Why do so many readers lack the ability to separate fact from fiction?

TANSTAAFL58 said:

Just like conventional fiction. If Sam Spade or M. Poirot suddenly used a phaser or magic to solve a crime, nobody would accept it.

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Christie is an interesting example. She believed in the supernatural, she wrote a few explicitly supernatural stories, and there are hints of it in her detective stories. In particular, the Harley Quin stories strongly suggest that Quin has some sort of supernatural aspect to him, and "Three Act Tragedy" implies that Quin and Poirot exist in the same world. She also wrote a couple of crime stories disguised as ghost stories, where the ghosts turn out to be hoaxes.

But for all that, I don't think she ever made the resolution of a crime story dependent on supernatural elements. It might be acceptable as colour, but not as a way of committing a crime or catching the culprit.

You have to invite a Vampire in.

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That one's pretty common, but not universal. "Vampires don't sparkle", OTOH, is almost universally accepted ;-)

Alice_Rosaleen said:

I think Heinlein was trying to describe a criticality reaction- a sudden deadly burst of radiation that can occur when too much plutonium is kept together and becomes unstable. Plutonium and all its decay progeny can be made lethal rather easily in the right (or wrong) circumstances.

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Critical excursions certainly are extremely dangerous, but the relevant passage from TLW is:

"Plutonium taken into the body moves quickly to bone marrow. ... The fatal dose is unbelievably small; a mass a tenth the size of a grain of table salt is more than enough—a dose small enough to enter through the tiniest scratch."

Definitely not talking about a critical mass there.

Hypoxia said:

A nightmare scenario I'm amazed hasn't occurred yet: A nefarious nogoodnik carefully places an ounce of not-hard-to-get plutonium powder in a thin helium balloon and casts it adrift in a westerly breeze in Santa Monica. It quickly rises, pops, and spreads death over the Los Angeles basin, killing millions. Heinlein didn't much exaggerate the lethality.

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Some information about plutonium risks - search for "plutonium toxicity", about two-thirds of the way down the page. It comes to the conclusion that "we may eventually expect about 2 million cancers for each pound of plutonium inhaled by people".

So, if you could blow plutonium oxide directly into people's lungs, without wastage, an ounce of Pu might translate to about 125,000 cancers... over several decades. You'd kill far more people with an ounce of botulinum toxin (easier to obtain), or with a 5% share in the US tobacco industry.

...and that's if you somehow manage to get all that plutonium into people's lungs. As the article notes, plutonium is heavy and it clumps, making it hard to use that way. Even if you did manage to overcome those problems and disperse it as an aerosol, only a very small percentage would end up being inhaled by humans. You'd have to work pretty hard to notice the effects against background rates of cancer.

For more evidence, see the case of Albert Stevens. As part of the US Government's program of extremely fucked-up unethical science experiments on unwitting participants, Stevens was injected with about a microgram of plutonium - a significant part of that being 238Pu, which is about 300x as radioactive than the 239Pu used for nuclear weapons. Taking that into account, his dose would've been equal to about 50 micrograms of 239 Pu. He lived another 20 years before dying of unrelated causes.

I'm not saying I'd spread plutonium on my breakfast cereal, but its lethality outside critical-mass scenarios has been greatly exaggerated.

Bramblethorn said:

I'm not saying I'd spread plutonium on my breakfast cereal, but its lethality outside critical-mass scenarios has been greatly exaggerated.

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Well darn. I must obsess over other nightmares. Current politics excepted.

Bramblethorn said:

Critical excursions certainly are extremely dangerous, but the relevant passage from TLW is:

"Plutonium taken into the body moves quickly to bone marrow. ... The fatal dose is unbelievably small; a mass a tenth the size of a grain of table salt is more than enough—a dose small enough to enter through the tiniest scratch."

Definitely not talking about a critical mass there.



Some information about plutonium risks - search for "plutonium toxicity", about two-thirds of the way down the page. It comes to the conclusion that "we may eventually expect about 2 million cancers for each pound of plutonium inhaled by people".

So, if you could blow plutonium oxide directly into people's lungs, without wastage, an ounce of Pu might translate to about 125,000 cancers... over several decades. You'd kill far more people with an ounce of botulinum toxin (easier to obtain), or with a 5% share in the US tobacco industry.

...and that's if you somehow manage to get all that plutonium into people's lungs. As the article notes, plutonium is heavy and it clumps, making it hard to use that way. Even if you did manage to overcome those problems and disperse it as an aerosol, only a very small percentage would end up being inhaled by humans. You'd have to work pretty hard to notice the effects against background rates of cancer.

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Thanks for such a thorough answer, Bramblethorn. I haven't read that story in so long I was just remembering the fact that he had to break open the plutonium core of a nuclear reactor. And thorium is volatile, but safer to mine and almost zero chance of a melt down. Russian scientists have even found ways to use thorium reactors to dispose of other hazardous nuclear waste. I read an article in a class on energy sources that plutonium isotopes from Nagasaki have been distributed as far as the arctic ocean and can be found in glaciers. There is no isolated nuclear disaster.

I say assume your audience is smarter than you think- so never condescend by providing more than necessary- while keeping in mind that they don't want anything too cumbersome language or concept-wise to stumble on- so don't try to impress them either.

Alice_Rosaleen said:

Thanks for such a thorough answer, Bramblethorn. I haven't read that story in so long I was just remembering the fact that he had to break open the plutonium core of a nuclear reactor. And thorium is volatile, but safer to mine and almost zero chance of a melt down. Russian scientists have even found ways to use thorium reactors to dispose of other hazardous nuclear waste. I read an article in a class on energy sources that plutonium isotopes from Nagasaki have been distributed as far as the arctic ocean and can be found in glaciers. There is no isolated nuclear disaster.

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Something that might surprise people: coal power generation releases more radiation than a typical nuclear reactor, joule for joule. (Normal operation; Fukushima/Chernobyl/etc. not included in those figures.)

It's a hard discussion to have, because people don't have an intuitive grasp for the kind of risks involved. Coal kills plenty of people every year, mostly through boring respiratory stuff that we just accept as normal. Nuclear is cleaner than coal when running smoothly, with a small risk of highly visible disaster - and a reactor meltdown that kills 1000 people probably gets more publicity than coal generation killing 10,000 in normal operation.

The real problem with nuclear isn't safety, it's that building a nuclear reactor takes decades. Right now, nuclear is competitive with renewables for generation costs. But by the time a reactor comes online, that situation may have changed drastically - renewables and storage technology have dropped massively in price lately. And the time required to build them is critical for CO2 mitigation; we're at the point where every year matters.

Clean coal is certainly a myth. High grade coals like bituminous can still have impurities like sulphur and nitrogen (which undergo chemical reactions when burned making them hazardous), and anthracite is too dangerous to even mine, as the Centralia mine fire proved (burning for over fifty years. I think Silent Hill is based on it). Not to mention once an area has been depleted of coal, the land and water are often unusable.
I'm not against fossil fuels or nuclear power in principle, especially since I've studied their many uses besides providing electricity, but they aren't the only viable options out there.
I think discussions about energy, like so many issues, become controversial when people a) don't do research for themselves, just rely on someone else's interpretation and b) become so invested in there being a "right" or "wrong" answer that they miss out on the chance to find multiple solutions.

Bramblethorn said:

Something that might surprise people: coal power generation releases more radiation than a typical nuclear reactor, joule for joule. (Normal operation; Fukushima/Chernobyl/etc. not included in those figures.)

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Historically (in this country) the regulatory limits for radioactive emissions from nuclear power facilities were intentionally set to be lower than the background radiation around coal-fired plants. That's why it's true.

Coal is a natural trap for uranium. It complexes and precipitates under reducing conditions found in coal seams. When the coal is burned, some of the uranium and its daughter products are released into the air.

Some is held in the ash, along with a rich and potentially toxic mix of other metals. Proper containment and disposal of coal ash is a big environmental concern -- for a lot of reasons -- and failures to do so are environmental disasters.

Some petroleum and natural gas is also enriched in radioactive and toxic elements. One of my long-term clients has been dealing with the effects of mercury extracted from natural gas and improperly disposed on their land.

Re: releases of plutonium. I've had friends who worked with plutonium at Los Alamos National Labs. The whole system -- meaning environmental regulations, occupational health and safety regulations, and daily operations -- are extremely sensitive to any detectable release and/or exposure to plutonium, and the detection limits are very low. Something the size of a grain of salt would be a massive release.

NotWise said:

Some is held in the ash, along with a rich and potentially toxic mix of other metals. Proper containment and disposal of coal ash is a big environmental concern -- for a lot of reasons -- and failures to do so are environmental disasters.

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I wish Duke energy agreed with this. They love dumping coal ash in local water supplies and regularly lobby (successfully) to block efforts to study cleaner forms of energy. *They were just fined 70M and not allowed to raise rates to compensate for the loss, but that still seems like a drop in the bucket to me.
And considering the disaster at Los Alamos that I think happened in the nineties, I'm glad they've tightened safety protocols.