Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we'd be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we'd have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I'd read the heck out of it.
I feel bad because the only way I can keep the flossing habit up is to use those disposable plastic flossers. I need to find a reusable one -- where it's just a handle that i can replace/rethread the floss, instead of contributing to plastic pollution...
There's also a long list of descriptions from sightings over the years, as well as summaries of scientific hypothesis attempting to explain the phenomenon. There's even an emission spectrum published in 2014. I for one can learn stuff without having all the answers completely figured out (which is good, since almost everything has something unexplained about it if you dig deep enough). For example, I learned I can make plasma balls in the microwave! Very cool.
Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we'd be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we'd have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I'd read the heck out of it.