[1285] Shub-Niggurath
└ posted on Sunday, 8 August 2021, by Novil
- Yuna: We don’t stop driving cars just because people die in accidents. We don’t stop taking medicine just because people die from side effects.
- Yuna: So what’s the problem with me trying to develop an antigravity drive and, purely accidental, summoning Shub-Niggurath, who will turn Earth into a horrifying, pitch-black hellscape where the souls of the mortals are ferociously mutilated by her young in a never-ending cycle of torment?
- Yuna: A bit of a double standard, don’t you think?
- Ye Thuza: No dessert for you for two weeks!
Also, stuff like that happens all the time – so what?
We don’t stop using nuclear power (which is literally the safest form of clean energy) just because if a poorly designed plant is hit directly by both a 9.1 Richter earthquake and its subsequent tidal wave it will cause a scary but manageable accident (with a total of 18 injured and zero fatalities).
…
Oh wait, some idiots do stop using nuclear power because of that. I’m looking at you, Angela Merkel.
Not that I would complain but this is exactly the situation one could use Larisa with a heavy promethium dispenser…
no sense of scale, huh?
El Suscriptor Justiciero wrote:
The problem is the split into political camps. A whole lot of topics simply can’t be discussed anymore because the affiliation to one or the other camp is always more important than any argument. And that creates a whole lot of problems and gets to my nerves.
Maybe because this is NOT Quake, where we can KILL Shub-Niggurath FOREVER via telefrag…?
Man, everybody knows Shub-Niggurath prefers dark meat to white. You guys are probably light enough for it to pass you over for someone else.
The reason people object to nuclear power is because the residue lasts for hundreds of thousands of years. People are really uncomfortable about that. There are apparently ways to handle it so that it’s ‘only’ hundreds of years–but that still takes hundreds of years, trusting humans to stick to something that long is like trusting a cat not to lick cream.
I do believe Yuna lacks a sense of proportion …
verilyheld wrote:
the volume of that shit is essentialy nothing though.
Before we have any problem dealing with that, we will be living in kilometres of regular “residue” akka – “waste”.
and just a funny thing – Currently Humanity has ran out of processed plutonium to power long range space probes 😀 😀 😀 We would have to dismantle more nuclear warheads… and well noone is going to do anything stupid like that anytime soon.
El Suscriptor Justiciero wrote:
Nuclear power no es clean energy. You have a very big problem if you don’t know something as easy.
It’s more, coal power, a dirty energy like nuclear power, it’s more safest than nuclear including its extraction
verilyheld wrote:
No, it’s just political camps. The same people who object to nuclear power in the western bloc celebrated it in the eastern bloc.
Same with CO2: We are producing massive amounts of unnecessary CO2 because of abolishing nuclear power. But it’s just about political camps, you can’t have a constructive discussion about such topics.
If China and India would truly abolish nuclear power, we would have an actually devastating global warming. Which immediately begs the question why the same people who warn that global warming endangers life on earth demand that China and India should abolish nuclear power.
The answer is that it’s just about political camps.
@ El Suscriptor Justiciero:
And they replace to nuclear energy with coal, wurst soft coal mainly.
At this point I’m surprised Yuna ever get’s dessert. She pulls these kinds of things so often the collective punishment should be lasting years.
@ verilyheld:
Indeed, that’s sooo much more dangerous than all the other toxic byproducts we produce that stay toxic forever.
@ Alan Richmon:
This is flat-out untrue. For one thing, operating coal power plants are actually responsible for more radiation poisoning than operational nuclear power plants. Coal has naturally occurring radioactive isotopes, and they get pumped into the air with the rest of the toxic byproducts of coal burning (other than the sufficiently dense stuff, of course, but that’s not like nuclear waste that’ll decay into harmlessness if we just leave it alone long enough).
Everything after and including ‘summoning’ is different Yuna.
@ El Suscriptor Justiciero:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties
Deaths
1 confirmed from radiation,
2,202 from evacuation.
Non-fatal injuries
6 with cancer or leukemia,
37 with physical injuries,
2 workers taken to hospital with radiation burns
With more workers being registered for having taking unhealthy doses of radiation. Not to mention the sick and elderly who volunteered for cleanup duty and who didn’t make it on those lists when they died in an increased rate.
Yeah… totally no fatalities there.
Nuclear power is also not the cleanest energy. If you take into consideration uranium mining and refining, transport and storage of the radiactive material, as well as the waste produced during and after usage (including the powerplant itself), it quickly becomes problematic.
You might want to stop taking the energy company coolaid and look at the whole picture.
C’Mon, Ye Thuza, two weeks are too drastic! Let say one week! 🙂
Is that the closet (i.e. the danger is contained), or the window of the house and the whole world outside is a Cthulhu apocalypse?
I see this child has no concept of scale.
She’s gonna need the Doomslayer to give a hand at this rate.
Arent wrote:
You’re not the ONLY one.
If it can bleed, it can die!
Twotail wrote:
This was carlesses but accidental hence the light punishmnet.
Not like when she maliciously destroyed her brother’s toys, that the difference though bought he ticket tomSorebottom City
Is that a tentacle monster ?? I see enough hent……… err, nope. Not gonna finish it.
Such a lenient parent. It should be two weeks plus the length of time needed to banish the horror from beyond.
Now what have we told you about eldritch abominations in the house, young lady?
@ El Suscriptor Justiciero: You forgot hundreds of thousands of evacuated people, millions of people with higher radiation background from than on and large areas of uninhabitable land.
On the other hand, it should be mentioned that there were two tsunami studies and both have been handwawed .
But I would bet that if we compared cumulative damage of ecosystem and health of power sources relatively to energy produced in total, the nuclear energy would be one of the medailists.
on the topic of nuclear power that has come up in this comment thread:
it is not a clean energy source, but at the moment it is pretty much the only way we have available to meet our base energy needs while reducing the CO2 output
it is not a good long term solution – for one our supply of fissible material is just as limited as fossil fuels and on top of that they have severe health risks from handling and storage (modern reactors are fairly failsafe though – its mostly old reactors that are susceptible to catastrophic meltdowns)
but it might be the stopgap we need to 1: avoid a climate collapse and 2: develop better power sources
just my 2 cents
Egomane wrote:
You might want to stop taking the energy company coolaid and look at the whole picture.
Well, the whole picture is not all black or white. Whether the benefits outweigh the cost is a question of politics.
One of the problems with nuclear power is that most of the cost happens in big accidents, rather than continuously. Think of the death toll from aviation accidents against that of car accidents for example.
Like stated in this wikipedia article, coal mining accidents kill a few thousand people each year, and a 2013 study estimated the pollution from coal and biomass burning to cause 2.1 million worlwide deaths each year.
Please keep that in mind when discussing the death toll of nuclear power.
With Nuclear fission they really kinda more produce themselves, and the waste is both manageable and even still useful for other uses if places used recycling and post processing.
Good thing this is a comic and not a video or something. Because I’m not sure how one is supposed to pronounce Shub-Niggurath with offending someone.
badbloodkiller wrote:
*without* I meant, why id there no edit thing?
All the above reasoning, pondering and theories are more than likely correct. But I was debating my mother of topics much like Luna’s here, not only was I grounded from TV, friends and comics, had the threat of dessert being removed from my personal menu for decades. But she always tossed in one of these little zingers….
“Because I said so! ” or “Because it’s common sense!”
To which I’d reply (under my breath of course)…. “So now I’m a mind reader like you?”…. “Oh… If it’s so common, why didn’t *I* know about it?”
Of course there was that gem of gems, “Do *YOU*, want *ME* to knock some common sense into you?”… “Oh yes please, twice on Tuesday if you please…!”
Why under my breath you ask? Because of past vocal utterances that she was able to hear, resulted in the back of her hand coming into the atmosphere from the orbit of Pluto. But I did develop cat like reflexes as a result of having a sarcastic mouth, and a defense from keeping common sense be “knocked into me” . Teachers loved me!
But never fold your arms…. You’ll need them to counter block non terrestrial debris.
Not pictured: cloud fighting the rest with the other sword and Larissa rushing to help because she finally has a good excuse to use the flamethrower
Summoning Shub-Niggurath just causes something a kin to a demon invasion humans have been training for that for generations
Now that Thusa vs Tentacle monster confirmed, the fanart will never end.
“But MooooooooOOOOooommm!”
“These are TENTACLES, We’re ASIAN, and YOU’RE UNDERAGE. DO THE MATH.”
@ El Suscriptor Justiciero:
No, we stopped it because even now no one has an idea to contain nuclear waste for the next 100.000 years at least. Some of it is dangerous for a million years.
Sven wrote:
Except we have pretty good idea. There are uranium deposits in africa which few, million years ago just worked as regular fission reactor whenever it rained on them.
there was fair bit of plutonium produced which has since decayed. Its really not that difficult to recreate (and surpass) what has contained it then and there
and most funnily enough – we actually produce more nuclear waste created by making stuff for hospitals, for radiotherapies and contrast materials for tomography then by powerplants.
99 percento of time when nuclear waste is moved its not from powerplants… its from when something for hospitals was made. So just giving up nuclear power will not really reduce the nuclear waste in any significant quantity or volume.
Well, Yuna, we don’t expect a car or some medicine to kill us, the chances are statistically low enough to tolerate. Summoning Shub-Niggurath will definitely lead to our death.
Sort of like nuclear energy, provided there are enough safeguards to stop accidents and endanger people.
Following up on this, Novil, what are your thoughts on the current situation in Myanmar?
Would Ye Thuza use a Japanese wakizashi as she seems to be, or a Burmese dah?
@ Taran Alvein:
Ha! Awesome – I was wondering if anyone was going to refer to The Fractured, But Whole!
Although, I wonder if Yuna is cheating with her science. From what I understand, summoning a great old one (like Yog-Sothoth, for example) comes from some sort of deal…I’m not saying that she summoned a god for a quick answer. More likely, she offered a trade to get funding for her science.
Somdudewillson wrote:
But the amount of radiation from it it’s very less than by radiation. Coal is continuous but there no are a real protection from nuclear. The problem is the ten or twelve accidents have more pain and losses that the amount of all the rest (accident and normal use)
@ El Suscriptor Justiciero:
Yeah, and this safe form of energy gave us Three Mile island and Tschernobyl.
And no, absolut no country has a safe deposit for the nuclear waste that would contain the radioactivity for the – what was it? – 2000 years it would need to reduce the radioactivity to a harmless degree.
You are right, absolut safe for someone with no responsibility for future generations.
@ RUBJack:
The problem her is… what is the alternative right now?
Fossils are not an option – supply is running low and we are already overheating our atmosphere with CO2.
Solar, Water and Wind are very environmentally dependant and can not be used to supply the core electricity load needed.
Fusion as far as i am aware is not in a state, where we can actually utilize it yet.
Orbital Solar would require some transmission system that we do not have.
@ Sharien:
There are designs of nuclear fission reactors which can safely shut down without needing an external source of power to keep the coolant flowing – however, building new reactors is phenomenally expensive (the high cost of the first couple of generations were justified by being able to use by-products in nuclear weapons, but that’s kinda frowned on nowadays…), and the plant the UK’s currently building is part-financed by the PRC (so giving us yet another reason why we can’t officially criticise them) but has repayments via a sky high “strike price” (i.e. a guaranteed minimum payment for each MWh generated).
Wind is variable, but some countries are ideally situated to exploit it – at the time of writing, it’s producing a third of the UK’s electricity requirements, with CCGT the next biggest source (fossil, but a lot ‘cleaner’ in terms of pollutants other than CO2 than coal or oil) at a quarter, and nuclear coming in third at around 13% (with a further 13% coming from other countries via our interconnectors). Biomass is producing around 7%, and that’s lumped into “Other” along with nuclear, as while it isn’t a fossil fuel, it’s still burning stuff (and IIRC, some studies showed that it can be even more polluting than fossils!)
Someone’s produced a handy dashboard, updated every five minutes, showing the UK’s electricity generation mix: grid dot iamkate dot com.
@ RUBJack:
Don’t talk about Chernobyl unless you understand the engineering behind it. The RBMK model was never safe, such that the NRC would have laughed you out of the room if you had proposed to build one in the United States before the accident.
@ Egomane:
Not really. Uranium fission yields 2.3 million times more energy per unit mass than burning coal. Even at a 1% fuel efficiency, that’s 23,000 times its weight in coal. Uranium yields so much more energy that the price of nuclear energy is overwhelmingly for the cost of capital, whereas the cost of coal power is mostly fuel.
Why Shub-Niggurath? Yog Sothoth is going to feel so left out.