So doing some research into nuclear fallout, radiation doses, and exposure in space, as one does given season 4's loaded disaster, I'm pretty sure that if the people in Mount Weather die near instantaneously from the exterior air, that everyone else on Earth should be dead too, no matter how much they've adapted or been genetically modified. In real life, anyway.
For your reference, I'm looking at
this handy chart on Wikipedia, which shows the dosages of radiation and their effects on the body and how long you'd last. And this travel log
Radiation for Beginners site by a guy who visited Chernobyl, and some of the radiation dosages he cites. Also, this
Gizmodo article. What I get from these is that the very high doses that are yes, 100% fatal, often still come with 1-2 days of awful pain, and the super high doses like the Chernobyl reactor when it went which was 300 Sv/hr that would kill you in 1-2 minutes then, and 34 Sv/hr which would kill you in 10-20 minutes now, 30 years later, I don't think should be survivable even by our hardy grounders and sky people.
I can see the completely currently deadly 6-10 Sieverts/Gray level becoming the new normal, especially after 100 years of gradual reduction. But people die of that level of radiation in 2-4 weeks as opposed to immediately.
Also, for air to be deadly, as opposed to a point source like a nuclear reactor, the source of the radiation is in the airborne particulate matter - dust, aerosols, salts, water droplets, humidity - and while I have no doubt that that is also radioactive, I would think it would be in the lower end of the range, and not the immediately kill you range.
As for season 4's proposed disaster to prevent, the thing to know about nuclear reactor destruction, is that Chernobyl is probably as bad as it gets - everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Terrible design, terrible safety features, and a feedback loop that led to the meltdown and blowing the top off the unprotected plant. The fallout did go with the wind and contaminate far and wide -- all the way to Scandinavia -- but not in the way that wiped people out in large quantities, and even today, people can safely go in and out of the Exclusion Zone. The effects of the radiation poisoning are long term effects of accumulation and higher cancer risk, rather than immediate death upon stepping over the line. Stepping over the line next to the reactor = death, but not the surroundings.
So if in The 100 universe, other nuclear reactors are going to collapse soon -- though I'm not sure why they wouldn't have already, or been rendered inert, here's a
reddit conversation that talks about the actual maintenance necessary and implies to me how, sure, modern plants could survive for weeks on their own, but more than a year might be stretching it, but 100 years? If the other nuclear reactors are going to collapse soon, they'd still have rather localized effects on the order of 1000 square miles (Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone) rather than causing global inhabitability.
It's all kind of muddied in my head still, and I guess what I'm also struggling what would the accumulated effects of 1) multiple bombs going off in 2052 and 2) multiple reactors going critical in 2152 (they wouldn't explode like a bomb would, as far as my info tells me), and what that would do to the background levels in the soil and water over the long term?
Fortunately there's a dude on Youtube who looks at the science of the Fallout 4 video game that touch on a lot of the same issues. This first video talks about how many nuclear weapons it would take to demolish the United States and China - with the punchline being, if you account for population density, it takes as many nukes as we had in 1985.
And also about Fallout 4 and the effects of a 300-750 kiloton bomb and how you'd get a nuclear wasteland out of that.
Also, also, if you want to drop some virtual bombs, there's a website for that:
NukeMapThe other thing I get out of these videos is that the dilution/dispersal of radiation wouldn't take as much time as The 100 universe implies, though again, not sure about accumulated effects in the soil and water and how long they'd last.
I'm not sure what my original point was - this post got away from me since I was researching while writing.
The point, I think, is that The 100 worldbuilding is contradictory to actual science in some key ways, and it bugs me.
Ah well.
PS. Here's a map of where all the nuclear reactors are in the world right now.
So... Wakanda would be fine, right?
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