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My ultra hardcore recycling guide for our house

Hi all,
I've been putting together info for how to recycle in Tucson while leveraging all the recycling options that are open to me: curbside, the city's upcoming glass drop-off, local and mail-in corporate-sponsored, and TerraCycle (a paid option). I aim to reuse or recycle every last bit of waste coming out of our house, no matter how crazy it may seem. Partly I just want to see how difficult it is; I recognize that my process isn't practical for most people.
Anyway, here's what I've gathered so far.

General principles

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  1. COMPOST: If it can be composted, compost it! (More on this below.)
  2. REUSE: If it can't be composted, reuse it! Reuse is always the most environmentally-friendly option.
  3. DONATE: If it can't be reused by you, donate it if it's something worth donating that someone else could use. https://tucsoncleanandbeautiful.org/ has a great directory for places that will accept various materials. Cero is a Tucson store that also accepts lots of stuff for donation and reuse. Donation usually involves transportation and some kind of carbon emissions, but it's still better than recycling. Don't donate junk! Donations aren't a free trash can.
  4. MUNICIPAL RECYCLING: If it can't be donated, recycle it locally using municipal recycling (curbside or drop-off). Recycle Coach has all the info you need on what municipal recycling can or can't recycle. ESGD's page on residential recycling also has some important guidelines. Recycling uses energy and involves carbon-emitting transport, plus not everything in a recycling waste stream actually gets recycled, so try to reuse first.
  5. LOCAL STORE DROP-OFF: If it can't be recycled using municipal recycling, recycle it at a local store for free. Earth911 has a search page that finds these stores and breaks them down by type, and TerraCycle's corporate-sponsored programs page also has some local programs. These programs typically ship their waste to a recycling partner, often TerraCycle in New Jersey, which adds to the environmental footprint of the process, so try to recycle municipally first.
  6. FREE MAIL-IN: If it can't be recycled at a local store, use one of TerraCycle's free corporate-sponsored mail-in programs. These programs end up sending waste TerraCycle, just like the local store drop-offs, but are arguably less efficient than sending a big communal batch of stuff, so try to use the local store drop-offs first.
  7. TERRACYCLE (PAID): If it can't be recycled using a mail-in program, use a paid all-in-one box to have TerraCycle recycle it if it's small and light. This is effectively the same as using one of the mail-in options above except that you have to pay, so try to use a mail-in program first.
  8. REGIONAL DROP-OFF: If it's a big bulky waste that can't be donated, see if it can be recycled outside of Tucson (e.g., save up Styrofoam for the next time I drive to Phoenix, where they do have the appropriate facilities). TerraCycle accepts almost anything, but their all-in-one boxes are pricey, so it may make more sense to save up big hard-to-recycle stuff like packaging for Phoenix or another big city, if you think you'll drive there at some point. Don't make unnecessary trips just to drop off waste!
  9. TRASH: If it can't be composted, reused, donated or recycled, throw it away and make sure that you follow the guidelines for hazardous waste disposal.
  10. GOLDEN RULE #1: Make sure that the material is clean. Clean waste streams are more valuable to recyclers, which helps keep costs down. Don't use too much water cleaning up stuff, but don't feel too guilty about using water, either! Dishwater usage is a tiny sliver of household water consumption, not to mention that industry and agriculture generally use much more water than homes.
  11. GOLDEN RULE #2: The goal of recycling is to break down your waste into "primary materials" (e.g., plastic, metal, paper, glass) that can be used by industry to make new products. The more mixed your materials, the more you need to research how to recycle it. Knowing the basics goes a long way. For example, I know that metal cans get melted down, so a paper or plastic label attached to the can doesn't worry me because I know that it will get burned off. But what about a milk carton, which is paper fused with plastic? Or the circuitry inside the plastic base of a CFL bulb? If you can't intuitively explain how the thing is going to get broken down into its primary materials, that's your cue that you need to do some research.
  12. GOLDEN RULE #3: Knowing the basics of how recycling centers work goes a long way. For example, if you know that you can't recycle plastic grocery bags curbside because they get stuck in the machines, that's a hint that you shouldn't try to recycle your plastic food wrap, either. Or if you know that plastic bottle caps fall through the holes of a separator, that's a hint that you need to research whether your beer bottle caps are recyclable (even though they're metal).
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Reuse and recycling guide for my home

This is not a comprehensive list of every recycling resource in Tucson, this is just for my house my household's needs. I've found that there's no one-size-fits-all solution if you want to reach close to 100% recycling/reuse, you end up having to come up with a list that's customized for your home, which requires research. I'm providing my list as a potential template as well as for inspiration.
Legend:
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How do I sort all this?

Right now, I'm using a makeshift system of lots and lots of bags to keep everything separate. My idea is to do a monthly "recycling day" and drop off everything that needs to be dropped off as well as mail in everything that needs to be mailed in. I haven't had to do this yet since I started this project.
I hope to build a sorting station in my house once I understand my needs a bit better.
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Notes on TerraCycle and partner programs

A lot of the corporate-sponsored/mail-in/drop-off programs are done through TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based recycler that specializes in recycling hard-to-recycle things (e.g., potato chip bags, toothbrushes). They make lots of their money through large corporations, which essentially pay them to process unprofitable waste in order to burnish their environmental stewardship bona fides. They also offer paid recycling pouches and boxes to the general public. You mail in these pouches/boxes (they come with a shipping label) after filling them up with recyclable waste.
TerraCycle will recycle almost anything and everything. However, anything that gets recycled through them or one of their corporate programs is shipped to New Jersey for processing, so it's preferable to reuse or recycle locally. They're also not as transparent as I wish they would be. I'm not certain, for example, how much of each waste stream actually gets recycled. They have a customer support contact form that's been very good for getting my questions answered, but beware that they take about 2-3 days to get back to you per request.
I bought the large "all-in-one" box from their site and found a coupon code online to bring the cost down to around $350. I read a review elsewhere from someone who got a medium box (about 50% the size) who said that it lasted her six months. My idea is to use this box as "recycling of last resort" and rely on drop-off programs as much as possible to keep costs down. On the other hand, this makes my life more complicated in terms of sorting different waste streams, so you could simplify by putting waste destined for various drop-off points into a single TerraCycle all-in-one box.
You need to register for free on their website to use their mail-in programs. Many of their mail-in programs unfortunately have wait lists. Of the ~15 programs for which I signed up around two weeks ago, about 8 had wait lists, and I got off the wait list for about 5 of them. So they seem to go through the list pretty regularly. Once you're in, you can print off a free UPS label from the "my profile" section of the site after logging in.
If I had to take a wild guess, I would assume that TerraCycle has a higher rate of recycling than municipal programs, but this must be balanced against the financial and environmental cost of shipping waste to their facilities.
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Composting

The Achilles' heel in my recycling and reuse plan is organic matter. The City of Tucson has a composting program but it's only open to businesses.
There are a few volunteer-run programs here and there that accept compostable waste. I managed to sign up for one, UA's Compost Cats, and will be meeting them tomorrow to pick up my sealed composting bucket and go over the program rules. I know that they have limited capacity, so you have to email them. They took about a week to get back to me.
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Am I insane?

Maybe a little 🙃.
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Shout outs

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submitted by Low_Walrus to Tucson [link] [comments]

First Contact - Chapter 325

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Herod opened his eyes, groaned, and rolled onto his side. He got his faceplate open fast enough to avoid spraying it with vomit when his internals suddenly convulsed.
Clear fluid mixed with digital code that was suspended in the thick viscous fluid.
He hacked and choked a minute more, than slowly pushed himself into a sitting position.
"Took you long enough," a woman's voice said.
Herod nearly screamed. He'd forgotten about the human woman. He slapped his faceplate closed and looked over to where she'd sat down on the floor, her back against the wall.
She was staring at him, her head cocked to the right slightly, one eyebrow raised, looking concerned but slightly amused. Herod noticed that the way she sat, with her legs open, seemed almost deliberately and lewdly provocative.
"So what did you eat that left behind garbled computer code?" she asked.
"Don't know. Things are a little confused," Herod said. He took a pull off of his water, ignoring the taste of lilacs, swished his mouth out and swallowed.
"You aren't human, are you?" she asked. She closed her legs, pulled her knees up to her chest, laced her fingers over her knees, and put her chin on her knees.
Herod shook his head. "No. I'm a digital sentience."
"So, a robot?" she asked.
Herod frowned. "No."
"Like... an android?"
"God, no. Those guys are complete assholes and kill anyone they come across. Be glad I'm not an android," Herod said.
"Wait, like a Terminator? Only instead of hunting Sarah Connor you're a maintenance man?" she asked, smiling slowly. "Or are you just some kind of jumped up disc defragger walking around in an Erector set?"
Herod understood exactly zero of the references except the defrag part.
"No."
"So, an artificial intelligence in a heavy repair body," she guessed.
"That's insulting," he snapped. "I don't call you a meat bag or a fleshy."
She shrugged. "It has no cultural connotations to me, feel free. Words only have the meaning society proscribes to them and only as much power over an individual as that individual gives them."
"I'm a digital sentience," Herod said. He stood up and looked down at Wally, who blinked at him. "We have work to do."
The human woman stood up smoothly, shrugging as she did so. "If you say so."
"We need to get you a hazardous environment suit. It's dangerous out there," Herod said. He moved up to the door and turned the handle, feeling the complex latch system inside the door move as smooth as butter.
"Sure," the human said.
Herod moved out to the control room, looking it over, committing it to memory.
"Are we it? Are we the entire repair team?" the human asked.
"Yes," Herod said. He moved over to the emergency supply room, opening the door and looking in inside.
He jerked back with a scream as a pair of dessicated bodies fell out, still holding onto each other. Their faces and necks were ragged and torn, their mouths still open in silent screams. Two flickering transparent version of the two combatants surged out of the room, through Herod, leaving him shuddering and shivering, down on his knees with Wally patting him on the back.
The human woman moved over and knelt down, staring at the two.
"Evidence of cerebral trauma, dentation matches wounds on opposite, dried blood around fingers and on hands," she said, kneeling down. She put her hands between the two bodies and pulled them away from each other.
"Phasic Energy Section," she read off the nametags. "Red stripes on one's legs, black on the other," she turned over their hands. "No calluses common to martial artists or those who have lived a martial life, no tool calluses. Computer workers or secretarial pool," she stood up, slapping her hands together. "An event caused a mass psychosis due to neural trauma and cognitive disruption. They each victimized the other even as they were victimized by some outside force. Doubtful it was a bioweapon or even a chemical weapon, as I didn't see any sores around the mouth or nose or eyes, no discoloration of the skin, and no smells that match known chemical weapons."
Herod looked up at her.
"Stand up, Pinocchio," she laughed. "I get that it was scary."
Herod got up, putting one hand against the wall, staring at her. "Didn't you see them?"
The human woman looked down at the bodies. "Yes. I just analyzed for them. Pay attention, Speedy, I don't want you to get Prime Law conflicts here."
"No, the temporal shades," Herod said. He coughed for a minute, trying to ease the ache in his chest.
"Didn't see anything," she mused. "Maybe I didn't observe in the right time?"
"Huh," Herod grunted. He stood up. *Sam*
No answer.
Luckily, Sam had given him the route and map to the mag-lev that would take them to the damaged section.
The human woman was already looking at the hazardous environment armor and Herod moved into the room.
"Try this one," he said, taking one down that was still in the packaging. He opened the package, handing it to her. "It's unisex, but has waste disposal systems, you should be able to wear it."
She nodded, taking the hazard suit and looking at it closely.
She only paused a second before putting it on.
"All right, do a quick self-test, sometimes these things fry out if they've been sitting too long," Herod said.
"How long has it been sitting here?" the human asked. "How long have I been gone?"
"We're not sure. There's temporal stability issues in this place," Herod said. He looked down at Wally. "If I had to estimate, it's about eight thousand years old."
"Humans look much different? Seems like every day there was a new news article about how fucked up humans would look in a hundred years, much less almost ten thousand," the human woman said, her hands moving. She grimaced. "I would have figured someone would have invented better plumbing attachments."
"Do a test," he said, tapping his own wrist.
Something about her bothered him.
She flipped up the wrist and followed Herod's directions. He corrected her twice and then did it himself, making sure he quickly connected to the suit's network and frying some firmware.
"Two red lights. Bad suit?" She asked, smiling at him.
"Bad suit," Herod said. "It happens. The power from the first test shorts something out after it registers as green," he turned and got a suit.
He missed the calculating look in her eyes as she narrowed them slightly. By the time he was turned around with another suit she was smiling again.
She dressed quickly. Herod looked then shrugged. "Have you ever trained in extreme hazardous environment armor?"
The human shook her head. "No."
"We don't have time to teach you. There's a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of damage control repair autonomous systems that need brought back online to fix a lot of systems," Herod told her.
She stretched, then bent down and touched her toes, then twisted at the waist first one way then the other.
"There, fitted," she said. She looked at him. "So what do I call you, instead of HAL or Speedy?"
"Herod," the DS said.
"Roman King of Judea, circa First Century B.C.," the Terran said. "Interesting name. Did you choose it yourself or was it chosen for you?"
"I chose it when I left the digital creche I grew up in," Herod said. He motioned. "We've got to take a mag-lev train. It's about a three hour ride."
"You grew up, weren't programmed fully formed?" she asked.
"I told you, I'm a digital sentience, not an AI," he snapped.
"Core life coding, then exposed to digital experiences and stimulus to form a unique being. Less artificial intelligence or digital intelligence and more pure energy being that can only exist in a dedicated electronic ecosystem," she mused.
"Pure energy beings are different," Herod said, frowning slightly as they wound their way out of the mat-trans facility.
"Like those Temporal Shades you mentioned. Those are pure energy beings. What kind of energy?" she asked.
"Phasic energy residue," Herod said.
"Caused by massive psychological trauma," she said. She was quiet for a second. "Phasic... phasic energy is psychic energy, isn't it?"
Herod nodded. "Yes."
"Psychic powers are an illusion. The amount of energy it would take to simply move a matchstick across a table with mental powers would require more bio-electric energy than the human body could store or handle, much less the human brain," the woman said. "Phasic energy is what psychic powers use?"
Herod sighed. "Yes," he stood there, waiting for the door to rise. "Phasic energy exists between two sub-quantum particle layers. Humans have a part in their brains that allows them to direct the energy."
"Sounds like bullshit to me," the woman said. "You'd find phasic channeling fibers in the brain and body of anyone able to use it."
"Like in Mantid bladearms and upper caste Mantid neural tissue," Herod said, dredging up a memory from school.
"So why didn't humans run around blasting each other with psychic powers for all of history?" the woman asked. "Seems like being able to melt each other's brains with psychic powers would have slowed down technological progression. No need to make a bow or a gun if you can just mind blast the other guy, Herod."
"Humans suppress and disrupt psychic powers in others around them. We found that out during the Terra/Mantid War," Herod said. He paused. "Did you work here?"
She shook her head. "No. I worked in a high security facility. My work is classified."
"We're inside a Dyson sphere, that's inside another Dyson sphere, that's wrapped around another Dyson sphere," he said. "It's called a Matrioshka brain and used for systems where sheer computing power is preferable to signal propagation."
"How big?" She asked. Herod noticed her eyes were particularly intent.
"The one we're on is roughly five hundred sixty two million mile radius," Herod said.
She narrowed her eyes again, then smiled. "That's big. How long did it take to make?"
"That doesn't really have a meaning here," Herod said. "It used self-replicating robotic systems to build each shell."
"What happened to the robots when the shell was completed? An orgy of destruction with the last one shoving the rest into a trash compactor and jumping in?" the human woman asked.
"We don't know," Herod admitted.
"Might want to find out," she smiled. "So, I'm warned, I'll be looking at something outside of my experience, and there will be a roof over my head. How far from me?"
"There will be one or more suns, moving through magnetic fields that will polarize to simulate night time. Those will be exactly ninety-five million miles from both this inside layer and the outside layer of the sphere inward from us," he warned.
"So, alien landscape. Got it," she smiled. She held up her hands. "I guess we better get going. Maybe I can help you repair things."
"Doubt it," Herod said, stepping outside. "This is pretty high tech stuff."
He missed the flicker of pure rage on the human woman's face.
When he turned around, she was looking up into the sky, her eyes narrowed. He watched her eyes moving rapidly, scanning the whole sky. She then slowly moved in circles, looking around her, and he frowned behind his polarized visor as he noticed she was only looking down a minute amount each time.
"How did you beat the magnetic issues for a mag-lev?" she asked at one point, mid-turn, pointing at a far off train that was slowly (to his perception) moving by.
"Monopole magnets and superconductors," Herod said.
"Hm," she said.
Herod sighed, waiting until she was done. That was one thing he hated about working with fleshys, they took forever to do anything that required mental exercise.
"The mag-lev is only a mile away. We'll take the travolator," Herod said, walking toward the entry station for the moving sidewalk.
"Be faster to walk," she said, looking around her as they moved toward the entry area. "Lots of dead bodies."
Herod stepped carefully around a trio of corpses, watching closely for any of the translucent apparitions. "The Glassing drove them mad."
The woman kicked a pair of desiccated corpses out of the way as she just moved forward, making Herod frown. She didn't seem to care about the dead.
"Don't do that," he said.
"What, they're dead," she smiled.
"Yes. Don't do that. Don't disturb them," he said.
"Fine," she said, walking around a corpse. "Better?"
"Thank you," the DS said.
"Funny that you'd say that, Herod, seeing as you're not human and you probably don't usually have a body. Is mortality a thing for you?" she asked.
"Yes. Eventually my core life strings will be too fragmented and I'll suffer core software failure," he said. "And no, I can't just be restored from an earlier backup, that's not how we work."
"Sloppy engineering," she muttered. She skirted around the weaving queue area while Herod walked back and forth along the line. "So what made them all go batshit insane?"
"The Great Glassing," Herod repeated.
"You said that, Herod. Why would aliens attacking Earth make everyone go crazy?" she asked.
Herod stepped onto the moving sidewalk, wishing she would be quiet. "The Mantid pushed the death experiences of everyone through SolNet and the SoulNet, every survivor had to withstand the death of billions," he told her as she stepped onto the moving sidewalk and then walked up to stand next to him. "Roughly half of the survivors went catatonic and never woke up. Two thirds of the remaining half became the Screaming Ones, attacking everyone around them in their agony."
He ended up explaining SoulNet, SolNet, and the SUDS system to her, staring off into the distance at the strange buildings and structures they passed. Once they got away from the Mat-Trans area the system smoothly put them on a high speed walk, moving them at close to a hundred miles an hour.
The whole time she listened, asking pertinent questions.
She seemed really interested in the SUDS system.
Together they got on the mag-lev train, sitting down after Herod punched in the transit code number. He looked at the ETA and looked at the human woman.
"It's going to take nine hours to get there. Sleep if you can," he said.
"I'm starting to get hungry," she smiled. She opened her faceplate and lit a cigarette. "These help, but I'm going to need food soon."
"I'll find some when I wake up," he said. He checked the mag-seal on his toolkit then looked at Wally. "I'm going to defrag. Wake me if anything bad happens."
Wally made a beeping tune and nodded, blinking his eye shields.
Herod closed his eyes.
------------------
"Herod, don't move, just move your awareness up," Sam's voice said.
Herod just brought his awareness almost fully up, leaving himself disconnected from his body. "What's going on, Sam?"
"What did you learn about our newest member?" Sam asked.
Herod thought, then quickly ran through his memories. He was surprised. He knew almost nothing ab out her.
"She said she worked in a secure location, on classified work. She got in the mat-trans, there was a stuttering, and she arrived here. She didn't know about the Great Glassing, I don't think anyway, but she knows Confederate Standard. She seems really interested in the mat-trans and SUDS systems," Herod said.
"So, we don't know anything," Sam sighed. "I checked her visual appearance against what little records are left. She didn't come up as a match."
Herod avoided smiling. "I've got good news for you. I left you a DNA sample in the mat-trans facility."
"Really? How?" Sam asked.
"I had her put in the catheter in one of the suits, shorted out the suits radio and beacon, and had her change suits," Herod said. "That'll give you DNA."
There was silence for a minute. "That was a good idea. Give me a few to check on it. I'll have to send in a bot."
"What's she doing now?" Herod asked.
Sam paused. "According to the cameras, she explored the train, busted open a vending machine, and gorged on the food inside. She's currently sitting across and down from you, looking out the window and smoking a cigarette."
"Oh, she said she was hungry."
"That's... weird..." Sam said.
"What's weird?" Herod asked.
"Her cigarette brand. I've got the inventory of the types and brands of cigarettes available here for the Treana'ad workers and some humans. Hell, apparently adult Pubvians viewed cigarettes as.. ahem... martial aid stimulants due to the cardio-vascular effects," Sam said. He giggled, and Herod began talking to him, just talking about their work together in the Black Box under Legion, trying to ground the younger DS as he screamed and raved.
"Sorry. It's getting easier, but I feel like I'm bleeding inside somehow," Sam said. He sobbed, but managed to control himself. "Where was I?"
"Her cigarettes," Herod said.
"Yeah. I can't find the brand. You know Treana'ad, they absolutely love Terran cigarettes, they're a luxury item. 'Terran Grown and Sown!' you know?" Sam said. "And her lighter."
"What about it? I've seen a few Treana'ad with that kind of lighter," Herod said.
"It's stamped on the bottom, look," Sam said, giving Herod the image.
ZIPPO MFG. CO. BRADFORD, PA
ZIPPO
PAT. NUMBER 2032695 MADE IN THE U.S.A.
"Is that..." Herod asked, feeling a chill at the three letter abbreviation.
"Yeah. The acronym for the Hamburger Kingdom. PA is the two letter code for the state region," Sam said softly.
"That would make that thing like eight or nine thousand years old," Herod said. "Except, I've seen her use it. It works."
"It's not a modern one, watch," Sam said. He passed the image to Herod.
She flicked open the top, put her thumb on the ridged wheel, and spun it by applying pressure. Sparks flew out, the ones hitting the twisted fiber wick bringing up a blue and yellow flame.
"That's flint and steel. That fiber, that's cotton according to the sensor systems. Not synth-cotton, real cotton. That's a steel casing, I can see the imperfections in it from here," Sam said.
"Give me a spectrograph of it if you can," Herod said. "I know enough about materials to get information."
It took a minute, then a little longer while Herod waited for Sam to deal with some lost children. Sam tossed him the spectrographic image of the lighter along with other scans.
Herod was not only able to identify the metal as 'stainless steel', but that it had enough impurities to prove it was mined metals.
When Sam came back he sighed. "I got the robot to the suit. You were right, there's DNA. Looks like she nicked herself a little with the catheter tube, there was a tiny smear of blood as well as fleshy fluids. Ew," Sam said.
Herod chuckled.
"Running a DNA comparison against everyone who worked here, who had authorization to work here. It's millions of records, so it'll take a few minutes," Sam said.
"That lighter? It wasn't made with a creation engine," Herod said.
"They were in their infancy back during The Glassing," Sam said.
"It was hard manufacturing, inside a gravity well and a magnetic field. If I had to guess, I'd say it was actually manufactured on Earth," Herod said.
"Look at the cigarette pack," Herod said. "American Favorite. By the Digital Omnimessiah, those are actual relics, not forgeries."
"You need to be careful, Herod," Sam said, somewhat unnecessarily to Herod's thoughts on the matter. He paused. "Um. Oh, wow."
"What?" Herod asked.
"Her DNA. Holy shit. Um, look," he said, and tossed Herod the image.
Herod took one look at it and did the digital sentience equivalent of shake his head. "I'm not Legion, this is meaningless to me."
"Here it is compared to modern human DNA," Sam offered.
"Sam, I'm in a hazardous environment frame, I'm not using the network, just tell me. All you did was throw two plates of pasta at my brain."
"OK, they're wildly different," Sam said. "Even compared to Glassing human DNA, like the people around here, hers is really really different."
"Define... different," Herod said.
"No genetic prothesis or overlays, I can see where the Glassing DNA and the modern DNA have been modified through time, genetic drift, evolution, or genetic manipulation, but wow, her DNA is damn near off the charts. Lots of bad DNA in it, it's... it's really weird."
Herod felt a kick against his foot and heard from far away. "Hey, we're here. You said this stuff needs repaired, Speedy. First Law and all that."
"What is she referring to?" Sam asked.
"I have no idea. Maybe the Four Laws of Robotics?" Herod suggested, opening his eyes. He switched from talking on the digital frequency to his vocal cords. He looked around, the mag-lev train sitting in the station.
"Hang on, let me talk to the facility VI," Herod said, standing up.
The human woman nodded, folding her arms, exhaling smoke out of her nose.
"How bad is the damage to the phasic array automatic repair system?" he asked.
"Bad," Sam answered, obviously (to Herod) running his voice through a synthesizer.
"It isn't going to get fixed if we just stand here. Besides, I'm eager to see technology used in application of something that I was informed was make belief, confirmation bias, and attention seeking," the woman said.
"Ask her her name," Sam said.
"What am I supposed to call you? I keep forgetting to ask," Herod said.
"Miss Nee, my middle name is Tay," the human woman said, her smile getting wider. "But you can call me Dee."
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submitted by Ralts_Bloodthorne to HFY [link] [comments]

[OC] The Distant Gods (Part 2)

Core - Tyrant World - High Seat of Septius
Shirley Goes to the Dance
The dance was magical. Truly.
No expense was spared.
Everyone was there. Humans. Filthy Crimmies. Private Adams. Shirley. The third wheel Lieutenant Duncan Mazer. The festivities got off with a bang as Private Adams turned the corner, Shirley leading the way. Adams was prepared for the onslaught, and he hunkered down behind his shield, absorbing the thuds and concussive blasts as he slowly pushed forward. With each impact, the backside of the shield, where the grip and runes were housed, flared blue and then dimmed, growing duller. Eventually, the shield would run out of mana and Shirley would just be a hunk of metal, but for now she was the prettiest girl at the dance and she exuded a beautiful glow as her intertial dampening field caught the bullets as they whizzed toward them.
Duncan was an awkward observer to the magnificent duet playing out in front of him as he slunk along in the Tank's shadow, his orb clutched in his right hand. He was doing his part, the abyss was stormy cloud of greys and black as he caught the spells flung down the hallway in his absorption aura. He couldn't stop the inbound tech, that was Shirley's responsibility, but he could stop anything with a lick of mana that didn't originate from one of his own. Not that the Crimmie spellthrowers didn't try. They threw everything at them, the baby, the bathwater and the kitchen sink. Both sides knew the best spot to stop the Dragons was at the bottleneck leading into the room. From behind Shirley, Duncan couldn't tell who was throwing what spells or what they were, but the rapidly heating orb in his hand told him he was doing God's work.
Adams was doing the Tank slide-step shuffle, grunting as he pushed Shirley along the ground against some unseen obstruction. He pushed against the obstruction, and was unable to make progress. Adams determined that this was the opportune time to begin a song to encourage his dance partner.
I knew a lass named Shirley. Her steel was shiny and pearly. And she liked 'er men burly. So I said I'm the lad...and...erm...
Adams paused, both in his song and slammed against the obstruction again. "Shit, I forgot the rest. Something about a lad sure...or the strap--" He growled, slamming his shield forward, trying to make progress. "Asshole made me lose my tune. Whole dance is gonna be ruined now." The growl grew to a snarl and he hunkered lower and gathered himself. His runesteel armor flared a brilliant azure for a moment and then he exploded forward, sending whatever obstruction was in his way flying. A moment later, and he stepped out into the room beyond. "SURELY!" Duncan belted out.
Private Adams would likely need psychological evaluation in the near future. Unfortunately, most of the Dragons were certifiable. It was part of their charm.
Upon breaching the barrier and reaching the room beyond, the frenzy started. Fire, bullets, shit and mayhem was coming from every direction now. Shirley's protection was holding, but she was working harder to project her inertial field to protect from the increased angles of attack. She was still a pretty thing, but her alluring glow was getting dimmer by the second. Duncan wasn't faring much better. The orb was getting hot to the touch, with black streaks beginning to form in his hand and creep up his wrist. He a ways to go before a melt and a heart attack, but he was on his way.
"Let's go!" Duncan hollered, motioning forward with his other hand.
The call was answered with a loud "Whoooo-OOOOF," as three shouting Tanks lumbered in behind Duncan and into the room, sliding their shields along the ground in front of them. They fanned out, leaving physical gaps between their tower shields but made sure that their inertial dampening fields overlapped to reduce the strain on any particular shield. Private Adams took a slight step back, letting the other shield takes more of the brunt of the assault -- it wasn't fair that Shirley be the only gal who got a spin on the dance floor after all. Duncan used the opportunity to peek between them to try and get a sense of what they were up against.
Duncan couldn't see all of the Crimmies in one go, but he did get an eye on two groups of them. His immediately assessment was that they were ugly as fuck. His second was that this was the toughest knot of Crimmies yet. The two groups he did see were arranged similarly to what he had seen before -- one spellthrower with a few non-magic minions clustered around as support. The two different breeds were easy enough to tell apart from appearance alone.
The techies were huge, monstrous assholes with chitin and fangs or whatever else best suited their particular brand of fuckery. Some were tall, upwards of ten feet. Some were fat. Some stood in front and took punishment while others stood to the side and fired guns and others sat further back and shat giant globs of acid. If Corps Intel hadn't assured them the Crimmies were all from the same family tree, Duncan would have sworn there were twenty or thirty species and they all just got together and painted themselves the same shade of dog dick red before a fight.
Spellthrowers were a simple scout just because they were always floating around on their lily pads -- little contraptions that looked like a suspended cushion with a few tendrils hanging down. That's right, the alien mana vomiters rode a baby carriage into battle. Made sense too, because they were puny, wasted things all crumpled and curled up on themselves. The Brains back in command said it was because they were full bore mana conduits. They suffered from body cannibalization worse than the Human Wizards did, but had the raw power output to make up for it. Which Duncan was currently the recipient of. Now that he had a line-of-sight, he could see the flashes and explosions as the spells hit his absorption field. He'd hate to be out there right now, trying to duke it out like the zero Null platoons had to.
It was only a quick glance between the shields, but it was enough for Duncan to see the two baby buggies and their cronies on the far end. Both groups had the chitin grunts in front, their massive overgrown blobs covered in homegrown armor that gave even the Gunners' piercing rounds a helluva time. The chitin blobs were flanked by two shooter variants each. One looked like a plasma belcher, the other looked like it was slinging standard ballistics. Both groups were pretty typical, but what was unusual was that they were in here together with two other groups. The spellthrowers didn't seem to like to be around each other, so having four of them in one place raising hell was a change of pace.
It also explained why Duncan's hand was beginning to sizzle. He was top-rated Null, but you could only soak so much before an overload. He could feel the black death making its way up his bicep now. Thankfully, the load lightened considerably once the two other Nulls, both Privates, filed in behind the Gunners and extended their own absorption fields. Breaching the room and setting up had only taken a few seconds, but the intensity made every second count. They'd managed to get about twenty of the platoon in the room and behind the shields, but there wasn't enough space and shield coverage to bring in more. Still, it was enough to get the action started and they could rotate if mana ran low.
Time to return the welcome.
This was where the training kicked in. The four tanks, hunched over in front, prepared to pulse the inertial fields of their tower shields. Sergeant Idris Eze, the leader of the Tank team, linked control over the inertial fields and drew it into himself, his runesteel armor flaring brightly. "THREE! TWO! ONE! HAAA!" He screamed. In addition to his voice, a warning symbol appeared in the HUDs of all of the troops in the platoon, warning them of the impending action.
Simultaneously, the intertial fields withdrew into the shields, leaving the gaps between the physical barriers unprotected. The gaps were immediately filled with a torrent of fire from the fifteen Gunners positioned behind. Those fifteen were arranged into firing teams of three, each with a designated target among the Crimmies ahead. The coordination would be handled via the team uplink embedded into their armor HUDs and under the command of Staff Sergeant Lundgrin who would select the targets, one of the happy benefits of being the leader of the Gunner squad.
Duncan remained behind the shield, not hazarding a glance through the gaps until the intertial shields were replaced. Stay bullets happened and he would rather keep his head in tact for the time being. Instead, he listened to the sweet melody of bolters laying waste to the enemy, the satisfying sizzling build up followed by the THUMP discharge. Occasionally, a bolter would emit a higher, whining sound, an indication that the Gunner was funneling mana into the shot to give it greater penetrating power. Zzzzzz-SHEEWWW. The piercers drained the cartridges a lot faster, but they were the only thing that had the stopping power for the chitin goons. Well, the Mageblades would be able to saw through them all right, but that'd only matter if things got up close and personal. He wasn't about to have them charge the space between just to get a few more notches on their belts, not matter how much they might grumble.
"HOLLLL-UP!" Sergeant Eze yelled out. The bolter fire ceased immediately, and the intertial shields flared outward again. The brief intermission allowed the Staff Sergeant to survey the damage and assign new targets while the Gunners reloaded if necessary and re-positioned. Duncan found the entire affair deeply satisfying, and there was something darkly humorous that tactics lifted from the ancient Greeks should find their home in galaxy far far away.
A tactical readout popped up in his heads up display. The first volley had killed four techies. All ranged attackers. The blobs were still on their feet, but the chitin was smoking. It was good progress, but they were running low on orb time.
"Orb is getting saturated. Need to discharge. Get some disruption in if there's an open angle on one of the depleted Crimmie groups after the next volley," Duncan ordered on the open channel. Normally he'd try to keep the noise pollution down, but if the Phasers were going in, he wanted everyone to know about it.
This was going to be a zero casualty trip. There was no room for mistakes. Mistakes cost lives, and all of the Dragons had seen it happen. Duncan pushed that dangerous line of thought aside and refocused on the task at hand.
"THREE! TWO! ONE! HAAA!" Came Sergeant Eze.
Zzzzzz-THUNK.
Zzzzzz-THUNK.
Zzzzzz-SHEEWWW.
Zzzzzz-THUNK.
Came the response.
"HOLLLL-UP!"
One group of Crimmies was down to the baby carriage and a blob. The others still had cronies standing. Duncan flipped to the Phaser team's channel. "Buggy 1. Isolate, incapacitate, cover. GO!" said Sergeant Sarang Park. Duncan glanced down the hallway leading back to their resting spot prior to the battle just in time to see three bodies flicker and then disappear. Moments later, three large booms sounded out as the Phasers unleashed the concussive blasts stored in their blast gloves followed by a baby carriage flying across the room, richocheting off the ceiling before settling on its side, the tendrils lashing about erratically.
Duncan held his breath. None of the Phasers were double-jumpers, not yet at least. They'd be out in the open for at least ten seconds before they could jump back. There had been some outcroppings they might be able to duck behind on the other side of the room, but it depended on where they phased in.
Seconds later, all three re-appeared, though Private Volga collapsed almost immediately, his left leg spurting blood from the thigh. Duncan exhaled a curse and then turned back to the action ahead. They had a Wizard with a few heal glyphs stored up, but Volga would be on his ass for the rest of the mission.
Suddenly, the Tanks were slammed back, losing a few feet but not their footing. Looming above them were two of the enormous blobs, their giant red bodies pressed against the face of the shields. One blob swept bulbous tentacles growing out of its midsection around the farthest left Tank, a Private named Robert Lincoln, the suckers on the inside affixing themselves to the tower shield as it began to shake back and forth violently. The Tank held on to the tower shield, but was lifted off of his feet. He jerked back, trying to dislodge his shield, but removed from the ground he didn't have the leverage. Razor sharp chitin spikes tried to jab around the sides of the tower shield, trying to impale the Tank in mid air.
"Let it go," Sergeant Eze yelled out.
"It's mine," Private Lincoln screamed. The relationship between a Tank and their shield was not a simple one, as Private Adams and Shirley so aptly demonstrated, and they were not easily parted. The intimacy of the relationship was reinforced by the unspoken rule among Tanks that they should never, ever lose their shield. It was a religion with a single rule. Dishonor. Shame. Blasphemy. It was taken very seriously.
Too seriously.
A chitin spike swept around behind Private Lincoln and pinned him against his shield. A second spike quickly followed, using the leverage provided by the pin to exert pressure against Lincoln's juggernaut suit. It flared blue at the point of contact, reinforcing the structure with mana. For a moment, Duncan thought it might just be enough. But it wasn't.
The suit flared and then extinguished as the spike broke through, impaling Lincoln through the midsection as he called out weakly. He flailed a few moments, thrashing in the pin, impaling himself further before he slumped forward, his hands still intertwined with the handle of his shield.
The Gunner poured fire into the belly of the beast, but the chitin held as the blob discarded Lincoln and began to move in on the exposed flank. The Gunners tried to pull back, but there wasn't any room to navigate, they could either be smashed against the wall, sidle in to their corpsmen or dive out of the way and beyond the shield wall. Chaos erupted as the six exposed Gunners each chose a different solution. Two dove to the left, three remained where they were, pulling the trigger and piling as much mana as they could into every shot, and the sixth dove toward the hallway leading back, colliding with Duncan in the process.
Duncan was thrown off his feet, only just retaining hold of his orb but losing concentration. He could feel his absorption field blink out. He tried to push the out from under the scrambling Gunner, but was suddenly forced back down as a chitin spike slammed through the Gunner's throat and into his shoulder. His magescale provided little protection against the assault and quickly gave way. Pain flooded Duncan's senses as he lay there helpless. Through the agony, he broadcast on the general comm.
"MAGEBLA--
The chitin spike was severed before he could finish the word.
--DES!"
He pushed the fallen Gunner to his side, clearing his field of vision in time to see a Private and a Sergeant showing everyone how to truly dance. They duck and they dove around the flailing tentacles, arms, spikes and everything else the blob could swing at them, slashing and stabbing as they went. One held two short swords, Private First Class Brynhildur Gunnardóttir, who went by Bryn to save everyone the trouble. The other, Sergeant Behnam Ardehi, wielded a single scimitar. Both had their own distinct styles, with Ardehi favoring long slashing strokes to disable appendages while Bryn focused on more surgical stabs between the gaps in the chitin.
Their runed blades surged with various types of effects depending on the wielder and what was required. When Sergeant Ardehi's blade locked with the chitin, it would suddenly vibrate intensely along the blade, creating a sawing effect on that would allow Ardehi to cleave chunks of carapace off of the blob, leaving Bryn with more weaknesses to attack. Bryn would make good on those openings, jabbing her blade inward and pushing pulses of concussive force through the tip of the blade whenever one of them found a soft spot, creating great oozing wounds. The blob entered a frenzy, furiously trying to lash out at the Mageblades while chirping in the Crimmies lilting birdlike language. The disjointed flurry only worsened the blob's prospects, and Bryn eventually managed to explode something the Crimmie truly needed. It slumped over, dead.
In the interim, the others had begun to reassemble themselves. The two Gunners that had dived outside of the shield wall were down. The three that had remained and fired had managed to survive until the Mageblades had arrived. The remaining tanks had locked arms and formed a convex wall against the other blob, which was trying to use the same tactics its deceased partner had used. A third and fourth Mageblade were hacking away on the sides, preventing the tentacles from gaining purchase on the shields while the Gunners poured bolty death on the shielded cranium peeking above the shield wall.
The black death had receded back into Duncan's forearm. He tapped the secondary mana storage in his magescale and felt the infusion of mana kick his adrenaline and dopamine up a few notches. He gasped slightly and then focused his attention back on his absorption field, it sprung to life just the the two Privates began to falter. He flipped to the Null channel, "Take a break, I just juiced. Can hold for a few." The pain in his shoulder was subsiding. He didn't have the rejuvenation of the Tanks, but mana could cover up for a lot while you were riding the high.
The other two Nulls maintained their fields, but they repositioned them behind his own, letting Duncan take the heat from the remaining three Crimmie spellthrowers. Status readouts splurted by in the corner of his HUD, giving him a quick overview of the current status. Three dead. Six injured. Eight Crimmies still in action from the original fourteen.
Not good.
Fucking disaster more like it.
There were going to have to spend some non-renewable resources. Holding the Wizards back had been a mistake. "Let's go offense. I want to see shield drains on the solo buggy. Buggy four. Coordinate with the Phasers. Get it done," Duncan ordered. If they got the Crimmies down to two spellthrowers, they should be able to orb the rest of the way and clean up, particularly with the blobs down.
Still, it was going to cost them. Duncan should have known this mission was going to be a shitshow. Command kept limit testing the Crimmies and the Dragons, and it was costing lives. They'd done so much winning that they just assumed it'd keep going quick and easy. Mana fluents weren't common enough to be wasteful, and this shit was garbage disposal.
A boom sounded out. This time, the carriage was flung against the ceiling and immediately exploded into a tangle of wreckage and red pulp rather than ricochet about. That was the benefit of taking out the spellthrower's shield before a Phaser blast, but shield drains were precious commodities. The glyph was uncommon, took significant time and bodily resources to regenerate and wasn't recoverable like a Sanctuary spell. But it was worth it if it saved them another death.
Duncan could feel the tide turning now. The black steaks had slowed to a creep up his arm, and the orb was hot but not burning. The Tanks were shuffling forward as the Gunners triangulated their fire on the remaining techies still standing, trying to clear the way so the Phasers could get in and blast the buggies without interference. The Mageblades had retired back into the hallway, dragging wounded to the back lines so the Wizards could heal without exposure.
Another boom sounded out. Duncan didn't see the baby go bouncing, but the HUD ticked down one buggy.
Seconds later, another boom.
The HUD read zero Crimmies.
They'd won. And they'd lost.
Duncan opened up the general channel, "Clear the techie bodies and get a Sanctuary down, ASAP. Prep shift walls, but keep the way open for the time being. I don't know whether we want to be coming or going yet. Sergeants, I've got the real time updates, but I want details. Tell me where each of the teams are at. We've got folks down, but there's still a mission here."
Duncan surveyed the room, taking in the aftermath. Crimmie corpses were strewn everywhere, the stench of them heavy in the air. His good cheer was gone. He'd been overconfident. They were in uncharted territory and what they didn't know had come up and punched them in the throat. He walked over to one of the chitin blobs and gazed down at the corpse.
Where the fuck had the tentacles come from? He nudged the body with his foot, pushing the thick tentacle out of the way to reveal the suckers lining the inside. They'd gone against blobs before, but nothing like this. Normally they hung back and soaked. When they got close, they came in with spikes, not tentacles.
Didi came up beside him, also staring down at the corpse. "That's new."
"Mmm," Duncan replied.
"Think it's actually new?" She asked.
"Maybe. That'd be a fast adaption. Can't rule it out though." Duncan slid the now clear orb back into the holster on the inside of his right wrist and then shook his hand in the air, letting his palm air out. "Can't believe they fucking broke a Null Tank combo."
"It was a perfect setup."
"Cocky."
"Would have been fine if Lincoln had let the shield go, we--"
"Don't put it on one guy. We were all here. We all could have done something different. Done something better. He fucked up, but we weren't perfect," Duncan said. "There will be a lot of video to review." Duncan didn't see the point in raising the Gunner who took him down, they could address the lapse later. What was important was that fingers didn't start pointing back and forth. Not while they were still out on mission.
"Yes, Sir." Didi paused, "We still heading down?"
"Don't see an alternative. Gotta find out what's putting out that much mana and no one else is gonna get even as far as we have." They'd lost people, but they were still operational and lethal. Extraction wasn't an option. Best to push forward and do what they could to maximize the odds. Duncan pointed over at one of the buggies, "Have the babies drug to Hazel and drained. Then heal up, restock and let's get back on the road. Even in Sanctuary, we're burning time."
"Yes, Sir." Didi saluted and then headed over to a group of Gunners. After a few animated gestures, they began to move toward the buggies and extract the Crimmie spellthrowers so Hazel can draw the mana out of them and distill it down. Given the state of affairs, more mana was more.
After the techies had been cleared, a golden hue sprang to life in the room. The pain in his shoulder dulled and the trickle of blood subsided. He released the residual mana in his system and braced himself for the crash. Sanctuary reduced the effect, but it made the pounding headache barely manageable. He'd pushed his threshold in the first, tapping the secondary to push through. Even with his enhanced tolerance, he was flirting with disaster. Last thing the Dragons needed was burnout for a Lieutenant.
He closed his eyes, letting Sanctuary wash over him and settle his mind before turning to the next task. There wasn't a chance it would get any easier, but a few moments to get his shit together might give him the strength to carry it out with the professionalism the fallen deserved. Slowly, he opened his eyes and then turned toward the three bodies of the fallen Dragons, who had been laid out to the side of the room and given a respectful distance from the other activities. Duncan walked over to the three, looking from the enormous frame of the Tank, Private Lincoln, to the two Gunners, including the one who had fallen on top of him during the fight with the blob.
Duncan knelt down beside Lincoln, his hand on the Tank's chest. He pulled the ID Chip around his neck and then inserted it into his own armor. A small HUD prompt appeared.
[Would you like to deliver last rites to Private Robert Lincoln?]
"Confirm last rites."
[This is a permanent action and will result in the destruction of the soldier's body and associated equipment. Confirm?]
They couldn't leave the bodies behind, and they were too large to carry with them. No one wanted this outcome, but it was a part of being in the Rune Corps. Fluents and their equipment were the property of the government and they didn't want that property in anyone else's hands.
"You did your duty." Duncan thumped Lincoln's chest once and nodded toward the shield leaning against his large frame, his hand still wrapped around the handle. "And you held on to the fucking end."
He paused, as if waiting for a response. When none arrived, he whispered, "Confirm." The runes on the armor and shield flared and then began to melt. Within a few seconds, all that remained of Private Robert Lincoln was a few wisps of ash.
Duncan exhaled a long, miserable sigh.
Two to go.
And a mission to complete.
---------
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Nuclear power is often the subject of disinformation, spreading of FUD, and dismissed. This post addresses many of these points. Questions are welcome but civility required.

Nuclear power is often the subject of disinformation, spreading of FUD, and dismissed. This post addresses many of these points. Questions are welcome but civility required.
This post is about nuclear power. It is long. If you want to debate, that is welcome but please read this post first. It's likely I will have addressed your concern in it. There will be no tl;dr.
I've seen a fair few posts on here, and other "green" sites doing their best to discredit and undermine the science of nuclear power in lieu of glorified pipe dreams. That the world can go 100% "renewable" (with plenty of caveats tacked on the end of course, half of them unfeasible).
There are 4 main "arguments" against nuclear power. Danger, waste + storage, cost, and fuel availability. This post is to hopefully illustrate why all are red herrings designed to sew FUD and in actual fact keep us tied to a hydrocarbon-based grid.

Danger

This is a three-prong argument. The first usually invokes events such as Chernobyl, Fukushima, TMI, and other lesser incidents; the second invokes radiation safety; and the third mentions terrorism.
Starting with nuclear events, of these three I mentioned---only one is actually at all relevant and that's TMI. But mentioning it in terms of safety is the equivalent of comparing a ford model-T to a modern family saloon. Additionally, it led to the raft of safety measures we now have thus preventing it from ever happening again.
Chernobyl is a total red herring. While it wasn't a good event, it's pretty much the only event in nuclear power history that has led to any "significant" casualties, with the official death toll being 60 and numbers in the region of 6-20k cited from extended exposure. Whilst high for a single event, this makes up the vast majority of all nuclear incidents and in terms of death/TWh produced, still results in nuclear being the safest of all power sources. Plus, the RMBK reactor used on site wasn't designed for producing power, but for plutonium for nuclear bombs. As such, it was made deliberately unsafe so they could pop it open quickly to get the Pu out. It was this deliberate design choice that caused the failure. Obviously, this is not present in power-based reactors. It's also likely that the deaths are overestimated in this event due to the employment of the linear no-threshold model, which has repeatedly been shown to be flawed, and a hormetic model should instead be employed. This even gets ramped up to 11 in some countries that have radiation "spas" where you sit in a radon-filled basement in a bath-robe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24298226/
And Fukushima? Yes it wasn't ideal, but literally nothing has come of it. No increased cancers. No deaths. No change in the background radiation level. Those maps bandied about showing the "flow into the ocean"? Garbage designed to spread FUD. The site fundamentally failed because a tsunami was higher than the seawall and drowned the diesel generators that were below sea-level. If the reactor hadn't shut down, it's likely it wouldn't have failed at all. Fukushima is less anti-nuclear and more anti-diesel generator.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fukushima-emergency/
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-daiichi-accident.aspx
The clean-up will cost money yes, but see the section later about why that's actually a good thing. Other events such as the Windscale fire were also caused by plutonium production.
Now lets compare those deaths with another singular event: a damn bursting in China. 230k dead. More than 10x all the nuclear incidents ever yet I don't hear many here complaining about hydro-power.
https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/230000-died-in-a-dam-collapse-that-china-kept-secret-for-years/91699/
In fact, comparing all the methods of power generation as deaths/terawatt-hour produced, nuclear is safest by about an order of magnitude (in other words, 10x more power can be produced for each person killed by that method of generation). How many people do you want to die to keep your lights on?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
The second of these prongs is fear of radiation. While I briefly touched on it when discussing Chernobyl, the fear runs much deeper. The main problem here is lack of scientific education, and an overzealous media. The thing about radiation is we are very good at detecting it, even at very low levels, and some units need to use very large numbers, such as atomic decays/second (Bq). Thing is, there are a lot of atoms in a small volume of anything. Avogadro's constant tells us that there are 6.022x1023 atoms in one mole of the substance. And one mole is the atomic number of the element in grams. So 92g of Uranium has 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms (approx). And with the density of U being ~19.1g/cm3, that's 5 cubic centimetres of uranium. Or a double shot in a bar.
This sort of numbering has led to the tongue in cheek unit "banana equivalent dose".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
Yes, that is the radiation dose you will get from eating a banana. In continuation, people will talk about waste being so hazardous, but without really understanding the numbers. So what are those numbers? Well, the granite worktop in your kitchen would be classed as nuclear waste under current legislation, thanks to radon in it.
Terrorism is another danger often cited. And this may even be a valid one, if there had ever been a terrorist attack on any nuclear plant across the world in the history of the human race. They're also designed to withstand a direct impact from a train or a 747, so a 9/11 attack isn't a concern. On a related vein, many conflate nuclear power with nuclear weaponry. These two implementations are about as different as can be, with the only commonality is that they both use a radioactive source. It would be like decrying a coal plant because C4 explodes as both are carbon based. Nuclear weaponry and nuclear power are fundamentally different technologies and cannot be conflated.

Waste/Storage

People don't think of granite worktops or gloves or aprons being "nuclear waste" though, they think of leaking soft steel barrels full of green liquid seeping out into waterways and turning us all into three-armed monstrosities with cancers out the wazoo. Except, none of that is true. Including the fact it's waste at all. So from now on I will call them used fuel rods, as that is what they are, The way fuel rods are disposed of is in a water bath for heat control of any short-lived elements to decay away, and then they are stored in "dry cask storage", or large concrete barrels on the reactor site.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage
"But these barrels are dangerous right? You will die if you get near them?"
Well, yes. But only because the armed guards on site will shoot you as you run towards them. If you had proper clearance, you could sit and have lunch leaning up against one with negligible radiation dose.
"But these drums are piling up with nowhere to store them, It's a catastrophe".
Well... also no. As you may remember the numbers from the previous section, volumes are small. If you were to take the entire US stockpile of used fuel rods and group them together, you'd have a mass of 70k metric tonnes. Sounds a lot right? But remember the density of uranium, that gives a volume of about 3665 m3. For comparison, single football stadium (I've pulled up Samara Arena in Russia for convenience), it has a volume of 503,480 m3. So the entire volume of used nuclear fuel in the US wouldn't even fill a football stadium, and in fact wouldn't even come close. I'd say we've got room to breathe there.
"But it lives for billions of years right and is super radioactive right?"
Well, again, not quite. Think of anything, the hotter it burns, the shorter it lives. Same with nuclear fuel. The high-activity nuclides in the used fuel rods decay in days-weeks. What's left is inert filler with fresh uranium mixed through. In fact, after it's removed from the reactor, it's still about 95% fresh uranium. Which has a half life of billions of years, but consequently is also low activity. You could hold reactor rods in your hand and be fine. And in fact this is how they are installed into a reactor in the first place. Notice no lead aprons, no serious PPE. Just gloves and goggles.
Fuel Rod Assembly: U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy
And yet in the US that's buried underground. Why? Blame President Carter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
In fact, that is the only main problem with storage of used fuel rods. The US gets a disproportionate amount of air-time across the world, and it also cannot reprocess its used fuel. It'd be like a car in which most of the petrol you put in trickled out the exhaust again. You'd either improve the design, or put it through again. And that's the purpose of either recycling the fuel rods, or using what is known as a breeder reactor. And in fact these breeder reactors are grid-proven and it's literally just lack of political will preventing them being rolled out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor
If the US was the recycle all the fuel it had in storage, it wouldn't need to mine any more for the next century or so. Yes, century.

Fuel Availability

"But it'll all run out eventually? In fact, a lot of estimates put it at only ~200 years availability? Why bother when the sun and wind are essentially limitless?"
Again, not quite. This figure comes from single-pass fuel use then storage. As I've just shown, that's incredibly inefficient and frankly a stupid way to handle it. In fact, if you combine breeder reactors, and fuel reprocessing, we have enough fissile fuel to keep our reactors happy for the next few hundred thousand years.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/

Cost

"But it's really expensive to build nuclear plants and takes too long."
It is expensive to build the nuclear plants yes, but the time taken to build them is largely based in legislation which itself is based in flawed science (as I mentioned earlier with the LNT statements). But when investigate it as a levelised cost of energy (LCOE), nuclear is pretty much front of the queue.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx
Plus, I'm going to take a little detour out of science here and start talking about economics. Things being expensive for a government is not the same as things being expensive for a person/business. The fundamental difference is that the latter is a user of currency, whilst the former is the issuer of currency. A common way of thinking is the out-dated gold standard, in which currency is finite and tied to gold/tax receipts/stocks/bonds. This, and consequential statements such as "we are generating debt our children must pay" hasn't been true since 1971. The government, being able to issue its own currency can never go bankrupt as it can always pay its debts. This also does not lead to inflation as it used to. If this has you scratching your head in disbelief, that's understandable. I suggest the book "The Deficit Myth" by Prof. Stephanie Kelton. Additionally, she does a really good seminar on it here and is definitely worth a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1SMjeuyF-Y
So fundamentally, if the government wish to build nuclear, they have both means and motive to do so, with no detriment to the economy (unless you count people in work being a detriment).
A few conspicuous sites are also mentioned in nuclear costs. These are typically Hanford in the US, and Sellafield in the UK. Both of these sites are scheduled to take decades to clean up, and cost hundreds of billions of $/£ to do so. This sounds ominous, but it isn't. Both of these sites were built in the 40s/50s as research sites and plutonium production facilities. Neither of these are actually relevant to modern power production and are simply a legacy from a time we didn't understand nuclear materials. When discussing US decommissioning costs, Hanford makes up 80% of this budget in the US, and Sellafield making up 75% in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/cost-taxpayers-clean-nuclear-waste-jumps-100-billion-year-n963586
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy/nuclear-provision-explaining-the-cost-of-cleaning-up-britains-nuclear-legacy

Discussion

So why am I so bothered? Why bother making this post at all? I am a scientist and it bothers me to see disinformation and anti-science get spread so freely. There is also an extremely bad-faith argument from a lot of people in this regard, as they do not discuss the waste generated in the production of renewables, nor the full LCOE and instead cherry pick good days and state it as an average. This disingenuity has led to some of the most expensive power in the US for Californians, and Germany needing to fire its coal stations back up as well as import power from nuclear powered France. Furthermore, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) performed an interesting study, in which it collates the opinions of those educated in science versus the general public. It can be seen that when formally trained in science, the approval rating nuclear is much higher. Surely we want our path to saving the planet rooted in science instead of hubris?
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2015/07/23/an-elaboration-of-aaas-scientists-views/
Also as I showed with the burst-dam, there are statements made about nuclear that are not made about renewables. So if I repeat the process, the waste produced for solar and wind is not discussed often enough. Both wind and solar produce huge volumes of toxic and radioactive waste. But as they are not as similarly constrained as the nuclear industry, this is both unaccounted, and just drained to the environment.
https://www.cfact.org/2019/09/15/the-solar-panel-toxic-waste-problem/
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/wind/big-winds-dirty-little-secret-rare-earth-minerals/
https://e360.yale.edu/features/boom_in_mining_rare_earths_poses_mounting_toxic_risks
Neither can the panels or blades be recycled so they go to landfill, to leech out toxic elements into the soil and groundwater.
https://stopthesethings.com/2020/10/10/lingering-legacy-millions-of-toxic-solar-panels-that-cant-be-recycled-destined-for-landfills/
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/solar-panel-waste-the-dark-side-of-clean-energy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills
And if nuclear fuel availability is mentioned, then so should availability of the minerals required to produce renewables. Many of the minerals used have available supplies of less than a year, and as is in the name, they are rare to begin with.
https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/10/chinas-monopoly-on-rare-earth-elements-and-why-we-should-care/
And to address a few points unique to renewables, the first is that by their method of operation, they harness a diffuse source. As such, they need to be big. Really big. Hundreds to thousands of hectares big. To produce an amount of power that could be generated by a reactor a fraction of the size. Now some people may find vast fields of solar panels or turbines beautiful, but I'd rather see vast woodlands, prairies, swamplands. I'd rather see our land returned to nature to actually capture some of the carbon that's ready to drive our extinction. It would also have the additional benefit that it would actually give back to the environment, and allow the bugs, birds, reptiles, critters, grazers, and hunters to thrive again. They don't thrive under windmills or solar panels.
https://www.strata.org/footprints/
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18270734.14m-trees-cut-scotland-make-way-wind-farms/
https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-built-on-carbon-rich-peat-bogs-lose-their-ability-to-fight-climate-change-143551
"But it's cheap!"
Exactly, and that's why renewables still have a place as is shown by the "energy pyramid" attached. Every rooftop should be lined with solar panels. Domestic windmills should be used to feed back into the grid. The land is already used, so make the most of it. But don't destroy nature to build renewables, as this is often exactly what happens.
The Energy Pyramid [Eric G. Meyer, Generation Atomic]
There are further issues faced by renewables but not faced by nuclear. These are called "capacity factor" and "insertion factor", and neither permit for exponential power demands that we as a race face. The former is a simple one, wind doesn't blow all the time. Sun doesn't shine all the time. There needs to be a backup, that right now is natural gas. Super batteries will not fix this issue, and are actually more likely to render renewables obsolete as our demands will grow with our capacity. The second, insertion factor, relates to how once the "good spots" are taken, we must use less good spots, and as such need larger installations to make up for the shortfall in production. With nuclear, both of these do not apply.
But why nuclear at all? Well, fundamentally, there is just so much uranium, and it is so energy dense, that it is silly to not use it. But when I talk about energy density compared to other fuels, it is hard to envision, so this wonderful presentation gives us more of a clue.
https://youtu.be/tpUtrDvya1w
So what does that energy density look like? Well, in a nuclear fuel assembly (shown earlier), there are hundreds of fuel pellets such as shown below. Each single one of those pellets are 7g of the ceramic uranium oxide, and can power a typical household for ~4 months.
Fuel pellets in a fuel rod [nuclear.duke-energy.com]
So why would you not want to use the cleanest, safest, arguably cheapest power source on earth?

Conclusion

This post hopefully illustrates some of the common and unfortunately pervasive myths around nuclear power. And if for a moment we assume the problems are all real and genuine, we have less than 10 years to fix our planet before it starts trying, and likely succeeding, to kill us. This is not the time to be advocating anti-science or wanting to look like you care whilst doing nothing. If the waste issue was true, that gives us hundreds to thousands of years to find a problem. If the terrorism issue was true, we'd have high employment in the military to keep the sites safe. If the fuel availability issue was true, we could use it until we perfect fusion. But fundamentally, if you are about to be hit by an out-of-control bus, you do not worry about the grazed knee you get by jumping out the way.
Edit 1: S/P
Edit 2: Included the AAAS survey in the "Discussion" section.
Edit 3: Added Hanford and Sellafield to the "Costs" section.
Edit 4: Added additional references to "Discussion" section.
Edit 5: Updated data on Chernobyl death toll.
Edit 6: Added fuel rod assembly image.
submitted by Vaudane to ExtinctionRebellion [link] [comments]

[Cryoverse] The Last Precursor 045: Monolith

The Last Precursor is an HFY-exclusive web-serial which focuses on the exploits of the last living human amidst a galaxy of unknown aliens. With his species all but extinct and now only known as the ancient Precursors, how will Admiral José Rodriguez survive in this hostile universe? Make sure to read the earlier chapters first if you missed them!
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Previous Part
Part 001
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Admiral José Rodriguez walks side by side with Lord Drall, second in command of the Kraktol Empire. The Terran and crocodilian appear mismatched in height, with the human standing nearly a full head taller than his counterpart. This height imbalance, when combined with the Terran's domineering presence and technical superiority in all manner of warfare, gives him an aura of leadership, causing the Kraktol general to defer to him when they speak.
The Terran and Kraktol step inside a vacuum lift, using it to drop down some ten or so levels to the lowest decks.
"Where I come from," José explains, "this vessel was already at the pinnacle of Terran technology. Ramma's Chosen had several Dreadnoughts at their disposal, some from older eras, others from the current era. Let alone my faction, there were other factions as well, such as Orion Corp and the Third Hand, who possessed dozens of similarly-sized Dreadnoughts. Even so, the Bloodbearer was especially unique; the flagship of our armada. With just this one carrier, Ramma's Chosen could project military force into any system within a thousand lightyears of our homeworld. We feared no reprisal, because combatting the Bloodbearer directly would mark any man as a fool."
Lord Drall gazes through the transparent vacuum tube window, watching as one deck after another swishes past his eyes. "From the research this era's sentients have gathered, a top of the line 25th Era military vessel would often end up comparable to a civilian-grade 40th Era vessel. In that case, the Bloodbearer should prove even more advanced than its numerical era signifies."
"Correct," José says, nodding. "Top-grade stasis chambers, a facility for regenerating missing limbs within hours, the greatest medical minds of my generation, and a hundred of Ramma's mightiest warriors. I am a killer, a soldier bred for slaying heretics. Even so, I was only one of many. Alone, I am formidable. But when combined with the power of other Chosen, we could perform terrifying feats of destruction."
José continues. "Defeating Yama during the age of Terran Supremacy would have been a trivial task. One Demon Emperor, alone, might be somewhat frightening, but you must remember that we defeated demonkind long before our advancements in military might. With our modern technological terrors in hand, defeating our ancient adversaries would have taken us a fraction of the time we originally spent. The problem comes in that we do not presently live in the age of Terran Supremacy, and thus, our task will prove far more difficult."
The vacuum tube slows to a stop. Its door swishes open, allowing the two faction leaders to stride out, with José in the lead. The Admiral guides Lord Drall toward a large, wide-open facility, one with the words, "Planetary Assault" emblazoned in huge, engraved letters above the doorway.
"You know," José says, "it kind of surprises me that there are vastly more pre-25th Era ships in the modern galaxy than post-25th Era ones. In my time, such old clunkers were outdated, generally considered dangerous, and only used by junkers, raiders, and the poorest of civilians. Many pre-25th Era warships were reworked and rebuilt into civilian cruisers, intended only for simple transport duties. They offered a small amount of protection against the Void Roamers and other undesirables. The fact your 'modern' militaries use such outdated technology is... bizarre."
"And," José adds, "that isn't even taking into account how few there were. Restoring some old clunker to working order was hardly worth the time and effort when parts for newer models were typically found in greater abundance, and far cheaper. Most First, Second, and Third Era ships could only be found in museums, not flying through space. I cannot wrap my mind around any situation which may have led to modern spacecraft disappearing while ancient craft resurged."
Lord Drall pauses outside the Planetary Assault bay. He glances at José and shrugs. "Many Mallali, Avaru, and Rodak archaeologists have sought answers to that question, and others. For countless millennia, we have known of the existence of ancient Precursor artifacts. However, in the First Age, when our species first gained the ability to travel through the void, we were careless and foolhardy. Many vessels we recovered possessed synthminds and databases filled with valuable knowledge regarding what happened to the Precursors. Sadly, our forebearers, in their infinite shortsightedness, erased those synthminds to solidify their unwavering compliance. Obtaining military might at all costs was their primary objective, while investigating the secrets of the Precursors was not even on their radar."
"Unfortunate," José mutters, before stepping into the armory before him. "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it."
Drall nods. "Indeed."
He follows the Terran, allowing his eyes to roam the insides of what appears to be a small hangar, but one without any shuttles or interceptors. Instead, nine gigantic bipedal war machines stand at attention against the far wall, with a spot in their middle conspicuously absent. These machines, identical to the Titan battlesuit Soren wore while dropping to Tarus II's surface, give Lord Drall a bad case of the chills. Seeing such intimidating mechanical armors lined up, he begins to form an idea in his head of just how much firepower the Bloodbearer truly can bring to a battlefield if it so chooses.
Inside the chamber, a half-dozen Kessu mechanics and janitors walk around, shining the metal fittings of each machine, cleaning the dirt and dust accumulated from 100,000,000 years, or otherwise performing routine maintenance on anything that requires their attention.
One of the mechanics, a white-haired female Kessu with a bright-pink nose, perks up when she spots José. "Prraw? Great Precursor! I am glad you came to visit!"
Her words grab the attention of the other five Kessu, all of whom turn to look at José and flash their cute kitty-smiles. "Meow! The Great Precursor!"
José chuckles. "Mina, this is Lord Drall. He is going to work together as our ally for the foreseeable future. As the second in command of the Kraktol Empire, he possesses a lot of political and military authority. He will dedicate a large number of soldiers to crushing the demons on Tarus II, as well as preserving Kessu society. I want you to treat him with the same respect that you would me."
The Kessu female, Mina, glances at Drall a second time. Realizing who he is, her expression turns cross for a moment, but she quickly comes to terms with her feelings. "Y-yes, Great Precursor. I will do what I can to help out. But... regarding the attack on my... my village..."
Before José can reply, Lord Drall takes a step forward. He drops to one knee and bows his head until the underside of his jaw touches the floor. "Please accept my sincerest apologies, Miss Mina. I will personally get down on my knees and apologize to every Kessu I have offended, if that is what it takes. What my people did was wrong. We bore a grudge against the Kessu for many generations, but the Kessu who wronged us have long since faded to the rivers of time. We will help rebuild your society and ensure a great peace between our species, so long as the Kessu are willing to forgive us our trespasses."
Lord Drall beats his chest and closes his eyes with grief, putting on a convincing performance. José, of course, doesn't fully believe his words, but Mina takes a step back, startled by Lord Drall's self-flagellation. "T-there's no need to bow before me, um, good sir! I lost a few friends and family, but... but that's just the nature of war! If you can help us rebuild and offer restitution for your crimes, we will certainly forgive you! There's no need to spoil the kitten's milk with idle anger; that's what my mother always says!"
Drall nods slightly, tapping the front of his jaw against the exosteel deckplates. "Oh, such wisdom! Such grace! Your mother is truly a kind soul. Does she still walk among the living?"
Mina nods. "Yes. She is still alive, but my father..."
"Graugh! How terrible! In that case, I shall go to your mother after this and beg her for forgiveness! Any punishment she requests, I shall accept it! This violent attack I perpetuated, 'tis a stain upon my grand name!"
One by one, Lord Drall profusely apologize to each of the six Kessu present, making all of them look at him with a certain degree of warmth and reverence. After he finishes, they return to their duties, quietly meowing amongst one another about how they had pegged the Kraktol leader as being far more vicious and bloodthirsty than he really was.
As Lord Drall rises to his feet, he shoots a questioning look at José. "...You are displeased with my words?"
"Not at all," José answers with a shake of his head. "I don't care one iota how your quarrel with the Kessu plays out. From now on, they will be under my protection, as I've said before. It's in your best interest to apologize to each of them, whether you mean it in your heart or not. As long as they believe you, and you stick to your word, you'll already have done a great deal better than some of the... politicians from my era."
Drall flares his nostrils. "Chuff. So you had those back then, too."
"Indeed."
"Disgusting."
Both men share a nod between each other before moving on. José gestures toward the nearest Titan battle-armor and begins to speak.
"The Titan Dropsuit was and still is the mightiest surface-combat device employed by Ramma's Chosen. It could turn any average man into an elite soldier, and any elite soldier into a demigod of death and destruction. Just one Titan could clear out an entire city of hostiles. Nearly indestructible, swift as a speeder-pod, and surprisingly agile, these battlesuits will be our key to defeating Yama."
Lord Drall walks toward the nearest Titan armor, and caresses its thick metal plating. He taps its shell with his claws, and even knocks his knuckles against several exosteel plates around its body. Not once does he hear a hollow ringing sound, indicating the metal must be highly dense.
"Impressive, to say the least. Words fail me. With a weapon like this, you could raid a Mallali core-world by yourself and not even risk suffering an injury."
I said it was indestructible, but that's only against traditional ground-based attacks," José explains. "If any average interplanetary bombardment platform were to attack from space, it could easily land a targeted strike on a Titan battlesuit and reduce it to melted hunks of metal. Naturally, we need not worry about that situation, given any ship within range of attacking these Titan battlesuits will also have to fly within the range of the Bloodbearer's primary cannon array. I pity the fool who suffers from such a blatant death-wish."
José continues guiding Lord Drall around the Planetary Assault armory. He leads the Kraktol commander over to a wall of various gadgets, most of them small, palm-sized devices, coming in all sorts of shapes.
"This here," José says, picking up a small metal cube, "is a portable forcefield generator. You can use it to temporarily seal off passages and pathways. Useful for protecting your flank in a firefight, or for trapping a particularly slippery foe to prevent their escape."
"Like Yama?" Drall asks.
"Exactly. And this here, this is a portable holo-entity generator. The entity can take many different forms, but as of now, it only has my bio-signature inside. It can discharge electrical bursts, either at a low enough level to incapacitate an enemy, or it can unleash enough energy to char them to ash. I've used these on several occasions; their versatility is what makes them formidable."
José explains the purpose of more than five dozen devices. Each one elicits fewer and fewer gasps of astonishment from Lord Drall. He quickly finds himself becoming less amazed, and instead more frightened, by the unbelievable firepower José has at his disposal.
"These weapons are truly awe-inspiring. I find it hard to believe your people, the Terrans, could ever go extinct with such incredible technology at their disposal."
"Hmm..." José mutters, pursing his lips. "I've not spent much time investigating the cause of Terrankind's extinction. As you can imagine... it's a bit of a sore spot for me."
Lord Drall doesn't reply for a moment. When he does, his tone becomes somber.
"Admiral. Truthfully, many Kessu scientists, many Mallali, Rodaks, and countless other sentients have spent an inordinate amount of time investigating what led to the extinction of the Precursors. Yet, no matter how we searched, where we looked, or what we found... in the end, we were unable to come up with a single substantial answer."
He continues. "Graugh! I do not wish to sound like a wild conspiracy theorist. However, it is my personal belief that whatever led to the extinction of the Precursors... it was not artificial in origin, nor was it some terrible accident. If I had to guess, I might even go so far as to say it was... deliberate."
The Admiral frowns. "Deliberate, you say? Perhaps, you believe my people's extinction to have come at the claws of some terrible enemy?"
Drall shrugs. "I cannot say. I am but a humble Rodak, unversed in the ways of science and archaeology. Any guesses I might hazard would likely prove wild and unsubstantiated."
"However," Drall mutters, "certain things simply don't add up. Every historical record indicates that the Precursors- sorry, the Terrans... every record indicates they disappeared at nearly the same time. Some worlds showed minor signs of battle-scars, but for the most part... it seemed to me as if whatever killed them merely 'erased' them from existence. One moment, they were there, and in the next, they were gone."
José gazes at one of the nearby Kessu, someone going about his business oiling a rusty servo motor on one of the Titan battlesuits. The Admiral's gaze becomes distant, as he looks not at the Kessu, but through him.
"...Monolith."
"I beg your pardon?" Drall asks.
The Terran mouths a few words to himself in silence before shaking his head. "No. I... I can't see them being the cause of my species' extinction. If that were the case..."
José lowers his gaze. He stares at the floor for several seconds, then walks toward a nearby tool-chest and plunks his butt down, taking a heavy seat on it. The Terran wearily rubs his facial hair for a moment before looking at his Kraktol companion.
"Lord Drall. You claim not to be a science-focused Rodak. Yet, even so, I imagine you can look toward the universe around us as a source of expanding your consciousness."
The Kraktol leader frowns. "Graugh! I... I am afraid I do not understand, Admiral Rodriguez."
"How many stars are there in the Milky Way?" José asks.
"I do not know," Drall replies. "Many millions, to be sure."
"Three hundred seventy billion, nine hundred and twelve million, six hundred and four thousand, one hundred and thirty-five," José murmurs, without batting an eye. "This number has certainly changed over the last hundred million years, but by the time of my era, the moment before I underwent stasis-sleep and arrived in this era, that was the exact number of stars in the Milky Way."
"The Terrans mapped out our entire galaxy," José explains. "We explored every world, and knew within a certain level of accuracy which stars were likely to go supernova, which ones would form in the future, and so on. But, Lord Drall, the Terrans did not possess the same information regarding the Andromeda Galaxy, nor the other five galaxies we sought to colonize."
José continues. "The Milky Way and Andromeda are merely two galaxies out of eighty within the Local Group. However, compared to the greater universe, we are merely a speck of a speck within the Creator's eye. Our galaxy is small, out of the way, and unimportant."
Drall nods. "Outside of the Local Group, there are untold hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with many more stars and planets than the Milky Way itself."
"That's right," José says, faintly smiling. "Terrankind arose upon a single, minor, ultimately tiny world within this galaxy. We fought countless battles and struggled through the eons, eventually trouncing our enemies and seizing control of the Milky Way. We ascended past the Second Type of stellar civilizations, and rose toward the Third Type, imagining ourselves unstoppable deathgods capable of flattening all who opposed us."
"But..." José adds, "it was when we stepped outside the confines of our galaxy's womb for the first time that we came to a terrifying realization. Much like the enemies we had crushed within the Milky Way's confines, there were many other civilizations outside the Milky Way, each one controlling parts of, or the entirety of galaxies within the Local Cluster. We came to refer to these entities as... Monolith."
Drall's pupil's shrink to slits. "What? Other civilizations? Then... that is to say...?"
"Yes. I believe it is possible that Monolith may have crushed Terrankind. Monolith, of course, is simply a term my people used to describe interstellar civilizations outside of the Milky Way. However, not all members of Monolith are the same. They vary dramatically, with some being warlike civilizations, and others hiveminds. Some colonized for the sake of self-preservation, while others attempted to spread religious or logical dogmas."
"What we found in Andromeda, for example, was a mostly untapped galaxy much larger than the Milky Way, ripe with opportunities for interplanetary exploration and exploitation. However, Terrans were not the only species to get that same idea, and so, we entered war with more than a dozen other members of Monolith. Battle lines were drawn, alliances were forged and broken, and a bright future for our people seemed within reach."
"But perhaps not," José concludes. "We Terrans could not interact with other civilizations outside of the Local Group. Galaxies existed well beyond our reach, and what worried our scientists and military leaders the most was the possibility that somewhere, out there, in the galactic neighborhood... there existed a terrifying species capable of annihilating us with a wave of its hand."
Lord Drall's scales turn ash-grey, giving him a pallid appearance. "Graugh! You are starting to frighten me, Terran. If you are right, then whatever civilization wiped out the Terrans likely still exists. It could destroy the Rodaks, Mallali, Buzor, Avaru, and all the other sentients with ease! After all, we are far from comparable to your species' former glory!"
José nods. "Yes. But, at the same time, I wouldn't wager any credits on Monolith causing Terrankind's extinction. After all, if a species that powerful wiped us out, why wouldn't they have colonized the entire Milky Way afterward? Why kill us due to a mere whim and then let our galaxy go to waste? That seems like a rather flippant use of intergalactic power, don't you think?"
Lord Drall settles down somewhat. "Y-you are right. What use would there be in eliminating all of humanity, only to ignore our galaxy afterward? If these beings were far mightier than humanity, then they would have no reason to kill you in the first place, whereas if they were at a similar power level as you, then Terrankind's extinction would have occurred over a longer period of time."
Slowly, José rises to his feet. He glances around the room at the Kessu, most of them far too engrossed in their work to pay attention to anything he and Drall have to say.
"That's not entirely true, Lord Drall. A highly advanced society might have one reason to kill us."
Drall cocks his head. "And what reason would that be?"
"Simply put, they may have seen us as a threat. Not at that moment, but perhaps, far in the future, we might be capable of threatening their stranglehold on the universe. Such a civilization would surely be... beyond Type III."
The Admiral chuckles. "But... if that's the case, then it doesn't matter. If our enemy is Monolith, and if Monolith is truly the one who rendered us extinct, then there is nothing we can do to stop them. Our enemy is a civilization far more powerful than we can imagine, capable of wiping out a galaxy's inhabitants instantly. Against that sort of enemy, there is no resistance your era's sentients can put up that will change a thing. It would be best to forget about Monolith entirely and live the rest of your lives in ignorant bliss."
José starts walking toward the Planetary Assault Bay's exit doors. Lord Drall follows after him, casting a lingering gaze on the impressive weaponry within the room.
"Admiral Rodriguez. Assuming this 'Monolith' decided to eliminate the Terrans... why would they not exterminate the Rodaks, Mallali, Avaru, and all the other sentients who arose in your place afterward?"
"I cannot say," José replies. "Such a mighty galactic superpower may not give a damn about insignificant Type I and II civilizations. Perhaps even certain Type III civilizations are of no threat to them. But my people? We were conquerors. We sought the advancement of our bodies, our minds, and our species. Given time... perhaps Monolith may have detected us, and decided to squash our ambitions."
A strange light appears in the Admiral's eyes.
"Haha. Wouldn't that be interesting? Killing all of humanity, only for one little Terran to remain? Imagine if little old me could, in some small way, avenge my fallen brethren. That would, indeed, be a delicious twist of fate."
...
The Terran guides Lord Drall around to several other facilities, showing off some of the weapons, armor, and technology they will use against Emperor Yama. Eventually, he and Lord Drall take the vacuum tubes back up to the main decks.
"This operation, it seems relatively safe," Drall mutters. "You said before that Yama does not possess enough power to pierce through your advanced technology and its afforded defenses. Therefore, the only true trouble we'll face is whether or not we'll be able to kill the slippery little demon, or whether he'll escape our clutches."
"That's right," José affirms. "Yama's power makes entrapping him extremely difficult. If he catches wind of our schemes, a single dark fissure leading to Tarus II's surface will enable him to slither away. His body has no mass. He can reshape his appearance and make himself thinner than a human hair, allowing him to slip through any gap in our defenses. If we are not comprehensive in our attack, we'll not capture him, and he'll break free. We cannot allow a single mistake in this operation."
"Do not worry," Drall replies. "If it is competency you desire, my soldiers are the best in the Kraktol Empire. The females serving underneath me were selected from the Thülvik's cousins and adjacent family. Not only are their stocks fine, but their intelligence is high, and their battle experience, refined. I've led many guerilla assaults on Mallali worlds, and as such, have bathed them in blood. They know nothing of fear."
Casually, José glances at Lord Drall. "How might they compare to Megla and Soren then, in terms of combat prowess?"
"Graugh! My daughters are, naturally, fine Kraktol specimens. Soren was never much of a frontline warrior, but Megla is among the mightiest of Kraktol veterans. You need not worry about their battle might!"
Several memories flicker through José's mind, particularly one recent recording of Megla and Soren attempting to fight a mere Class C monster.
The Admiral chuckles. "Haha. That will pose a... problem."
"Pardon?"
"...Nothing. Let's just say, my standards are quite high. I'll require your troops to undergo a few 'tests' to ensure their competency."
Lord Drall scowls for a moment, clearly offended by José's words. "Graugh! With all due respect, my soldiers are elites, each one capable of taking on five Mallali at once! I would appreciate it if you did not insult their competency in battle!"
"We will see," José says, his tone cryptic.
Drall quickly hides his displeasure, silently reminding himself that he must remain on good terms with the Precursor at all costs, even if it means suffering a few demeaning insults. After all, the Precursor has only had Megla at his side as an example of Kraktol battle power. Compared to a whole unit of elite Kraktol warriors fighting in tandem, the Precursor couldn't possibly understand the sheer force the Kraktol Empire can bring to bear.
"Graugh. Hehe, when you see the might of a full Kraktol battle battalion in action, you will surely change your tune, Admiral."
Before José can reply, Drall clarifies, "Naturally, you defeated Orgon's warriors thanks to your superior technology, so if we were to face off against you again, I've no doubt you would crush us. But, I believe that if that technology gap were equalized, the results would surely reverse!"
A flash of mischievousness appears in José's eye. "Oh? If I were to grant your Kraktol warriors the same technology I possess, do you think they could win against me?"
"Graugh! Naturally," Drall says, as the vacuum tube arrives at their destination and swishes open. "You are a walking death god as of now, but had we possessed such mighty weaponry, I believe it goes without saying we would win ten times out of ten!"
A truly evil, vicious grin spreads across José's face. He claps Drall on the back and smiles smugly. "Hah hah hah... well said. I'll hold you to those words. Warriors mustn't let their lips flap loosely, you know."
Drall's high spirits fade, ever so slightly. He picks up on the Terran's confident expression and frowns internally.
Have I, perhaps, overlooked something important?
Next Part
.......................................
Author Note:
If you liked what you just read, please consider subbing to my Patreon! I post patron-exclusive writing posts, with typically one post dedicated to TLP each month, and another to Cryopod. You help me survive long enough to not starve to death, and I give you fun things to read. It's a win-win! Check out some of those posts here and here!
Also consider reading The Cryopod to Hell, the primary story in the Cryoverse! Both TLP and TCTH are part of the Cryoverse, so they're deeply interlinked. You don't wanna miss either of them!
Thank you!
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The Racist Origins and Painful Legacy of Atlanta's Zoning

I'm going to start this post off with a few disclaimers:
  1. A good amount of my information comes from The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein. I tried to find as many direct sources for the relevant topics brought up in the book as I could, but they weren't always readily availible. I highly encourage you to read the book itself if you want more details and his sources.
  2. While I am going to try to use Atlanta-specific information as much as possible, there are some things that I can only provide evidence for in general, not to mention that I have to discuss this with the wider national historical context as well since Atlanta was but one part of a massive racist horror show.
  3. I am by no means claiming to be an expert on this material. It's just what I have the most supporting information already at had for. Again, if you want to read more details from someone who spent much more time researching than I have, pick up a copy of The Color of Law.
  4. I am by no means claiming that fixing zoning will be the end-all-be-all of segregation legacy, nor that it will singularly solve disparities for minority populations compared to white populations within the city. Undoing the sheer scale of bullshit put in place to codify segregation and racial suppression as it manifests today is an undertaking requiring effort on par with something like the Green New Deal (coincidentally, there can be quite a lot of overlap in with a GND, and that's why climate and social justice are so often packaged with various versions of a GND). Fixing the legacy of racist zoning's impacts is just one part to an incredibly complex system, but it's still one worthy of doing. Gotta start somewhere, right?
Alright, on to the main content... Buckle up kiddos, we're going for a fuckin ride!

Why the Fuck are you Talking About Zoning Right Now‽

The country is, to use an incredible amount of understatement, in a bit of a pickle right now. We're in the midst of a global pandemic that's surging, and resurging within our borders. We're reeling at a seemingly never ending parade of tragedy and failure of composure from the very police forces sworn to protect us. We're dealing with an ever escalating push back and response from a federal government that is attempting to label protesters as terrorists. We've had impeachments, assassinations of foreign political operatives, the emboldenment of out-and-loud racists, foreign bounties on our military, historic Supreme Court decisions, and record stock market crashes. We're staring down the barrel of a depression, and there's a looming climate catastrophe that's been burning in the background of all of this.
So why, in the middle of all of this, am I bringing up zoning of all things? How could that possibly be relevant to any of this?
Well... as it turns out... quite a bit. See, zoning is one of those core functions of government, generally on the local level but not always, that just kinda exists. It's a long, boring, complicated mess of legal code that just doesn't come up all that often in our every day discussions (unless you're a nerd like me who keeps trying to shove it into every conversation... ahem...).
No matter how innocuous or intangible or boring zoning may feel, though, it actually has massive ramifications for how our build environment is shaped. That is literally its job, after all: codifying what is and isn't allowed to be built, where, and how. That build environment then has massive ramifications on a whole pile of social, economic, and environmental issues.
A good zoning code balances public desires for safety, health, and environmental protections, while also helping to ensure various amenities are provided, ideally outweighing any downsides of development with benefits to the community at large. Unfortunately, most zoning systems fail at this balance, often focusing on the wrong components as perceived negatives when they're actually benefits, while codifying build requirements that actively make things worse for the communities around them. A bad zoning code can make housing more expensive, make it harder to meet climate and environmental goals, make the general population more sickly, impede the ability of persons to generate generational wealth, and horrendously damage the tax base, making it harder to fund public projects.
As it turns out, most of these issues trace back to a few core ideas of the initial model zoning systems, and were originally put in as features of the codes. The intent at the time was mainly focused on creating a few specific negative outcomes, with many of the others having taken decades to fully manifest and be recognized. Yet, the original structure of the codes remain, bureaucratic momentum and an incomplete understanding of justice keeping them in place, dragging out the problems for years and years and years.
So what were those features, and what specific negative outcomes were they trying to achieve?

Setting the Stage for Segregation

First, we have to step back, and take a bit of a historical run up to provide proper context.
In 1877, Reconstruction ended. Federal troops, who had defeated the Confederacy, packed up and left the south after 12 years of postbellum occupation (14 if you include overlap years of occupation before the war's end). Reconstruction, though certainly not perfect, had been a time of relative empowerment for black Americans. Backed by federal troops, integration and political power was actually in reach. It wasn't 40-acres and a mule, but it was an incredible leap forward as the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were enforced in about as blunt a way as possible: at the muzzle of a rifle. That all came to a painful and tragic end with the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had promised southern Democrats the end of occupation in exchange for electoral support.
Almost immediately, black Americans suffered a bloody, violent resurgence of oppression, with segregation becoming standard practice, and enforced both at the hands of local law enforcement and mobs of white Americans. Worse yet, as Jim Crow laws and their efforts anchored themselves across the south, previously diverse and inclusive (relatively speaking) parts of the country began to follow suit. All over, towns and cities undertook the effort of removing, or isolating their black populations, using similar tactics learned from the southern states.
Like a cancer, segregation spread far and wide, becoming more and more recognized and acceptable. By 1913, freshly elected president Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet approved the implementation of segregation in federal offices, marking about as drastic a change in federal priority as you could take over the course of three and a half decades.
It is in this atmosphere of invigorated racist bullshit that zoning rises within the policy consciousness.

The Original Sin of Zoning

As a concept, zoning ordinances within the U.S. were rather new, with the 1908 Los Angeles municipal zoning ordinances being the first of their kind. The LA laws were a formalizing of existing nuisance laws, meant to create separations of land use and buffers between the harmful effects of industries and residences. Though specific business classifications (such as unnecessary prohibition of laundries, which were predominantly owned by Chinese immigrants at the time, in certain areas) did come with racial issues, they were quite tame by the standards of the time, as we're about to see.
Prior to the rise of zoning as a popular government effort, it was fairly rare to see actual legal code dedicated towards segregation, instead focusing efforts on government-endorsed vigilantism and governments not enforcing equality laws already in place. This began to change, however. In 1910, a few years before the federal government would make official its office segregation, and two years after the LA zoning system was established, Baltimore became the first city in the nation, (as stated by the New York Times), to create an explicit law mandating the segregation of city areas. The city ordinance dictated that blacks could not buy homes on blocks where whites were the majority, and vice versa. The law was... horribly broken, and judges had to grapple with the complex, integrated reality of the city, trying to adjudicate who could and couldn't live where, or buy property where, creating an incredible mess of legal issues across the city.
The practical problems with the law did not stop other cities from copying the effort, though. Invigorated by Baltimore's example, Birmingham, Dade County (Miami), Charleston, Dallas, Louisville, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Richmond, St. Louis, and others all made their own version of racial segregaition mandates within landuse. Amungst this list was, in fact, the City of Atlanta, whose ordinance virtually copied the Baltimore law, with the added provision that a person of one color occupying a house in a mixed block could object to one of another color moving next door.
Unlike the initial LA zoning laws, the systems put in place following Baltimore's example were specifically racially focused, with more familiar zoning laws taking shape in the years to come. These initial racist laws would persist until the 1917 Supreme Court decision that such laws were unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley. However... the decision was based around the freedom of individuals to buy and sell property to whomever they wished, rather than a denunciation of segregation within law itself. Many cities simply ignored the Supreme Court ruling, and moved ahead with their segregationist laws, while others claimed that slight variations in the ordinances, such as the difference between block level and larger zoning styles, meant they didn't have to follow the ruling.
The City of Atlanta was, once again, one of these cities. In The Atlanta Zone Plan: Report Outlining a Tentative Zone Plan for Atlanta (1922), written by Robert H. Whitten as a consultant for the the City Planning Commission, explicit residential districts were outlined by racial makeup, with R1 as "white residence district", R2 as "colored residence district", and R3 as "undetermined race district". It was nice enough to allow servants' quarters remain open to either race. The plan justifies this by saying:
the above race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race.
Additionally, Whitten defended his zoning plan in professional publications by saying that "[e]stablishing colored residence districts has removed one of the most potent causes of race conflict." This, he added, was "a sufficient justification for race zoning.... A reasonable segregation is normal, inevitable and desirable."
Here is a map of the proposed zoning system within the then city limits. You can get an idea of just how limited housing areas for blacks were, just how much of the city was to be dedicated to single family housing compared to apartments, and how relegated commercial uses would be. Incidentally enough, this is where the City of Atlanta begins to see a zoning code similar to modern codes. We'll get to that in a moment. For now, note how closely this map matches some of the racial demographics of the city today, oh, and (just coincidentally I'm sure) how the largest 'Colored District' in the city was to be essentially bordered on three sides by industrial areas. Other zoning maps from the same time would go further with encroaching industrial zones, limiting colored areas, and limiting apartment areas.
Can I just take a moment to say how much I fucking love the Atlanta History Center and its archives? Okay, moving on.
At the same time that Atlanta was ignoring its constitutional duty to not segregate its people, the federal government was stepping into the zoning game. In 1921, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover organized an Advisory Committee on Zoning to develop a manual explaining why every municipality should develop a zoning ordinance, with an eventual goal of developing model legislation that could be easily adopted. This committee had such members as Frederick Law Olmsted, who argued in 1918 that not only were certain housing types "coincident with racial divisions", and, since it was undesirable to "force the mingling of people who are not yet ready to mingle", great care should be take not to mix housing types, and Irving B. Hiett, who was the president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, an organization who would produce a code of realtor ethics stating that "A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood... members of any race or nationality... detrimental to property values" just a few years later. By 1922, the committee had developed A Zoning Primer, which argued that zoning was required to preserve property values, and which was widely distributed across the country. The policies would push out wide and far across the nation, following the federal government's example.

Pretending as if Racist Plans Aren't

In 1924, the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the City of Atlanta zoning code due to its racial components. Despite this, the underlying plan and map developed with segregation in mind, would act as the basis for future plans. Indeed, there are many overlaps with the 1922 plan, and even zoning designations today.
Keep Whitten's and the Zoning Commission's mentalities concerning the importance of racial segregation when looking back through the rest of the initial Atlanta zoning proposal. It provides leading anecdotes (without apparent supporting evidence beyond some photographs that don't really seem to match the narrative) of the dangers of mixing small stores, and low-rise multi-family housing with lower densities, primarily focusing on the perceived loss of value of adjacent properties, while framing the persons who make such developments as greedy speculators only out for a quick buck (rather than look at the economic benefit to the store owner, the new access to the store that surrounding areas get, and the housing relief the apartment dwellers experience).
Still without apparent evidence, the proposal makes sweeping, generalized statements about the need to preserve neighborhoods' character, and preserve property values. It proposes to do this by dividing the city into use, height, area, and race categories, with each mixing with the others to dictate specific allowances. The racial categories were removed, yet the remainder of the plan's suggestions would persist.
Even in 1917 it was understood that density was a major component of affordability. Special City Plan Adviser for the City Plan Commission of Cleveland Ohio Robert H. Whitten's essay The Zoning of Residence Sections, where Olmsted argued the merits of preventing the mixing of people and their racially pre-dis-positioned housing preferences, outright states:
We want to distribute the population as much as practicable, but at the same time we do not wish to force people who for business or other reasons need to live close to the central business sections either to pay very high rents or to go to much less convenient locations. As a city reaches metropolitan size, the demand for housing space near the central area becomes so great that the only way to make that location available to any but the wealthy is to permit a more intensive utilization of the land. Were it not for the ability to pile one dwelling on top of another, rents would be prohibitive in these central locations for the great mass of the people.
Even while expounding on the virtues of low-density housing, Whitten takes effort to acknowledge the economic need for multi-family housing to maintain affordability. Yeah, it's done in a condescending way where he can only imagine a case where being adjacent to the central business district is a legitimate reason for housing density, but he at least still accepts it as reality.
Yet, dwelling house districts, from which apartment houses would be excluded, were to include the larger portion of the area of Atlanta, and were to primarily be made up of the largest area class, requiring at least 5000 sqft per family of lot area. The code outright targets 2-3 story buildings with families living over a store (generally which they would operate) as being undesirable, and thus is explicitly designed to prevent such outcomes. All of these things drove up the per-house price, requiring a family to pay for a significant amount of land, as well as an individual house, in the majority of the city's residential area. In the maps I linked above, you can see just how few areas were allowed to have apartments compared to the wider single-family zones.
The federal zoning primer includes similar sentiments, telling an anecdote of how an apartment house built next to a home would destroy values by becoming 'a giant airless hive, housing human beings like crowded bees', as well as lumping 'sporadic stores' in with 'factories or junk yards' as a contributing factor of blight within a residential neighborhood.
It's important to note that none of these codes tried to make improvements to living conditions through legislation like building codes, which could have helped prevent the squalor conditions that were so readily associated with apartments, and which had been present in the U.S. since at least 1859, in Baltimore, choosing instead to essentially quarantine apartments to prevent their spread into single family areas.
As I laid out above, these are all value judgements made by people who viewed the mixing of races as something to avoid, as something that itself would contribute to a loss of property values (rather than recognize that self-fulfilling white panic, was the actual source of value drop, and that the constrained black populations were willing to pay higher prices because there were so few homes they could even get into, actually raising prices), and even made racial connections to types of housing to keep separated. But, because of the insistence of the courts, their policies were forced to take on an air of race neutrality. Thus, explicit race-based zoning was stripped from the codes, and the far more familiar forms of space and use based zoning were established. Those forms just so happen to harshly restrict the kinds of housing openly accepted as being affordable to the masses, and, in particular, the demographics of people who were least economically able to choose elsewhere.
As the federal zoning primer said: Zoning Is Legal
This is not to say that exclusionary zoning was not without its legal challenges, of course. In the 1926 Supreme Court case of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365, the court upheld the constitutionality of exclusionary zoning, using as part of its opinion the argument that "very often the apartment house is a mere parasite", and that, if allowed to mix with single-family houses, "come very near to being nuisances". The case was brought to the Supreme Court as an appeal to a U.S. District Court of Ohio ruling against the constitutionality of exclusionary zoning, stating that "the blighting of property values and the congesting of the population, whenever the colored or certain foreign races invade a residential section, are so well known as to be within the judicial cognizance." Essentially, while the Supreme Court decided that exclusionary zoning was based on inherit issues with mixing building types (even though 1) the issues aren't inherit, and 2) the exclusion argument is based on a slippery slope fallacy), the District Court had (correctly) identified an underlying racial motivation for preventing mixing.

When the Pretending Becomes More Overt

Were all else equal, we might be able to ignore the initial racial components of exclusionary zoning, and merely call the resulting codes classist (the reality is that racism and classism were/are tightly intertwined, with each giving perceived justification to the other), but things weren't equal. The median household income for a black family in 1947 (the earliest year I could actually find data) was just 51% of a white household (it was only up to ~63% in 2018). Even though modern discussion around apartments tends to bemoan the 'luxury' branding, and how accurate it may or may not be, the hard reality is that living in an apartment is cheaper than buying a house, at least in the immediate. For lower income people, it's pretty much the only option. For poor, and thus disproportionately black, people, the primary need for housing affordability was in the form of apartment buildings and residential density, even if that was only desired as a stepping stone. But that's not what the zoning system provided.
Overwhelmingly, the city's land was designated for single family homes. Large lots, and individual homes drive up the per-unit costs of housing, locking poorer people out of being able to buy into neighborhoods. Worse yet would be the zoning systems of suburban and smaller towns, which would eliminate the ability to build apartments all together, essentially locking lower income, and thus disproportionately black, persons from being able to relocate there at all. This lead to crowding in the limited apartments, and, since the building codes hadn't been adequately updated to actually prevent it, the very slum conditions used as a justification for preventing apartments in the first place became self-fulfilling.
Of course, not all black people were so poor that they couldn't afford to buy a single-family home, and quite a few did look to leave the limited availability of apartments. They were not met well, and indeed, in the years following the installation of exclusionary zoning systems, the federal government would essentially codify black exclusion from single-family neighborhoods, with cities clinging to the federal policies as justification for blocking black and integrated housing.
Property (particularly home) mortgages used to be very, very different than how we think of them today, which locked many people out of the ability to get them. High-interest rates, huge down-payments, interest-only payments, and short (5-7 year) payback periods. These terms kept middle and low class persons (of all races) from being able to afford to buy property. As part of the New Deal, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation was established. The loan system was restructured to be closer to the lower rates, lower down-payments, overall payment, and long-term periods we're more familiar with today. Additionally, many existing mortgages were bought and restructured to save property owners from foreclosure.
In the process of this, though, HOLC wanted an inventory of risk across the nation, so it could manage these new loan terms without crippling itself financially. This is where the kinda okay policy stopped. The risk inventory was carried out by local real estate agencies, who had national ethics codes and local policies for their agents to explicitly consider race when evaluating risk. So much so that they were actually under direction to maintain community segregation when otherwise selling properties. The inventory took the form of color-coded maps, where red sections on the map represented high-risk (don't loan people money / bail them out here). Many, many of these red areas were based on racial prejudice, with even wealthy / middle class integrated or black communities being rated far worse than equivalent income white areas.
Here is a database of maps across the U.S., overlaid against modern areas. Here's a fun game: compare the Redlining Map for Atlanta to the initial racial zoning map! No it's not a 1-1 match, but it gets awfully close, particularly if you start to include initially designated areas for apartment buildings.
This entire mess was made even worse with the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority, which was intended to insure private bank loans to first-time home buyers. Even though the FHA had its own auditing system separate from the HOLC, it still had direct segregation and whites-only policies. Additionally the FHA very specifically did not insure mortgages within urban centers. This meant that both HOLC and FHA services were denied to nearly the same areas: black or integrated neighborhoods, most often in urban centers.
The FHA justified its racial rules by claiming that black people ruined property values. This was actually backwards, as the limited options available to black people meant that black and integrated properties were in high demand, and thus could be sold at a much higher price. What did happen, though, was 'block-busting'. So, because the FHA (and other organizations) continuously sold the idea that black people ruined property values, as well as the base-level racism, this left white neighborhoods vulnerable to manipulation. Speculators would buy up properties in blocks on the border of black / integrated and white areas, and then rent / sell them to black people. These speculators would also hire black people to walk around white neighborhoods asking about home sales, and looking like they lived there. Then the speculators would go around warning white property owners that their housing values would tank with all the black people moving in, and make stupidly low offers, buying out white properties well below the actual value (this is where the FHA was getting its data). Then the speculators would turn around and, because there were so few other options, sell the same properties above their actual value to black people at bad rates. This drove up costs for black people who otherwise just wanted a home, and the high prices contributed to perpetuating poverty and again creating self-fulfilling slum conditions.
Many cities, private lenders, and other government agencies (like Veterans Affairs) anchored their lending and development approval processes on the FHA backing of home loans, which meant that blacks were barred from even the opportunity to really leave parts of the city within which they lived.
It's worth reiterating that the HOLC and FHA policies were targeted directly at owning private homes, working off of a national policy that private homes were less communist than apartments. No, I'm not kidding. The U.S. Department of Labor distributed pamphlets entitled We Own Our Own Home to schoolchildren stating that it was a "patriotic duty" to cease renting, and to buy a house. Millions of posters were printed, and hung in factories and other businesses, while newspaper ads were run throughout the country. This national housing direction propped up single-family residences, and the infrastructure to support them, while leaving pretty much everything else to languish.
Then there were the racial covenants, where individual properties were made unavailable to black people by deed restrictions, and which were often implimented on neighborhood scales.
Then there was the New-Deal, where the Civilian Conservation Corps abided by local segregation policies for its camps and worker housing, further entrenching local segregation.
Then there was the issue of cities targeting black and low-income areas overwhelmingly with zoning variances for industry and toxic waste disposal sites, exposing those persons to much higher quantities of toxins and pollutants.
Then there was public housing which eliminated mixed-income tenants, was often explicitly segregated, often resisted adding housing for black people, and, when they did add housing open to blacks, located overwhelmingly in already black and poor neighborhoods, effectively concentrating poverty and increasing segregation.
Then there were Interstate Highways, which were explicitly used for 'slum clearing' in many cities (including defining slum based on racial makeup rather than socioeconomic status of the persons living there), which were massive transportation subsidies to the very same segregated low-density suburbs already built with federal loan backing while public transportation languished, and which were actually used as physical barriers between parts of the city.
Frankly, the list kinda just keeps going, and so I'm not going to try and fit it all. Seriously, go read the Color of Law for more explicit details. My main point with all of these is that, when you combine the initial versions of the zoning codes, the opinions of the people who made them, and the wider reactions and policies that came after the codes proved not to 100% segregate black people from white people, it becomes clear that a major component of the zoning system was established not actually to prevent health or value issues, but rather to maintain the separation of races.

That was a lot of words...

Right, so here's the summary:
  1. After a decade of relative progress, the federal government abandons Reconstruction
  2. Almost immediately, communities, including previously inclusive ones, begin to force their black populations out in a renewed effort of segregation
  3. At first this is done outside of the law, but eventually cities get the idea to literally codify segregation through ordinances
  4. That codified segregation was struck down in the Supreme Court, so cities are forced to find a proxy method of enforcing segregation
  5. Cities used the separating of mixed-use developments and multi-family apartment buildings to create racial segregation through the proxy of economic segregation
  6. When this doesn't work 100%, the federal government established home mortgage support systems that directly excluded black people, preventing them from buying into single-family neighborhoods even if they could afford it
  7. There was a lot of other shit that happened to basically show that zoning was not the unbiased system it was pretending to be

Persistence of bad policy

Even though many of the explicitly racist policies have been removed or overturned, and what progress there has been in raising the wealth of black persons has helped with some racial mixing, it's clear that the proxy methods for discrimination persist to this day, with visible segregaition outcomes. Even when we do see integration, it is often in the form of wealthy white people moving into the limited new developments allowed in previously majority black areas (AKA 'Gentrification').
Today, Atlanta is still overwhelmingly zoned for low-density, single-family residential, even if some of those zones allow up to Accessory Dwelling Units (such density, much urban). Lot sizes in much of the city are still mandated to be quite large, and height planes still overly limit the number of stories buildings can be. What apartment buildings are allowed are constrained by cumbersome parking requirements (both codified and required by private lenders), and property setbacks. Mixed uses are often restrained on individual properties, requiring a specific zoning designation to be allowed. Even the city's plan for handling future growth still relegates nearly 75% of the area to relatively low-density housing as 'conservation' areas.
Metro-wide, not nearly as many homes are being built as were pre-recession. While home prices are increasing back to pre-recessionary levels, housing inventory in metro Atlanta is constrained – partially due to a lag in residential construction. Prior to the recession, it was not uncommon for residential building permits to exceed 5,000 per month (in some cases, reaching over 7,000). After May 2007, the region experienced a steep decline in residential building permits, which persisted into early 2012, when the region began seeing modest increases. Though residential permits have trended upward since 2012, they have yet to reach pre-recessional levels, hovering instead between 2,000 and 3,000 permits per month. Because of this, all counties in metro Atlanta are experiencing the a decline in housing inventory. One of the main summary points of that report was: "Home prices rising significantly – faster than wages – due in large part to dwindling supply" ARC Regional Snapshot: Affordable Housing While the metro itself has been pretty easy to build new housing within (atleast from 2000 to 2015) compared to other metros, the parts of the city and close-in suburbs tend to be the hardest within which to add new supplly (of the 10 hardest zipcodes to build, the top 3 were partially in the city, and another three were in or partly in the city).
Indeed, inflation-adjusted housing prices are rising quite quickly in the Atlanta Metro, even including months during this pandemic. Prices are looking to pass pre-2008 peak in 2023ish. Only, this time, vacancy rates for both renters and homeowners have been nearly at all-time lows for the metro (Source: Census Bureau). Many of the most intense price increases happening within the core city.
At the same time, affordable housing initiatives are proving to be far too few to handle the rising costs, with recent 'Inclusionary Zoning' rules, as well as the wider public housing program failing to close the need. We're talking programs considering themselves successful at a few thousand units, when the demand for affordable housing (let alone total housing) is in the hundreds of thousands.
The simple reality is that the racism of our past is leading to an over-all affordability crisis today. While, as usual, the hardest hit are African Americans, this affordability crisis has far reaching impacts across the demographic spectrum, including poor whites, and, particularly, poor Latino populations as well, locking out a wide variety of people who would otherwise want to live in the kinds of dense, walkable, urban areas the City of Atlanta uniquely offers within the metro.
Not only that, but the very types of low-density developments so widely codified across the city and nation do not generate enough economic activity to actually pay for the infrastructure needed to support them, propped up by piles of hidden subsidies, all resulting in cities being effectively bankrupt. (Here's another real-world example) Even some of the most 'wealthy' of towns are having to seriously reconsider their historic development patterns to close out financial gaps. In Atlanta, this leads to things like a massive backlog of maintenance issues that even recent bonds and tax increases can't fully handle. Again, policies of a racist past are hurting everyone today. Undoing those policies, and transitioning back to tried-and-true development styles would greatly help fix financial issues.
Additionally, as we work to overcome challenges with climate as a whole, we need to be seriously looking at our build environments, and just how much low-density development contributes to emissions compared to higher-density parts of the metro, and even the city itself. At the same time, moving away from cars would help reduce respiratory issues for poor and minority persons who are disproportionately affected by road-pollution, and generally moving to cleaner industries while cleaning up legacy pollution sites can help undo the years of inequality through industrial exposure..

Okay, so what do we do?

We need to have a hard discussion about zoning policies: their origins, their purposes, and their effects. We need to be prepared to recognize when policies were built on hate, and where they have lead to harm, just as much as we need to be ready to recognize that not every aspect of the zoning system is bad. We need to be willing to change, and be proactive about fixing the failings of previous generations. Ideally for the net benefit of all of us.
As part of this discussion, though, we are going to have to really, truly consider what 'character' of this city are valuable. What are tangible goals, what are the potential negative outcomes, and what can be done to mitigate those outcomes, ideally while actually adding to the 'character' of the city. Again, we needs to be willing to change here. Not everything wrapped under the broad umbrella of 'character' is actually worth keeping, particularly given how I could probably copy and paste some of the 'neighborhood character' arguments from the initial racial zoning codes into places like NextDoor or Facebook or even here on Reddit without anyone suspecting they are nearly 100 years old.

The End!

Holy shit! You made it to the end! Thanks for putting up with so, so many words... Here's a video of a little girl way too excited to get on a train as a reward.
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next hazardous waste disposal near me video

Hazardous Waste Disposal Permanent Program Opens. The Saint Louis County Department of Health is pleased to announce that the first permanent household hazardous waste collection facility is now open. The permanent program is regional and residents from St. Louis County, There are year-round disposal options for some common household hazardous wastes. Store others until the next collection event. Acids – Hold for a HHW event. Acetone – Hold for a HHW event. Ammunition – Call the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) at (859) 219-4500.. Antifreeze – Dilute 2 parts water to 1 part antifreeze. Residents connected to the city sanitary sewer system This ABOP and PaintCare facility provides residents of Riverside County a FREE and environmentally safe way to properly dispose or recycle the most common types of hazardous household waste as listed below. Household Hazardous Waste drop off makes it very easy to get all that waste out of your garage or home responsibly. Keep a tub with items that qualify as household hazardous waste, make sure it is out of reach of any small children, then take it to the next Household hazardous waste drop off near you. Hazardous Waste Drop Off Near Me. If the Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) Collection Events and Drop-off Programs by County *IMPORTANT Consumer Notice: Before taking any hazardous wastes to Collection points or drop-off locations, please contact the program representative first to learn what types of materials will be accepted, times and days of operation, and other program details. Household Hazardous Material disposal Options. The Department of Environmental Services, Recycling Office holds semi-annual collection days in the spring and fall. For more information, please contact the Recycling Office at 225-389-5194 or email us. 2020 Household Hazardous Material Collection Days. Fall 2020. Date: Saturday, October 17, 2020 Note: During our 2nd Saturday of the month Household Hazardous Waste collection events (March-October) Secure e-cycle will be accepting electronic waste at their facility located near the Household Hazardous Waste facility at: 3052 S. 24th St. in Kansas City, Kansas 66106. Charges apply for TVs, computer monitors, and towers: TVs under 31" ($25 Household Hazardous Waste Collection Program. Wayne County's Department of Public Services hosts four Household Hazardous Waste Collections per year for County residents. The collections are designed to accept unwanted household chemicals for proper disposal and electronics for recycling from residents. (Updated 1/7/2021) Given the current and anticipated surges of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, Household Hazardous and Electronic Waste (HHW/E-Waste) collection events will be temporarily suspended, beginning January 16, 2021.The suspension is in support of Public Health orders, frontline workers, and to encourage residents to remain home given the gravity of our current situation. Household hazardous waste should NOT be placed in your green or blue containers. The City of Lakeland hosts an annual Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day. For more information about this event, please call the Solid Waste Office at (863) 834-8773.

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