Future Peril

[stickmaker]

 

"Through your collective efforts you finally force the massive door open. Beyond, stretching far past the reach of your lanterns, is a dark, silent tunnel. However, it is not completely featureless. In the distance you see something. As your eyes adjust you realize it is a glowing skull and crossbones."

 

Congratulations. Your role-playing group of atechnical future primitives have just found an ancient radioactive waste repository. :-)

Comments

[kengr]

Alas, if it's all *that* ancient it'll be "mostly harmless".

Rule of thumb: after ~300 years, nuclear reactor waste will be about as radioactive as the original ore.

How radioactive something is ("activity" often measured in units that amount to decays per second per unit mass) is inversely proportion to the half-life.

So anything that's intensely radioactive has a short-life. and vice versa. Decay products complicate things some, but the general idea still holds.

So all those stories from the 70s & 80s that have dangerously radioactive waste after thousands of years are pure bunk. Bad science.

On the other hand, you can play with your *players* perceptions.

I had players encounter a room with walls, floor and ceiling that glowed a soft, faint blue.

They fell all over themselves getting out of there. It was a harmless glow. Not radioactivity.

A good "booby trap" if you have your primitives encountering a nuclear *fuel* storage site or lab that was used *recently* (mining and refining by offworlders?). Something the Manhattan Project discovered the hard way...

You have the ingots of uranium or plutonium spaced carefully on the shelves, far enough apart that the neutrons they emit won't affect each other much. And the shelves were spaced apart the same way.

They forgot that the human body is a moderator (because of the water in it). So when they added the second row of shelves, as long as folks were added ingots from the outside sides everything was fine.

Then somebody walked *between* the sets of shelves. And his body slowed the faster neutrons just enough to make them induce extra fissions in the ingots on the other side of his body. and vice versa.

Result? a quick feedback loop causing the chain reaction to amplify in a second or so. Enough so that there was a bright *visible* flash of light that caught the attention of his co-workers as he got a lethal dose of radiation.

I don't recall if it was enough to make him collapse immediately or not.

Then, of course, you have what happens when the PCs start dumping these shiny metal ingots into sacks to carry off.

The sub-critical masses go prompt critical and at a minimum irradiate the hell out of them. At worst, they get a "squib" explosion where the reaction generates enough energy to force the ingots away from each other.

Say, grenade to satchel charge level of "boom".

[stickmaker]

Just because something is radiologically safe doesn't mean it's chemically safe. :-)

Sounds like someone was tickling the dragon's tail.

Anyway, the scenario was sparked by a recent memory of me asking several technically savvy people - including some nuclear physicists - how to build a warning sign which would last for multiple thousands of years. (I should have known better. They sent me _equations_... :-) Yes, I still have the document I made with their replies.) The original idea was signs in an alien base which are glowing even though the power failed tens of thousands of years before.

[kengr]

Yeah, the squib explosion bit is something they narrowly avoided while tickling the dragons tail. The guy who knocked things apart with his bare hands when the screwdriver slipped got a really nasty dose of radiation.

The bit with the shelving happened but it was pure "we didn't think of that".

If you are creating a booby trap on purpose, a couple of sub-critical plates on either side of a doorway would work nicely.

Most long term storage protocols involve vitrifying the stuff or otherwise making it chemically inert.

Of course, all bets are off if the primitives decide to do something with the "pretty colored glass".

Something they actually *made* back in the 50s were emergency lights that used radioisotopes to either ionize gas (sort of like a neon light with no electricity) or light up a phosphor coating on the inside of the bulb.

We've had some fun discussions on the TML about derelict starships and ancient bases.

One fun bit is that unless they use some really odd electronics (like TIMMs) nothing will work because over that long a time span the dopants will have migrated across the PN junctions rendering the semiconductor based stuff unusable.

Similar things apply to optical circuitry and quantum "chips".

But the emergency lighting might still work if you had the right mix of radioisotopes.

btw, there's a "high tech" booby trap that could be built with bronze age tech.

Ever see the experiment where dripping water is used to charge a couple of hollow metal cylinders until a spark jumps?

It could be scaled up and some crude capacitors added.

Then anybody who walks between the metal plates gets "hit by lightning".