Published on 12, July, 2020
Not dead, simply gone, just like that. How would suburban pets fare without people to feed them? How would the forests, the oceans and the wildlife react if there was suddenly an end to all the hunting, fishing and farming? After being on the receiving end of humanity for millennia, nature would finally be given a chance to take the world back. But how would it work? How long would the skyscrapers and houses last if they were abandoned? Aftermath: Population Zero - The World without HumansThis is a fascinating documentary. It's quite long, but extremely interesting. What would happen if, tomorrow, every single person on Earth simply disappeared? “Aftermath” is the astounding story of a world that humans will never see. The two-hour special examines the impact of human beings on this planet by proposing what the Earth might be like without people.
my only concern is the enslaved, caged animals, and the nuclear facilities need to be decommissioned (though I think Mother Earth may find a way round that problem).
There would be an enormous cataclysm according to the documentary. There is enough diesel to keep the plants going for a couple of weeks, but after that, every nuclear reactor would cool down and each one would explode with the force of 250 Hiroshimas.
They would automatically shut down - and eventually melt down.
the eventual overheating would poison the fuel rods releasing hydrogen through the over-pressure system.
If the reactor continued to overheat, it would eventually melt down into the sand-filled containment and the distribution of the active material would become sub-critical - like the Chernobyl 'elephant foot'
What reason can you give that would cause an explosion?
Depends on the isotopes - long lived is good - it means that there are only a few particles coming off every now and then but for a very long time . Short-lived means it's all coming off together so much more dose uptake if you're stood there.
But all of this will be behind metres of concrete - no problem..
You'd be surprised at how much natural radiation is around you - the sun - blasting you every day. People love a tan - but that's your skin showing radiation damage! If that happened in a work environment, there's be a massive enquiry. .
Radon seeping out of the ground - bananas! quite radioactive!
Isn't the half life in some case hundreds of thousands of years though?
I don't buy it - there's sooooo much anti-nuclear BS that facts are irrelevant to most people - all they know is 'nuclear = bad' What is this gas? How do the explosions actually happen? Reactors fail safe these days - all the old Chernobyl types were decommissioned decades ago. I'm not believing the failure modes.
Melt-downs are not really that dangerous to the outside world - the reactor is trashed and the containment is filled with radioactive glass - but so what? There's no-one to go and mess with it and in a few thousand years, the problem decays itself away to nothing.