Lately there has been talks of a whole social/civilizational collapse, for example this NASA funded study. Gail Tverberg in her blog Our Finite World has been discussing this for years. Below I take the liberty of condensing her argument.
- The problem is not peak oil, but peak affordable oil.
- We are already there, the big oil companies have cut back exploration because they cannot make money even at $100/barrel.
- High oil prices choke off growth in our economy
- With little or no growth, we cannot pay our debts.
- As in 2008, unpayable debt will crack our financial system
- As not in 2008, the central banks have shot most of their “arrows” and have few left in their quiver.
- As was avoided in 2008 ,the financial system collapses, social chaos follows
A civilization meltdown would be followed by nuclear power meltdowns as we would no longer be able to maintain our reactors.
In the blog discussions, I argued that the meltdowns would be a local, not a global problem. To prove my point I conducted a what if experiment: in the style of XKCD What If
What if all the nuclear reactor core radiation was released and spread evenly around the world?
Continued below the amorous snails ( warning geekout ahead )
There are about 500 reactors either in operation or under construction worldwide.
Radioactivity is measured in "curies." An average operating nuclear power reactor core has about 16 billion curies at its core, which is equivalent to the long-lived radioactivity of at least 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. In comparison, a large-sized medical center with as many as 1000 laboratories in which radioactive materials are used, has a combined inventory of about 2 curies
This makes 8 x 10^12 total curies in all the reactors in the world.
Dividing by the 57,506,000 square miles on the surface of the Earth
Gives 140,000 curies/square mile
This compares with 17 curies/square mile naturally occurring in the soil.
These numbers are a WAG (wild ass guess). If all reactors melted down, most of the contamination would remain relatively local as it has for Chernobyl and Fukushima ( Yes there is ocean contamination in the latter and airborne contamination in the former, but the vast majority of the curies are still in place ). On the other hand the numbers do not include 70 years worth of nuclear waste. The heat ( and assumedly the curies) from the waste decreases to 0.2% of the original a week after shutdown, but there are very toxic isotopes such as Strontium-90 and cesium-137 and Plutonium-239 which last centuries or millenia. You can wave your hands all over the place but this will not change the almost 10,000 to 1 discrepancy
I started this calculation to prove my opinion that even under the worst conditions total nuclear meltdown was not a global problem, and instead I disproved it.
It has not changed my mind, since I was against more nuclear power anyway, for different reasons, but that is another posting.