seawasp | Okay, I feel better...

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... about my stumblings with respect to Hideous Radiation Problems in space travel. I have just read that in the TV series "Jericho", apparently radioactive fallout carried down by rain becomes harmless once it's in puddles on the ground.

This goes beyond merely insulting one's intelligence and all the way to assaulting one's intelligence, violating it, and leaving it sobbing and broken on the ground.

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From:

seawasp

... nuclear = atomic. Same thing.

There are two types of nuclear or atomic bombs. One is a fission-based device (such as those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the other is a fusion-based device (Hydrogen or H-bomb). However, even the fusion-based ones use a fission-based device to START the big boom.

All of them produce some level of fallout. Generally the bigger the boom, the more fallout, though specific design can increase or decrease this. What would be likely to toast Denver or any other decent-sized city would be about 20 megatons (a thousand times the power of Hiroshima).

And even if they HADN'T actually detected radiation, they did EXPECT radioactive fallout, and would not have acted as though the rain being over made things safe.

Unless of course someone made some comments on that, which would at least save THAT level of stupidity for a later show. (I.e., if they came out, pointed some Geiger counters at the ground, and someone said, "Man... that's strange... it's perfectly safe! The ground should be hot for YEARS..." that would make it a mystery as to how you could nuke Denver without some fallout...)

Even with that, of course, the idea of STAYING in Jericho when a presumed radioactive cloud of fallout is headed your way is idiotic. American towns don't have anything in them that would allow you to remain there safely. For a civilian the only way to protect you from radioactive fallout is to follow the Miyagi Defense: not be there.

From:

corvidophile.livejournal.com

makes me wonder what with all the pins that were being pushed into the map, that with that much fallout then, if there'd be ANYTHING left anywhere (safe to live on, etc.)

i still enjoy the show though. but i watch shows for pure enjoyment or kicks and try not to analyze them too much. its like suspending reality when watching CSI and the little things like DNA tests that take mere hours on the show, wouldn't happen in real life.

From:

seawasp

CSI is comparatively hard SF, actually. For dramatic purposes they do indeed drastically compress time, but that's excusable. Sometimes they leap beyond the bounds of SF into fantasy, true -- most noticeably when they "enhance" a photograph taken from a security camera or something and end up reading license plate numbers from a blur that was about three pixels across in the original. No, really, you can't do that. No, not even with handwavy computer stuff.