What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
28 comments
·March 11, 2025Animats
tanaros
Medium is a publishing/hosting platform for authors. This Medium account is (or purports to be) the official account of the Stanford alumni magazine.
crusty
It appears that it was published on medium and subsequently added to the standfordmag site, hence the 2 links to it they're and the notice that new articles are published there. It probably just remains because they have no control over medium, so they can't turn the page into a permanent redirect, and they don't want to just take it down and break links.
RIMR
1. This is the official Medium publication for the Stanford Alumni Magazine.
2. The Medium version of this story was published 1 month before the stanfordmag.org version, so this is the "original" story.
abound
The note about using C-14 (introduced from nuclear blasts) to date the age of living cells is fascinating.
prerok
Sorry, say what? C-14 comes from exposure to radiation also from the sun. Dating by it would make no sense in recent history because it would be too hard. Am I missing something?
prerok
Answering my own question, after rereading TFA. It's more because the C-14 was doubled and not because C-14 did not exist before.
ToucanLoucan
I read this several times as C-4 not C-14 and was very curious how one would date the age of living cells with plastic explosives. I think I need more coffee.
declan_roberts
I wonder why "extinction rebellion" types don't love nuclear power more.
When it works right we have unlimited clean energy.
And when it goes wrong you have a 50,000 year nature preserve.
serviceberry
Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc.
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.
zenolijo
I only personally know one person who had been an active member in Extinction Rebellion and I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. It seems like they all agree that the amount of growth we have today is unsustainable, but what sustainable growth exactly is and in turn how much growth needs to be compromised is not agreed upon. So I don't believe that endless pursuit of growth is against most of their members opinion, they just have a much stricter view on what sustainable growth is (and that some degrowth might be needed to achieve sustainable growth in the long term).
tehjoker
I think this is probably a misrepresentation of degrowth. Perhaps there are some that take an extreme view like that, but it is more that we are very very obviously beyond the limits of sustainable living and something will have to give, now, or worse in the future as we deplete even more resources.
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.
ForTheKidz
Because we talk about the harms of radiation far more than we discuss the harms of pollution and CO2, despite the latter having orders of magnitude more health impacts. We'd have to have hundreds or maybe thousands of chernobyls a year to compete.
wkat4242
If you look only at deaths yes. But radioactive contamination can lead to a lot more damage to health and nature than just deaths. As an example, Fukushima caused 1 death but its pollution was detected all the way across the Atlantic. Yet usually only deaths are factored in.
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.
smallmancontrov
Focusing on anything except damage/kWh tends to increase damage/kWh.
> 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.
wat10000
Being detectable isn’t very interesting. Modern technology can detect vanishingly small concentrations of weird isotopes. No harm came to anybody on the other side of the ocean from that stuff.
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!
richardw
And if nuclear became the default clean energy technology, it would have to be shared worldwide. Every country with the same issues, but varying levels of competence, political alignment, terror risks etc. do we want 100 000 nuclear power stations?
hijinks
people have seemed to forget that there were some people in LA that use to walk outside in gas masks due to all the air pollution.
WorkerBee28474
Because their stated purpose and their real intents are not aligned.
hammock
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jmyeet
I only learned last year that you can dive the atomic fleet [1][2]. What is the atomic fleet? As part of the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, they dragged a bunch of WW2 ships (from both the US and Japan) and detonated bombs above them to test how effective such weapons were at sinking ships.
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...
margalabargala
> something normally not possible AFAIK where you can only stay a few hours to stay below radiation thresholds.
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.
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beanjuiceII
[flagged]
What, did Medium just copy over Stanford's alumni magazine? Here's the original story.[1]
[1] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-bikini-atoll-looks-lik...