What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
medium.com
medium.com
I've heard and read a lot about the atrocities visited upon the Marshallese in the name of research in the last six months. Including around the potential "intentionality" of the human testing [1]. It is harrowing. And a hard pill to swallow in any context. The Nolan film did the islands little justice.
As an aside: while indirect, the journey to the Marshalls isn't as onorous as the article suggests - yes there's an island hopper, but United also fly direct from Honolulu. Though getting to Bikini is likely another adventure in itself.
The greater good
It's worth considering that the US also used the islands as a dumping ground for waste from previous tests in the US [1] ... At a site which is now under threat of leaking due to the effects of climate change [2]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-nuclear-te...
I think the only way you could top this would be to place a vault at ground level that spanned the San Andreas fault.
Even more comical is that it's not like we didn't think of that because we literally do use that space for those reasons. We just also decided to fill the atoll with large amounts of nuclear waste... Seemingly for fun. To give the benefit of the doubt, for transportation logistics reasons.
If dilution is so straightforward then why wasn't the waste mixed with a large volume of sea water and then dumped far out at sea to begin with? That probably would have been cheaper.
Go and see for yourself. /s
“… the soil and the lagoon water surrounding the structure now contain a higher level of radioactivity than the debris of the dome itself, so even in the event of a total collapse, the radiation dose delivered to the local resident population or marine environment should not change significantly.”
This is just insane.
Arguably the lesser bad in this case!
The implication is that nothing matters more than being “most powerful”. What a sad, sad way to view life.
It’s sad until one realises that this is what human nature is. It’s “us” or “them” regardless of how much we all wanted that it wasn’t so.
The wikipedia link mentions allegations, but not what (I feel) counts as evidence. Note that I'm not denying that the US Government engaged in radiation test programmes (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens), nor that these were covered up and are ethically questionable. But can such a rumour be falsified?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14#/media/File%3ARadioc...
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...
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.
Time ?
When humans disappear, nature thrives. The higher mutation and cancer rates don't really matter in aggregate.
There are more on the island Enyu south of that, with the old runway.
They have great writers. /s
…do we?
We do but the extent is limited compared to other mammals, brain mass normalised.
There's a historical overview here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK55966/
I'd have to dig around for comparative mammal brain regen rates.
When it works right we have unlimited clean energy.
And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.
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.
(Edit: although maybe thorium might shift the calculation.)
> 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.
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!
The radiometric procedure here was (IIRC) replace a large number of air filter mats in a large number of HVAC units and after a week to cycle them back and then reduce the "contaminated" mats down to samples that sat within highly sensitive high crystal volume spectrometers for 72 hours or more.
The 'normal' environmental radiation event count level in 40 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation Crystals (if that's what was used) at some 80m above ground level is between one and two thousand events per second.
The Fukishima signature gamma events came to a few thousand in 72 hours (again, IIRC) whch had to be teased out from a flood of other events many magnitudes greater in count.
Absolutely not enough to be concerned about, but a seriously interesting bit of detection work.
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.
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.
You have to pitch things the correct way, and it would really help if it wasn't treated as an "Ideological" thing but an ecological and humanitarian thing.
It is not okay to shove our pollution, poor wages and working conditions, and so on, to another country, nor its population. Arguing that it's okay if Chinese and vietnamese and indian folks are treated poorly, have poor health outcomes, and so on, just so long as we get shein and temu and amazon and walmart...
The "there's plenty for everyone, consume buy purchase, it's ok!" is just a lie. you can't do that without harming someone else.
Your old home had a gas furnace, and then you bought new construction and it's all-electric. Did the government do this? Are you even gonna think about it when making an offer? Your bill is gonna be higher, but how much of it is just because it's a different home?
And even then... you get away with it for a while, and then it all of sudden becomes a political talking point.
> do you know that for sure?
Yes. I absolutely loathe modern washing machines. The irony is that they don't actually save any water because I end up running them multiple times. One of these days I will hopefully get around to gutting mine to replace the control box with an RPi. It's a lot of busy work for something that ought to function well to begin with.
> Your bill is gonna be higher,
Maybe not with a modern mini-split setup. Those are genuinely better than anything that came before them. As a bonus, they remove the failure mode of "blow up your house" that all gas appliances inherently carry.
You can also power them with solar, removing your day to day reliance on the grid.
i have an HE2 (which everyone, universally hates) and it cleans clothes fine with 1 load where you can't even see the top of the water most of the time. You have to load high efficiency top loading machines different than your grandparents loaded their speed queens. You must not put anything over the impeller. everything must go around the edges before the water starts. the impellers in HE washers don't agitate around the torus of the tub, they agitate like the electric field on a torus around the tub, so they go bottom, bottom middle, upper middle, upper, upper outer, bottom outer, bottom; in a loop. if you put stuff in the middle to start, it'll just swish that back and forth and never clean anything. Sometimes stuff won't even get wet, or you'll have dried soap stuck to your clothes.
secondly, don't use fabric softener. If you must use something because of your water quality, use vinegar.
If you need to wash sheets, curtains, blankets, comforters and the like, you can't put them around the outside, because the HE washers do that cycle differently, too. You have to gather the fabric like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bindle sack, start with the sheet or whatever flat, fold all four corners (or whatever) into the middle so they all meet in the middle. Then pick it up by the four corners (or whatever) and place it in the washer with the middle of the sheet down and the four corners on top. Like a bindle sack. use the "sheets / heavy duty" cycle for sheets and the like. that's what it's for.
please, let me know if this solves your issues.
Is it different now?
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
i don't know, you tell me. And billions are in poverty now so i'm not sure this is a productive conversation. 44.9% of the global population is under $6.85 per day. 740mm try to survive on less than $2.15 a day.
45% of the earth's population is 3,700,000,000 or so, which, if my counting of commas is correct, is "literally billions of people"
The people in extreme poverty are not the people you are making the argument for. Changing your consumption isn't going to do a thing for sub Saharan Africa and latin America, as a matter of fact increasing consumption of goods from those countries will improve their quality of life.
If you are ever in South Africa contact me, really. I'll take you to those people in povery, tell them yourself how you think Americans spending less money is going to change their lives in any way.
You will probably find some peoplewho are just trying their best to make it through the day. You will also find a lot of their lack of wealth comes from a lack of education.
You want to make a lasting difference, stop donating to feel good charities or animals or nonsense. Find an organisation that is focussed on improving education in these areas and donate to that.
Because nothing kills corrupt governments quite like an educated voting base.
another way to look at this is, we export our pollution to another country until their citizens get tired of the pollution, and thus charge more for production. So we pull up stakes and move on to the next country that's too poor to complain.
But i guess bootstrapping economies by dumping toxins everywhere on the planet is ok.
The goal should be to bootstrap sustainable, clean technologies, not the same 1800s era industrialization that coats the land in a fine sheen of toxic waste.
Yes, there is a need to stop the small minority of humans that will not be good stewards of the planet, the people and creatures on it, and its atmosphere. I'm fine with being labelled an authoritarian.
oh and to answer a possible question about "what is 'good science'", i'd start with looking at scientists that have been doing science for at least a couple of decades, with no factual retractions on their record, or on the record of those they mentored (those who actually wrote the papers?). As an ancillary - their work must be reproducible, ideally by an competing institution - and it should go both ways. if Harvard always poo-poos UC Davis' research publications, then they shouldn't be surprised if the CSU and UC systems scrutinize Harvard's work especially.
to analogize to something i often hear, "We already have laws about that, just enforce them" - we already know what outstanding, excellent science looks like. Reinforce that.
on https://www.mapmypolitics.org/ i show as a lower left centrist, maybe 1 question away from "social Libertarian". I answered as though i were running the country, not as though i were living under the country i was describing. So questions where an answer is my ideal, but is impossible under the current system i answered that way. "Trade should be regulated to prevent unfair competition" was my answer, because "we pay our slaves - er... workers - 5 cents a day and don't care if they die" is unfair competition, to my reasoning. so is "we can provide cheap goods because we pollute the air, land and water, and ship cheap stuff to other countries they 'want' and pollute their air, land, and water, too." A couple examples, there.
Which Western nations have a fertility rate above replacement?
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.
What do you do? Obviously, the first thing you do is make sure the expenses go down. Cut down the unnecessary, slim every operation to what is really required, stabilise the curve so the slope becomes less steep.
Only then can you start thinking of investments in increasing efficiency by means of technology or long shots.
All of this carries over to humanity; we need to achieve a sustainable curve.
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.
And unlike, say, India, getting that number down is much easier (people resist being killed, but freely distributed contraceptives would likely by welcomed by women).
that begins with none of the existing lifeforms that were there beforehand.
Bikini Atoll was blasted with 23 (or 24, there's an edge case) separate nuclear explosions in the air, at sea level, and underwater, one a thousand times more powerful than either of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons.
Not comparable to a nuclear power station accident.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ExtinctionRebellion/comments/bhah12...
Extinction rebellion is focused on forcing politicians to take climate change seriously and make urgent policy changes. If politicians want to meet them with "we are taking this seriously, we're making a massive investment into nuclear power" they're free to do so.
Literally heaven, surrounded by the most beautiful ocean, reefs and fish.
Imagine then they turn up, round you up, take you off your island and send you somewhere else to live forever, taking your home from you.
Then they nuke that island repeatedly so it can never be lived on again and is now one the of the most polluted and radioactive and toxic places on earth.
Pristine perfect beauty converted to unliveable toxic hell for humans and animals.
This is the story of mankind, even today people want forcibly remove people.
devil's advocate: GODZILLA and all the excitement and joy the franchise gave people would not be as much a thing without the US trying to blow bikini atoll off aerial maps.
Pretty sure the people there had just as much conflict, poverty, and misery as the rest of us.
There is no absolute abundance of food on an atoll. There’s fish, coconuts and precious little ground for anything else to grow. It can be sustainable if the populations are very small, and then turn to hell quickly if they are not.
In that context, relocating 167 people to another island within the same country/cultural region barely registers.
Again, I'm not justifying anything, but if I had been around at the time, I'm not sure I would have cared either.
The place looks nice but there is not much there to make human life easy or nice: not much soil for agriculture or herds, not much shade, no fresh water, no resources to build anything, ...
[1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-bikini-atoll-looks-lik...
Other examples of this effect:
Samson -> Sampson
prince -> prints
hamster -> hampster
warmth -> warmpth
fence -> fents
2. The Medium version of this story was published 1 month before the stanfordmag.org version, so this is the "original" story.
https://stanfordmag.org/issues/december-2017
It makes sense to link to the current web version of the issue rather than the medium.com version.
> We’ve moved! Read this article and new stories from STANFORD on Stanfordmag.org.