survived, right?
Things returned to normal eventually (food medicine govt police electricity petrol hospitals - civilization) so no doubt most survived.
The problem with killing half the world's population is once you smash humpty it's not possible to reassemble him.
Or in other words... you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube or the shaving cream back in the can.
Consider the electrical grid. If half the people who maintain that - from the coal miners to the people who make the machinery to dig the coal to the people who keep thousands of km of power lines operational to the factory workers who make the spare parts to maintain the grid --- are dead... the entire system stops functioning.
Korowicz does a much better job of explaining this than I can -- p.56 is the key section --- if that gets the juices flowing... it's worth reading the entire paper...
https://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Trade_Off_Korowicz.pdf
And of course Joe Tainter is the master
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477.Collapse_of_Complex_Societies
So Klaus & co have bypassed these sorts of studies because it doesn't fit their narrative? That seems naive.
Who's behind Klaus?
Yes but we do need to run all power stations and can abandon some cities.
My money would be on the hunter gatherer tribes... (if it weren't for the fuel ponds)
To clarify ... I didn't write One Year in Hell... but it sure sounds exciting to experience that!
Here's my research dump on Spent Fuel Ponds:
The Fukushima nuclear catastrophe could have been far worse, it turns out, and experts say neither the nuclear industry nor its regulators are doing enough to prevent a calamitous nuclear fuel fire in America https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/05/20/19712/scientists-say-nuclear-fuel-pools-around-country-pose-safety-and-health-risks
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/burning-reactor-fuel-could-have-worsened-fukushima-disaster
Assuming a 50-100% Cs137 release during a spent fuel fire, [8] the consequence of the Cs-137 exceed those of the Chernobyl accident 8-17 times (2MCi release from Chernobyl). Based on the wedge model, the contaminated land areas can be estimated. [9] For example, for a scenario of a 50% Cs-137 release from a 400 t SNF pool, about 95,000 km² (as far as 1,350 km) would be contaminated above 15 Ci/km² (as compared to 10,000 km² contaminated area above 15 Ci/km² at Chernobyl).
A typical 1 GWe PWR core contains about 80 t fuels. Each year about one third of the core fuel is discharged into the pool. A pool with 15 year storage capacity will hold about 400 t spent fuel. To estimate the Cs-137 inventory in the pool, for example, we assume the Cs137 inventory at shutdown is about 0.1 MCi/tU with a burn-up of 50,000 MWt-day/tU, thus the pool with 400 t of ten year old SNF would hold about 33 MCi Cs-137. [7]
http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/publication/364/radiological_terrorism.html
Containing radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/14/us-japan-fukushima-insight-idUSBRE97D00M20130814
The problem is if the spent fuel gets too close, they will produce a fission reaction and explode with a force much larger than any fission bomb given the total amount of fuel on the site. All the fuel in all the reactors and all the storage pools at this site (1760 tons of Uranium per slide #4) would be consumed in such a mega-explosion. In comparison, Fat Man and Little Boy weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained less than a hundred pounds each of fissile material - See more at: http://www.dcbureau.org/20110314781/natural-resources-news-service/fission-criticality-in-cooling-ponds-threaten-explosion-at-fukushima.html
Once the fuel is uncovered, it could become hot enough to cause the metal cladding encasing the uranium fuel to rupture and catch fire, which in turn could further heat up the fuel until it suffers damage. Such an event could release large amounts of radioactive substances, such as cesium-137, into the environment. This would start in more recently discharged spent fuel, which is hotter than fuel that has been in the pool for a longer time. A typical spent fuel pool in the United States holds several hundred tons of fuel, so if a fire were to propagate from the hotter to the colder fuel a radioactive release could be very large.
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/making-nuclear-power-safer/handling-nuclear-waste/safer-storage-of-spent-fuel.html#.VUp3n5Om2J8
According to Dr. Kevin Crowley of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board, “successful terrorist attacks on spent fuel pools, though difficult, are possible. If an attack leads to a propagating zirconium cladding fire, it could result in the release of large amounts of radioactive material.”[12] The Nuclear Regulatory Commission after the September 11, 2001 attacks required American nuclear plants “to protect with high assurance” against specific threats involving certain numbers and capabilities of assailants. Plants were also required to “enhance the number of security officers” and to improve “access controls to the facilities”.
The committee judges that successful terrorist attacks on spent fuel pools, though difficult, are possible. If an attack leads to a propagating zirconium cladding fire, it could result in the release of large amounts of radioactive material. The committee concluded that attacks by knowledgeable terrorists with access to appropriate technical means are possible. The committee identified several terrorist attack scenarios that it believed could partially or completely drain a spent fuel pool and lead to zirconium cladding fires. Details are provided in the committee’s classified report. I cannot discuss the details here.
http://www.cfr.org/weapons-of-mass-destruction/nuclear-spent-fuel-pools-secure/p8967
If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.
“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16fuel.html
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere.
Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies. One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.
http://science.time.com/2011/03/15/a-new-threat-in-japan-radioactive-spent-fuel/
Today there are 103 active nuclear power reactors in the U.S. They generate 2,000 metric tons of spent nuclear waste per year and to date have accumulated 71,862 tons of spent fuel, according to industry data.[vi] Of that total, 54,696 tons are stored in cooling pools and only 17,166 tons in the relatively safer dry cask storage. http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health-policy-institute/responses/the-growing-problem-of-spent-nuclear-fuel.html
Spent fuel fire on U.S. soil could dwarf impact of Fukushima
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/spent-fuel-fire-us-soil-could-dwarf-impact-fukushima
A fire from spent fuel stored at a U.S. nuclear power plant could have catastrophic consequences, according to new simulations of such an event.
A major fire “could dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. “We’re talking about trillion-dollar consequences,” says Frank von Hippel, a nuclear security expert at Princeton University, who teamed with Princeton’s Michael Schoeppner on the modeling exercise.
….the national academies’s report warns that spent fuel accumulating at U.S. nuclear plants is also vulnerable. After fuel is removed from a reactor core, the radioactive fission products continue to decay, generating heat. All nuclear power plants store the fuel onsite at the bottom of deep pools for at least 4 years while it slowly cools. To keep it safe, the academies report recommends that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and nuclear plant operators beef up systems for monitoring the pools and topping up water levels in case a facility is damaged. The panel also says plants should be ready to tighten security after a disaster.
At most U.S. nuclear plants, spent fuel is densely packed in pools, heightening the fire risk. NRC has estimated that a major fire at the spent fuel pool at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania would displace an estimated 3.46 million people from 31,000 square kilometers of contaminated land, an area larger than New Jersey. But Von Hippel and Schoeppner think that NRC has grossly underestimated the scale and societal costs of such a fire.
Spent fuel would never produce a fast nuclear reaction. As soon as the pool of molten fuel gets close to critical mass, it would get somewhat dissipated one way or another. Most reactors are now covered with domes so the horrible mess will be somewhat contained.
It's worth reading through that research dump... I spent a lot of time trying to find out what would happen if a pond was not cooled...
I have a cousin who is an engineer and head of safety at a nuclear installation in the Toronto area.
I saw him 4 or 5 years ago and asked him -- what would happen if the spent fuel ponds lost power permanently. He said - that cannot happen -- and since Fukushima we have added more safety measures to ensure they could continue to spray water onto the ponds in the event of a catatrophe.
I said yes of course -- but what if there was no diesel available to run the pumps... and the water boiled off...
He said - that could not happen.
I said sure -- but what if say civilization collapsed like in those TV shows... and it was not possible to cool the ponds...
He reiterated 'that cannot happen' ... I take that to mean - it's unthinkable.
To be clear - it would not be like a nuclear bomb going off.. it would just burn and spew radiation and other toxins .. literally for centuries...
not really killing everyone - just shortening their lifespans dramatically (perhaps to dark age levels) as long as 20% of the people live to about 20, its not an extinction event. The Chernobyl ecosystem is thriving (not least because of the absence of humans). Definite civilization killer.