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".