44:05
>shadman
Always fun to see Ross back at it again. Not often you get two Game Dungeons practically back to back
great video as always
So I think I understand the weird science behind the nukes -> global warming thing. A couple steps probably got skipped or glossed over (or maybe Ross just misunderstood it, it's not like I'd even heard of this game an hour ago).
The Amazon rainforest plays a pretty major role in the carbon cycle. It turns something like 4% (iirc) of the annual CO2 emissions into oxygen - which doesn't sound like much but the planet's pretty friggen big and global warming is about relatively small percentage shifts.
If the meltdown caused a continent-wide forest fire, and then the residual radiation prevented the forest from regrowing, you would in fact mess up the carbon cycle - rather than by emitting too much, by destroying the ability to absorb. And it is feared that this is a positive-feedback cycle, because the Amazon likely wouldn't survive at higher temperatures.
All of that happening because of one reactor sounds like a load of crap. It's not like there's a lack of plant life in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and the Amazon isn't going to turn into an inferno no matter how big an explosion you set off. It's a rainforest, not a tinder box. But it's at least a plausible chain of events afterward.
I don't know if that's actually what the creators intended but it's where it sounded like they were headed. Maybe I'm being too generous though.
I think Ross completely misunderstood nuclear power. Paging Dr. @Snowmew
This was the first thing that i thought of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d4C1ZQKmw4
I feel like he kinda had a grasp on why it would be bad, but was confused why a game about saving the earth from climate change would vilify one of the best alternatives to fossil fuels.
The message gets even more confused when it wasn't even an accident that causes this, it's eco-terrorism causing an enormous ecological disaster in order to get everyone's attention about potential future ecological disasters??? I mean hell it's more of a security problem than a sustainability problem at that point. Nobody would see headlines of "Eco-terrorists blow up nuclear power plant" and think "Well that cinches it we need to cut back on fossil fuels", they'd think "We need to stop people from blowing our shit up"
Oh also this game is $1 on steam right now. I bought it just for that amazing artwork.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1335/11bd247e-c15d-4e60-b4b6-b900075e48ee/image.png
Steam from the steamed main characters we're having. Mmm.
I think that's what he was hinting at when he called it a 12 Monkeys situation. Salvadors from the past-future kept blowing up the nuclear plants and kept fucking up the future until this game. Although if it was a real 12 Monkeys situation then nothing would have changed. Which, as Ross pointed out, kind of happened anyway.
I will always drop what I am doing to watch RGD
like studying for my final in 15 minutes ):
god damn it I thought the exact same thing when I originally watched the video, as if I wasnt struggling to take the game seriously already due to the poor voice acting and plot :v
Speaking of taking the game seriously it would've been easier to suspend my disbelief in more ways than one if Fey had been an android, and the lawyer villain a talking crocodile.
first one was questionable but the second was definitely an A
That's great! I'm proud of you.
When Ross kept making comparisons on the game being a Saturday Morning Cartoon, it actually made me wish for more games to go into that direction ala The Curse of Monkey Island. Not completely kid friendly perhaps, but just something wholesome and humorous like Curse of Monkey Island was. I'd pay full price for an adventure game like that with a lengthy 8-10 hour adventure and great voice acting, visuals and animations.
I don't think it'll happen. Adventure games made today have to appeal to older people who have nostalgia for 90s adventure games. And to appeal to adults, I guess you need a little bit of darkness, apparently.
There's the other Daedalic Point&Click series Deponia. It's artstyle reminds me of CoMI and I think it's good.
Also worth noting that meltdowns don't produce explosions as presented. Nuclear explosoins have to happen under very specific circumstances, by setting off highly particularly and specifically refined nuclear material with very specifically shaped charges to cause a chain reaction of nuclear particles hitting nuclear particles, like popcorn from hell. Whereas a meltdown is simply the runaway fisson, either due to a coolant failiure or out of control "spooling down" of the fission, which is much slower. And any explosions are usually due to the extremely hot material melting through the reactor walls into the coolant, causing a steam explosion. The main hazzards of that being the exposed nuclear material and irradiated water being out in the open. And it's not really possible to cause a nuclear explosion with a reactor, because the material simply isn't refined to the correct state to behave that way.
And y'know, steam explosions are rough, but if any boiler explosion was enough to end the world, we would've been hosed ages ago.
You're late
https://i.snep.top/d1vngr.png
I think he got the gist of it though so I wouldn't say he completely misunderstood it. Obviously he more or less gets the concept that a nuclear reactor can't just blow up somewhere and trigger a global warming catastrophe.
Generally speaking, future reactor designs are designed to utilize, at the very least, 10x as much of the energy in the uranium fuel as we do now. So it's not really a question of finding more uranium, but improving our use of it, as you found out.
I also don't think your $2 per Wh number for solar is correct. Existing solar technology isn't really all that cost-efficient without subsidies, but it's not bad enough that it costs over 10,000x as much as your typical grid energy.
I'm not really opposed to renewables at all, I just don't think it's feasible right now to expect renewables to reliably satisfy base load. Nuclear is kind of in the middle of the road when it comes to unsubsidized cost. Yet really, until we can develop better solar panels and more efficient storage methods, it's not going to be able to do base load, so there has to be another piece to the puzzle.
Don't forget that breeder technology has been well researched and there are numerous fuel sources we can use (For example Thorium is ~4x more common in the earth's crust compared to Uranium, not even U-235, just U-238, the unfissionable one, & U-235). Sure Uranium is limited, there's no arguing that. But its also the efficiency that we use that power, for example most LWR, BWRs and Candus achieve <1% extraction of the Uranium's energy in the core alone, not considering losses from the steam/coolant cycle or turbines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
Plus with breeders we can use existing nuclear waste and decommissioned weapons as fuel starters or full on fuel replacements.
I don't know why we aren't persuing thorium reactors with every ounce of effort we're capable of. It seems almost perfectly ideal in every way.
Ross is having Housing problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0vA64sSdqM
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