The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”(doomsdaymachines.net) |
The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”(doomsdaymachines.net) |
I know what the Demon Core is (there was a similar, lesser known accident in my country, but it only killed the operator) and I'm all for bleak humor, but...
... I don't understand this one. What's with the animé girls and the cutesy style? What is this mocking exactly?
I'm not offended by it or anything, I just don't get it. Seems completely random as well as obscure.
Ah, sir, I guess you’re completely unfamiliar with anime tropes. From absurd brutality to dark drama (much worse than your Titanic Ending and Futurama Dog), everything can be found in anime. Thinking that these are cute animations for teens and children is a big mistake. I, a grown up adult, usually dread when an anime plot is too nice to its actors and think if I want to watch it further. This juxtaposition is well-expected.
To paraphrase Brad Bird, anime is not a genre. It's a broad art form that encompasses all genres. This is a common mistake for Western viewers of anime; even in the 90s it was marketed to us as being all dark, twisted Liquid Television stuff. But yeah, actually, most anime is created for and marketed to kids and teens. In Japan, if you're an adult consumer of anime, your peers may wonder what the hell is wrong with you and why won't you grow up. (Manga is different; plenty of manga are produced for adult consumption, and these are fairly serious in tone, and may lack the fantastic settings or big-eyed character designs Westerners associate with the medium.) Adult anime otaku in Japan are viewed with the same bemusement and contempt we might have for, say, the grown-ass men who are fans of My Little Pony. This may have changed more recently, as the Japanese government has leaned into the idea of anime and manga being important cultural exports through its "Cool Japan" publicity program.
Now the risk takers are at private companies.
Stop paying attention to whatever source is leading you to believe scientific progress has slowed down. They're lying to you.
Innovation needs creativity and fast iterations, in our current setup that is incredible hard.
MRNA tech is a good example: It was stuck in limbo for ages due to safety concerns, COVID allowed people to ignore these and push forward.
Demon Core meme came from KanColle(2013) communities in Futaba, and permeated to nicovideo.jp as well as to Twitter. That's why it is predominantly image based with few GIFs inbetween, why it is Demon Core and Demon Core only, and why there are few comical non-girl versions created years after inception.
I'd guess overlap between outspoken (ex-)Futaba users AND HN readers(hops_max=3) OR knowyourmeme users is exactly 1.0f, and this won't ever go on record anywhere unless someone say it somewhere, so here you go.
Do you have some source for this being the origin? Could you cite some examples from prior to 2018 which is earliest date of other Japanese demon core memes cited by https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/demon-core ?
Maybe there could be mht files in someone's basement somewhere, but I have no data to present at this instant, mostly just oral history. Sorry for that.
edit: oldest post tagged Demon Core on Pixiv dates back to 2016/01/17, so kym is verifiably off by years.
edit: there's a KanColle themed image post in Nico nico seiga dated 2017/06/18 featuring a "borrowed" Demon Core-chan 3D model, which meams the design existeed for some time.
edit: this blog post dated 2014/09/30 links to a deleted Touhou video with Demon Core in title: https://1ni.co/2014/09/30/project20140930_6/
Why not contribute your knowledge there, instead of (or in addition to) here, where it will surely be forgotten about?
The situation might change in 5-10 years, but as Prof. Oak said, "this isn't the time to do that"; I think it doesn't quite going to just work.
The Demon Core meme, for instance is getting pretty lamestream, no longer some shared affinity.
It's nice even mommyTok is doing it I guess, but we are one step away from a CNN story, then it's definitely over.
So for a brief moment make the most of the fact your smarter than "knowyourmeme"
Nico Nico Douga is a video hosting website that was created soon after YouTube's boom. It's famous for having user comments scrolling across videos and for being one of Japan's biggest meme factory from 2007 to 2012. Forcing users to login to watch videos, the push for premium accounts, and a rough transition from FLASH to HTML5 are considered some of main reasons of its decline.
I don’t agree. To me, it’s derived from many things, like juxtaposing something incredibly stressful and dangerous, with something else.
I’d go further and say the suffering that happened is only important in that it made the demon core popular and well-known, but the memes would still work if it somehow became well-known without the death and suffering because no accident happened.
But on the surface level of it, it's a scientist doing something knowingly incredibly dangerous and dumb for no particularly justifiable reason.
We've all felt a bit like that at some point. We just probably didn't have a core and a screwdriver.
"I'm a highly-trained scientist who helped develop the bombs that leveled two cities and usher in the nuclear era... yeah, lemme just fuck around with this bomb core and a screwdriver such that I'm one muscle-twitch from killing everyone around me, that seems fine."
So I get it, it was a demonstration of how to perform an experiment. But I can't understand how the screwdriver makes any sense at all. What's being measured? What does success and failure look like? What does the experiment produce, what data in what format?
Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements. Somebody's working on a data table that says "At position X, we measured value Y". But randomly wiggling stuff around with a screwdriver, I can't see how one can do anything of the sort. And I figure at this level, "more coverage = more radiation" is kind of a trivial point that doesn't really need to be demonstrated.
Between that accident and the year 2000 there were about 60 criticality accidents causing about 20 fatalities
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0037/ML003731912.pdf
After a software project failure that overturned my life I got interested in the quality movement, Deming, Toyota Production System and all that. I was also interested in nuclear energy, actually opposed to it at that time, an opinion I have changed.
Before the Fukushima accident I became aware that Japan was leading the world in nuclear accidents, especially this criticality incident
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
as well as the comedy of errors at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant
which I could summarize as "makes Superphenix look like a huge success"
Causes floated for that were that (1) Japan was more aggressive at developing nuclear technology post-1990 more than any country other than Russia (who is making the FBR look easy today) and (2) the attitudes and methods that served Japan well in cars and semiconductors served them terribly in the nuclear business. Workgroups in a Japanese factory, for instance, are expected to modify their techniques and tools to improve production but takes detailed modelling and strict following of rules to avoid criticality accidents.
If you go through the Fukushima disaster handling, that doesn't seem to have happened at all. In fact, people seemed to be super inflexible and actions seemed to have a long authorization chain.
The Toyota Production System wasn't actually that free, it expected people to report the changes before they happen and had plenty of opportunities for a manager to step in and stop it. Anyway, I'm not sure how widely it was adopted in Japan, the system famously came from there, but the country isn't famous for applying it.
In disasters, you want to follow the established procedure, to minimize risk in an already confusing and unusual situation.
This also would explain the relatively large presence of anime memes in particular, since the "main" meme is a series of Japanese animations.
EDIT: knowyourmeme.com actually has an article about the Demon Core and its popularity in Japan as a meme[1]. Apparently the latter predates the Demon Core Kun series by about a year at least. Still, the latter being on YT made it a lot more accessible to non-Japanese people which might explain the spike in meme popularity in 2019.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjjzx95hXRLvbVeHuE8fT...
Bear in mind, however, that some napkin math suggests that this is gross overkill, 2,250365100 = 82,135,000, suggesting that even a fairly long lived person only needs a mere 2,650 gallons of gas, or ~7,070 Tesla powerwalls, and that the demon-core can easily supply enough lifetime calories for a solid large city of ~1,500,000.
Sometimes i imagine how I would explain our current tech to someone clever and curious from the past. Like what would Jules Verne, Edison or John von Neumann do if you took your iphone out of your pocket and show them as you unlock it with your face, click youtube and search their name. (Just as an example of something super pedestrian and mundane which might just blow their minds.) We are trully living in an age of wonders.
“Are allowed to” is probably more accurate than “can”, given that the main constraint is other nations looking for signs that you are doing it and... reacting negatively if they see them.
Sodium and Chlorine? Potassium and water?
Also, if you are so inclined, there are also Chernobyl memes [1].
Some years ago i gifted them a snow globe for birthday, but not one with a snowman and white particles, but one with a little chernobyl plant and black particles. Their coworkers found it funny. It is still at their desk these days.
Now I want one. Where did you buy it from if you don't mind me asking?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6ZIjbX1gj88
I'm not sure if this is the genesis of the demon core meme (probably not), but it definitely came fairly early on.
There are many examples from WW2 comedy to 9/11 memes. Sometimes the examples are more indirect, like in film: American Psycho, American Beauty, Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, Fargo, Don't Look Up, Fight Club, Quentin Tarantino's stuff, etc. All of them deal with dark themes in a light way.
Given the prevalence of this in our culture, the author seems a bit surprised. Maybe they didn't connect it to dark comedy.
Things can be, and often are, both at the same time.
> I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.
The problem arises when people think they are an intended audience when they are not (the pope going to a Bill Hicks show), or when a comedian thinks that they're in front of their intended audience when they are not (a conservative comic at the Appolo). A lot of people need to learn this on both sides, and more importantly need to stop complaining when they come to this realization.
I know someone who saw a Carlin skit where he jokes about prisoners escaping... Basically the person got triggered.
Either way, I don't believe in censoring humor in most cases.
Also, I love how the author tries to argue for who should be allowed to make the joke, like there is some arbiter who can tell you “oh you don’t fall into that group so you are not allowed to make that joke.”
https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/12x9rxi/the...
Based on The Ol' Spicy Keychain:
I don't agree with the author's analysis here. I think the demon core is simply memorable. It has a scary name and the beryllium sphere is iconic in a way the Kelley and SL-1 accidents simply aren't.
A bit from Look Around You, a (fantastic) British comedy show made to look like retro science classroom educational videos, from the minds of Peter Serafinowicz and Robert Popper
I like the pun on “hot girl stuff” https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/hot.html
Expecting everyone to be deeply affected by all traumatic experiences throughout history is unrealistic. We have defence mechanisms to cope with the overwhelming weight of global suffering, and breaking them down is a bad idea. So shaming those who managed to distance themselves from such events (by saying their dark comedy is in bad taste) is condescending. I say it's good to have healthy coping strategies and not be overly affected by awful events we were not exposed to directly – that is called healthy mental resilience. Not everyone should suffer because anyone else has.
People should and will still joke, even when awful things have happened to billions in every conceivable niche of life. Really, I would even argue one should not absorb more suffering and terror than they would have been exposed to in one life-time, even if the internet and news media makes it easy. One should certainly, without any doubt in my mind not internalize every tragedy in history in an effort to stifle humour.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/25/comedy-plus/
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/mel-brooks-film-exc...
> I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.
That "something else" to me is the absolute ease of the act. I think we normally expect the scale of the consequences to match the setup difficulty.
Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic!
So there's also the wizardry component of it. It tickles our love of fantasy stories and arcane power, and the irresponsible handling thereof.
Elsewhere someone mentions lighting cigarettes at a gas station. That situation has similar aspects, but lacks the magical flair.
There wasn't anything instant about the death, from Wikipedia:[1]
Despite intensive medical care and offers from numerous volunteers to donate blood for transfusions, Slotin's condition was incurable.[2] He called his parents and they were flown at Army expense from Winnipeg to be with him. They arrived on the fourth day after the incident, and by the fifth day his condition started to deteriorate rapidly.
Over the next four days, Slotin suffered an "agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas", including severe diarrhea, reduced urine output, swollen hands, erythema, "massive blisters on his hands and forearms", intestinal paralysis and gangrene. He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn." By the seventh day, he was experiencing periods of "mental confusion." His lips turned blue and he was put in an oxygen tent. He ultimately experienced "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and slipped into a coma. Slotin died at 11 a.m. on 30 May, in the presence of his parents.
The other people in the room got a couple years’ worth of rads from his mistake didn’t they?
I’m sure they rationalized not using an apparatus for this due to embrittlement, thermal expansion, response time, or all three. But from the perspective of someone looking back on this era 50 years later (now 80), Jesus fucking Christ.
Carpenter’s pencils as spacers would have saved his life.
In fact Wikipedia says he was a dumbass:
> The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> By Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used. The top half of the reflector was resting directly on the bottom half at one point, while 180 degrees from this point a gap was maintained by the blade of a flat-tipped screwdriver in Slotin's hand. The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver. Slotin, who was given to bravado,[11] became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions,
Yeah it’s sad but it is almost difficult to believe, so it ends up being kind of funny
Hell, when the accident happened, he said, "Well, that does it."
Off-primary use of a mundane hand tool being the only thing preventing a minor nuclear disaster is simply funny. Like God forming man from mud not with the fine tools of a master clay-worker, but a child's play-doh plastic carving tools and a couple toothpicks.
Vs. if your day job routinely involves high voltages, roofing, heavy equipment, or other "one stupid slip, and your life is effectively over" situations, then you have a rather different outlook on this.
> It required the operator to place two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around the core to be tested and manually lower the top reflector over the core using a thumb hole at the polar point. As the reflectors were manually moved closer and farther away from each other, neutron detectors indicated the core's neutron multiplication rate. The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves to allow enough neutrons to escape from the core in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
> Because in my head, a proper experiment has data collection and precise measurements.
In your head yes, in early nuclear science it seems protocols weren't that important as long as it went boom in the end. As with many industries, regulations are written in blood
The guy doing this experiment was *notorious* for it and multiple other manhattan project people had already told him he was going to die if he kept doing it. But he had the kind of bravado and personality that he kept doing it.
So to be clear: all of the other people whose risk tolerance levels already had them handling weapons-grade plutonium as a career ALSO thought this guy was insane for doing this.
Would it have actually gone bang like a bomb, or more like just get insanely hot and give off an insane amount of radiation, but over the span of many seconds?
Obviously they should've built a rig for that (at least), but I guess there was a "ain't nobody got time for that" attitude.
Like if we measure the amount of noise a device makes, we do it in a quiet room and at a standard distance. Without precision there's no useful data being generated.
So that's the part that I don't get. Shouldn't there be a screw being turned precise amounts, precisely made shims, or at least calipers be involved?
It wasn't the "oh look, something funny happens if I do this!" stage of experimentation. This was after they understood what they were dealing with well enough to build and successfully use two bombs. And Slotin was supposedly about to move elsewhere and was working on passing on knowledge.
That's why it's so weird to me.
I think with his reaction afterwards to remove it again, he saved the others in the room, but not himself
I think they made the connection to dark comedy:
>this somewhat kawaii rendering of the Slotin experiment, along with the “I love science” phrasing, was a form of dark humor.
And later
>Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.
But just as in the movie it was politicians who weren't down with it. On both sides. Khrushchev was removed when his colleagues figured out just how close he got them to WW3.
With Thermonuclear War: no one is around to experience anything after a comedian bombs on the world stage.
Stanley Kubrick was famous for making actors miserable, but reminded us film is ultimately a collaborative art form. =3
In his opinion, killing humor is the same as killing creativity and killing creativity is the same as inviting disaster and/or failure for the sake of your ego.
Not being solemn is not the same as not being serious.
I think your last sentence there really is the right take away here. But even more than that, I think the right way to prevent future tragedies is with humor not solemnity.
I often think about https://xkcd.com/1053/ and how it's broadly misinterpreted: the point isn't that we should accelerate the education of everyone (at least on things of non-vital import), the point is that it's mutually fun to actually have the experience of sharing with a single person or a small community. And of course, as the XKCD says, it's important to do this freely and without judging the learner... but that freedom to share often exists precisely because the knowledge remains obscure.
If we don't like the commodification of the "inside joke" into a mere vehicle for advertising, as so much of culture in the age of algorithmic video feeds is becoming... then we need to let spaces and knowledge be obscure sometimes!
Not everything needs to be measured to a high precision to be useful, and it's always a balance of how much effort you want to expend versus how useful that extra accuracy/precision is.
If all you care about is "when you're getting close to a critical mass, your instruments will look like this," you don't care that you have a wide swing in your data. You just want to show a difference from baseline.
Consider trying to measure feedback from a microphone and speaker. You don’t have to be an expert to know that there’s a quick change in system behavior when the microphone gets too close to the speaker.
If the goal is to demonstrate to observers how the neutron output (reaction rate) increases as the reflectors are moved closer together over the source, then that isn't really necessary.
This seems more like an incredibly dangerous version of a demonstration you might see at an interactive science museum or a classroom. You don't need precise measurements to demonstrate the relationship between two phenomenon.
As in, you're trying to understand the situation as "shouldn't they have precisely nailed down all the parameters, if the goal is to measure when X starts happening". But it seems Slotin was more demonstrating "this is what you're going to see on the monitors when stuff is close to going boom". It wasn't about "this specific distance is a safe gap" and more "here's how you can tell whether the gap is safe".
He was about to be reassigned out of the lab, and was demonstrating equipment to his designated successors.
Presumably the experiment to be done later is about characterizing different cores. They had already done it for this core, and wanted to teach the principles to others.
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/1...
Also Youtube, and justifiably so for once.
NicoNico was simply obnoxious to use even in its heyday, while you could just open a Youtube vidja and watch. Once Youtube incorporated livestreaming and chat, it was over for NicoNico.
Also if you have questions about the VT520, you could join ##asm on libera IRC.
The three reasons to produce fissile material are weapons, non-explosive military uses and civilian power reactors. Even many of the weapons states aren't producing new fissile material for weapons these days, they have more than enough.
No doubt! But i’m also not sure if the compute would be the most interesting part to them. The screen itself might fascinate them. Or the touch interface. Or they might ask how is it powered, or how does it store all those videos in that little slab. And if we tell them it is connected to other machines with radiowaves, they might ask many questions about that. They might notice that even though the music they hear “came over the radio” it is exceptionally crisp and without any distortion, so they would ask about that, which could lead us chatting about digital error correction codes or compression algorithms. Or maybe they would be fascinated by the camera and take pictures of themselves, or ask about other features the phone has.
It is one thing to understand that a transistor is just an electronic switch, and if you connect many of them you can have complex electronic circuits. It is an entirely different thing to experience that you can touch one of the tiny images on the slab and then it shows a colourful birds eye view picture of the buildings around us, and with two fingers you can move around to seemingly anywhere else on Earth and see what is there.
We know that the second is just a bunch of transistors appropriately organised but there is a few “wait what? How is that possible?” along the path from understanding transistors to experiencing google earth.
And then of course the biggest magic of it all: this device they are seeing is not some rare wonder which only governments or militaries can afford in few numbers. Not something only specialist can use in laboratories of higher learning. It is a common item anyone can buy. The cost of purchasing this device is comparable to the rent one pays for a modest abode for a month. That is the real magic. That it is available and affordable to the masses.
That quote seems to have multiple origins, though I remember it from Portal, an unlikely source.
I don't know what's the correct way of extracting the love operator from under the square root.
The point was to show it to people, not to collect data.
Wow, that's a brilliantly horrifying image. (Are there other analogous ones? Does anyone do musical timing of building demolitions, or something like that?)
There was the V For Vendetta movie where landmarks exploded to the 1812 Overture, but no gesturing was involved.
Sure, some of that training is going to involve blackboard calculations and careful measurements.
But you're also probably going to demonstrate a sink to them and say "As you can see, when we turn this knob more hot water is added to the mix. Note how, after I put the plug in the plughole, the water level starts rising."
The purpose of the demo isn't to precisely measure the depth of the water or the temperature at the faucet or the angle the tap is turned to. It's just to let them see the thing in practice, so as they study it in theory they know what to imagine and how the model maps onto the real world.
0: https://doomsdaymachines.net/p/the-meme-ification-of-the-dem...
1: hey, it's not nice thing to say, and I understand that writing for the Gigazine is not an easy job, but frankly,
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20110404124748/http://slashdot.j...
3: https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E3%83%87%E3%83%B...
The Slotin incident happened in 1946, after WW2 had ended.
At some point potassium chloride is a mercy.
Despite having been in all kinds of alpine rock climbing and international downhill ski racing competition experience, or perhaps because of it, that was just a hard NOPE. I think it was just the intense awareness that, once a slip starts, there was no recovering or stopping before the ground. The weird thing is just how totally casual he was about it, even seeming to think my question about protection was a bit odd.
I'm just damn fortunate to have the option, especially considering the statistics for roofing work.
It always seemed barn raising events were a very effective and efficient way to build community infrastructure. But a death or crippling per barn is a damn high cost in blood!
It's relatable: It's so human to experience fatigue and just let it go and do it the quick way that one time. From jaywalking to not checking whether the power is turned off.
The Demon Core is an exciting parable about how closely we're flirting with death when we do that. Just one little slip, and life completely changes from one moment to the next.
It's that wretching discomfort of how easy it is to imagine being Slotin.
The nihilistic humor/sarcasm is a way to cope/confront it all.
Anyway, in a general sense that's a particular type of sexual selection[0] that's been observed more often: showing that you are a healthy individual with good genes by taking risks. It probably has name. I suspect that with humans it's also an instinctual way of showing off who is the strongest in your peer group, without the sexual selection connotations.
EDIT: turns out the wikipedia article was one click removed from what I had in mind: signaling theory! (the evolutionary biology version)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azumanga_Daioh
which has a mad scientist character that I can easily picture screwing around with plutonium half-sphere and a screwdriver.
1: Yeah I know this is a bad idea itself, but what can you do? She was ~20 and her pre-frontal cortex was still not fully developed.
But the details also adds to the magical element. It's not just being reckless, but being reckless with a horrible, excruciating, protracted, torture curse.
A story of using a screwdriver to fiddle with a loaded gun while the muzzle is pointed at you wouldn't have the same appeal, because the consequence is so much more direct and mundane.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/1hy7fu/never_look...
I didn’t think of it this way before, but yeah, the demon core memes are absolutely cousins of this type of loaded weapon humor.
It's unlike many deaths. But there are plenty more that share that quality.
> Wetterhahn would recall that she had spilled several drops of dimethylmercury from the tip of a pipette onto her latex-gloved hand.
> Approximately three months after the initial accident Wetterhahn began experiencing brief episodes of abdominal discomfort and noticed significant weight loss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn
That onset reminds me of a children's book about postwar Japan, in which a little girl is running around on the playground and falls down. This extremely ordinary event is treated as an emergency, and it turns out to be one.
xkcd published a What If? video about the consequences of swimming in a nuclear fuel pool: https://youtu.be/EFRUL7vKdU8
It's entirely possible to build up skills allowing you to avoid using PPE, but every kid who sees you is being put at risk just so you can swing your dick around.
Yes, but you only need to mess up once and your skill doesn't save you from other people mistakes.
Humans don't have perfectly consistent attention, and by the time you think you have any skill like that your attention is even less consistent than before you started "practicing".
To me it seems quite reasonable that the people hired
to work on a bomb intended to kill 150,000 people in one go
against the backdrop of a war where 70-85 million died
might not place the greatest value on health and safety, and the sanctity of human life.
In the evening, Nano and Sakamoto-San would convince Hakase to defuse it, but in the last second Nano accidentally slips and the core goes supercritical with an enormous flash of blue light.
The light subsides, revealing it was just an elaborate device to make the perfect runny egg.
"The Shinonome household passed another peaceful day."
(The person I replied to didn't make this claim directly, but it's an oft-cited myth that it seemed like they were referencing.)
Rabies is actually a great comparison. It has similar magical/horrifying feel to it. Like with the screwdriver slip-up, catching rabies can look like a total non-event; here, it doesn't kill you yet, merely starts the timer on a bomb. The countdown can be anything between days and years, and when it runs out - when the first symptoms start showing - you're already dead. Then the dying happens, which... relative to radiation sickness, I'm really not sure which is better.
To add an insult to injury, rabies is very much curable before the symptoms show - but you have to realize you may have been exposed in the first place.
They are found, rushed to the hospital, they wake up and feel better, everybody can meet them and see them alive and know of their attempt -- but they're walking dead, their liver is incurably damaged and they die in a few days.
In his final days, my dad, dying from leukemia in home hospice care, had been getting his calories entirely from a cocktail of beer and V-8 juice — and taking a lot of acetaminophen (aka paracetamol, the generic of Tylenol) for the pain. As I brought him his latest "meal," I warned him that too much alcohol and acetaminophen would wreck his liver and kill him. He brightened and asked whether that'd be a way for him to end it. I said I didn't know the details but that as far as I knew it'd take days and be even worse than what he was experiencing. (He died the next day, 15 years ago yesterday.)
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%91-Amanitin#Symptoms_of_po...
Someone playing with a screwdriver and a few pieces of various metals is funny because its danger is unintuitive. It's so strange that someone can mishandle such seemingly innocuous objects and then die a few days later because of it, that it's comical. It's a non sequitur.
I think you're falling into exactly the sort of trap I was talking about, that the enormity of the devastation is so unimaginably great that it's difficult to imagine what it would actually be like, and to (somewhat lazily) conclude "well, it'd probably be instantaneous". But, for example, this analysis doesn't support that idea at all: https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshi...
That would imply that people might retain the ability to form memories past the age of 25, though.
(That said, repeated head trauma does tend to thicken the skull, although any practical benefits are extraordinarily questionable.)
Fukushima happened because their backup generators flooded and couldn’t provide emergency power to remove decay heat. They flooded because management didn’t listen to the engineers who spec’d a much higher (and more expensive) sea wall.
Three Mile Island can’t be blamed on management in the same way, but indirectly in that they allowed a culture of accepting defects to fester. Operators had so many inoperable or inaccurate alarms and meters that they were initially unaware of any problems, and then they didn’t trust / believe the readings they saw.
Nuclear power, when built and operated correctly, with strict procedural compliance, is incredibly safe. The U.S. Navy has over 7500 reactor-years of safe operation spanning over 75 years, with zero reactor accidents.
I am all for wind and solar where it’s feasible, but you simply cannot beat the density of nuclear fuel, nor its ability to provide 100% base load day in and day out. If you want sustainable green energy (and I do), it must involve nuclear power; fossil fuel plants cannot be replaced by anything else we currently know of.
And there have been incidents on nuclear subs as well.
This is not against using nuclear power, but you should not downplay the risks. Because if something happens, the consequences can be devastating. There is also the problem with nuclear waste, which isn't really solved either.
What this says to me is that it's unfeasible at-scale unless it's a nationalized venture administered by a workforce with literal military discipline.