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Imagine using something dangerous to generate power or heat for a home. Something that if it leaks into your home could suffocate you overnight or explode, or that in normal use can give children respiratory issues or cause cancer. Thank goodness we’re too smart to use something like that unlike the absolute imbeciles in this comic
Imagine if we had to move it around in such large quantities that there were thousands of kilometres of unwatched pipelines just out there, potentially leaking.
Actually leaking, not potentially.
And imagine people fight pointless wars over resources instead of using the renewables that are available for free.
Not only that, but mining for it produces massive quantities of dangerous runoff and radioactive waste. Good thing coal doesn’t do that!
You forgot the /s at the end.
Pretty sure that kid’s arm would hang down to his ankle if he straightened it. Must be all those atomic wafers.
Kilo wat
“Kilowat”
Might have questioned the reliability of that information source even back then already…
Yes, the kilo-wat. For when a simple “wat” doesn’t accurately capture the absurdity of the situation.
For example, asking junior to put an atomic wafer in the power box, when you are standing right fucking next to it.
I feel like “Atomic Wafer” should be a band name
Or as slang for a tab of LSD
why do i feel like Radioactive Buttplug is both already a band and an approved medical device
tell me you dont understand how nuclear-powered energy without telling me you dont understand nuclear-powered energy
It’s easy: just boil some water
Could you imagine a world where we first used atomic power for good and not evil?
Not really. It’s not economical and never has been. Civilian use of nuclear energy has only ever been a cover for nuclear arms development.
*Licks powerbox*
The radiation explains why his right arm is long enough that he could scratch his shins standing up
Future rock climbing world champion
So was the popular conception back then that power was somehow magically transferred directly from uranium to the power grid?
What grid? It looks like the “power box” on the wall is generating power for that house all by itself, no transmission necessary.
Considering that the smallest operating nuclear reactor ever made was this big…
…and that critical mass is a thing, I can only assume the “power box” was some kind of RTG.
Wouldn’t all but the largest RTGs struggle to power more than a few incandescent light bulbs, though? Looking at the table on Wikipedia, their output is usually only from a few dozen to a few hundred watts.
It was 60 years ago. If they put same effort to it as they put to computers you would have one in your pocket.
RTGs aren’t as limited by technological investment as they are constrained by fundamental physics.
It is pretty hard to irradiate a whole block and give everyone turbo-cancer with my smartphone, tbh.
The Soviets used RTGs quite a bit for remote installations, and “whoops, we lost one, I hope nobody finds it and kills their family” is a real concern (that was kind of ignored because a. Russia is big and b. it’s the Soviets we are talking about)
Nobody wants you to wear it. It would be enough if you could keep it next to the building that would power it for next 100 or 1000 years. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry about energy in your house for couple of generations ? You can read about ex. carbon-14 battery https://www.ukaea.org/case-studies/carbon-14-diamond-battery/ or watch video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgGVt4sUnnw
It was worse than that. Our understanding of radiation took awhile. While Uranium glass is probably safe I wouldn’t go using it regularly. A lot of women (“radium girls”) suffered from cancers induced by licking their brushes when painting luminescing instruments. This comic looks like 50s era when post the bomb sci-fi was full of “atomics” as the stuff of the future.
It’s like those watch batteries, but it’s uranium and powers the house.
I don’t think fiscal cost is the best or only way to measure success or necessarily improvement of society’s energy generation.
$ 0.001
The Jetsons/strangelove era pricing for nuclear energy was based on fuel costs only, and certainly scale was needed rather than this absurd wafer system. The fuel costs were based on no one using any yet, and maybe children yearning for the cancer.
Title… “that’s what she said!”
