#Atom-Energie

[decolonize-the-everything]

Why are they mining so much right now?

Cobalt has become the center of a major upsurge in mining in Congo, and the rapid acceleration of cobalt extraction in the region since 2013 has brought hundreds of thousands of people into intimate contact with a powerful melange of toxic metals. The frantic pace of cobalt extraction in Katanga bears close resemblance to another period of rapid exploitation of Congolese mineral resources: During the last few years of World War II, the U.S. government sourced the majority of the uranium necessary to develop the first atomic weapons from a single Congolese mine, named Shinkolobwe. The largely forgotten story of those miners, and the devastating health and ecological impacts uranium production had on Congo, looms over the country now as cobalt mining accelerates to feed the renewable energy boom—with little to no protections for workers involved in the trade.

The city of Kolwezi, which is 300 km (186 miles) northwest of Lubumbashi and 180 km from the now-abandoned Shinkolobwe mine, sits on top of nearly half of the available cobalt in the world. The scope of the contemporary scramble for that metal in Katanga has totally transformed the region. Enormous open-pit mines worked by tens of thousands of miners form vast craters in the landscape and are slowly erasing the city itself.

[...]Much of the cobalt in Congo is mined by hand: Workers scour the surface level seams with picks, shovels, and lengths of rebar, sometimes tunneling by hand 60 feet or more into the earth in pursuit of a vein of ore. This is referred to as artisanal mining, as opposed to the industrial mining carried out by large firms. The thousands of artisanal miners who work at the edges of the formal mines run by big industrial concerns make up 90 percent of the nation’s mining workforce and produce 30 percent of its metals. Artisanal mining is not as efficient as larger-scale industrial mining, but since the miners produce good-quality ore with zero investment in tools, infrastructure, or safety, the ore they sell to buyers is as cheap as it gets. Forced and child labor in the supply chain is not uncommon here, thanks in part to a significant lack of controls and regulations on artisanal mining from the government.

[...]When later atomic research found that uranium’s unstable nucleus could be used to make a powerful bomb, the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project began searching for a reliable source of uranium. They found it through Union Minière, which sold the United States the first 1,000 tons it needed to get the bomb effort off the ground.

The Manhattan Project sent agents of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, to Congo from 1943 to 1945 to supervise the reopening of the mine and the extraction of Shinkolobwe’s ore—and to make sure none of it fell into the hands of the Axis powers. Every piece of rock that emerged from the mine for almost two decades was purchased by the Manhattan Project and its successors in the Atomic Energy Commission, until the mine was closed by the Belgian authorities on the eve of Congolese independence in 1960. After that, the colonial mining enterprise Union Minière became the national minerals conglomerate Gécamines, which retained much of the original structure and staff.

[...]Dr. Lubaba showed me the small battery-operated Geiger counters that he uses in the field to measure radioactivity. He had begun the process of trying to find and interview the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners, but he explained that tracing the health consequences of working in that specific mine would be difficult: Many long-established villages in the area have been demolished and cast apart as cobalt extraction has torn through the landscape. His initial inquiries suggested that at least some of the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners had been drawn into the maelstrom of digging in the region around Kolwezi.

In her book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, historian Gabrielle Hecht recounts the U.S. Public Health Service’s efforts to investigate the effects of uranium exposure on people who worked closely with the metal and the ore that bore it. In 1956, a team of medical researchers from the PHS paid a visit to Shinkolobwe while the mine was still producing more than half of the uranium used in America’s Cold War missile programs. Most of their questions went unanswered, however, as Shinkolobwe’s operators had few official records to share and stopped responding to communications as soon as the researchers left.

[...]“Don’t ever use that word in anybody’s presence. Not ever!” Williams quotes OSS agent Wilbur Hogue snapping at a subordinate who had said the mine’s name in a café in Congo’s capital. “There’s something in that mine that both the United States and Germany want more than anything else in the world. I don’t know what it’s for. We’re not supposed to know.”

[bacchuschucklefuck]

space sweepers but they're delivery people and are at no point on screen through the entire movie

[sylvielauffeydottir]

i love seeing oppenheimer discourse on this website revolving around how the movie is going to ‘glorify the atomic bomb’ or ‘celebrate war writ large’ bc it honestly makes me think people know literally nothing about who oppenheimer was, what he came to believe, or what happened to him. but go off i guess

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

We have done better. We are better.

[urplepurplegurgleturgle]

bad future storyboards

[nemfrog]

Soviet postage stamp commemorating the Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. 1958.

Science History Institute

[honeytonedhottie]

getting things done fr౨ৎ₊ ⊹🫧

im going to use an example from the book "atomic habits" by james clear, the book was so amazing and i highly recommend it <3

so there was a photography teacher and he separated his class into two groups. group quality vs group quantity. the instructions were that group quality had to produce one perfect photo, and group quantity had to produce 100 photos. at the end of the term, the best photos were produced by the QUANTITY group.

the best photos were from the quantity group bcuz the students were busy taking photos, experimenting and learning from their mistakes so in the process of producing 100 photos they honed their skills.

however the quality group only sat around and speculated about perfection, they had little to show for their efforts and only produced a mediocre photo.

what can we learn from this౨ৎ₊ ⊹🫧

there is a difference between MOTION and ACTION. when ur in motion ur planning/strategizing and learning, although those things are good thats NOT what produces a result. ACTION will produce a result.

we can apply this knowledge in manifesting, its not enough to CONSUME loa content, consume loa content from my blog or youtube or anywhere else. the knowledge that could CHANGE UR LIFE is useless unless u apply it. although its good to learn more about the law, you'll only get an outcome thru application.

when preparation becomes procrastination, that means something must change. you dont wanna just be planning, u wanna be practicing.

[retropopcult]

A young woman sticks her head out the window of a bus which had just arrived in Paducah, Kentucky. She was posing for LIFE magazine photographer Ralph Crane for a 1952 story on the town, which had been dubbed "The Atomic City": in 1950, the US government selected Paducah as the site for a large uranium enrichment facility which grew the town considerably during the Cold War.

[msfcatlover]

So here's the thing with the Narrator in my version of the Slay the Monster AU... he's still trying to kill death, he just thinks of death differently.

Now a lot of this is just my own philosophy, but I personally never thought of death as a form of change before playing StP. Death was stopping. Death was stillness. Death was an ending, and there's Nothing after. Change is when you go from living to dead, but being dead? That's an unchanging eternity. Your corpse'll change, sure, but that's not you anymore ("You are not your body.")

The Narrator wants a world without death. Without stillness, without silence, without rest. You might change from living to dead, but your heart will not stop beating, your nerves will not stop firing, and you will change right back from dead to living the instant after. You cannot properly die if nothing can stay dead.

Ongoing, ever-changing, vibrant, thrumming, thriving life.

So He splits the divine heart of reality. He sculpts Change into a heaving, beating cage for Stillness. But Stillness is too great a concept for anything short of divinity to ever truly kill, and the very nature of Change means Stillness cannot be imprisoned forever; sooner or later, Change will shift and leave an opening for Stillness to escape.

He does His best, though. He shatters Stillness and tucks each fragment away in a different chamber of the cage, trying to keep them separate. And He crafts a living, breathing avatar of Change to go kill it, one shard at a time.

Of course, He'll have to be careful about it. Change is a powerful thing, after all. This reality is made of her, and now she can think. Stillness is too broken not to be affected if Change decides it's something else.

A placid mirror will always reflect back whatever you happen to see in it.

[nobrashfestivity]

General Dynamics Corporation Erik Nitsche Atoms for peace Poster 1955 Poster for the Atomic Energy Conference, Geneva, 1955, by General Dynamics Corporation.

[humanoidhistory]

Gundremmingen Nuclear Power Plant, Germany.

(Deutsche Fotothek)

[noosphe-re]

Seth J. Putterman, Sonoluminescence: Sound into Light, Scientific American Magazine Vol. 272 No. 2 (February 1995), p. 46

[pinetreevillain]

Listened to the Don and Tim playlist on a whim and uh—

Why

I am a master of comedy

[drawfee-quot3s]

it's the the lil kiddos toxic waste clean up crew! it comes with real hazmat suits! real toxic waste containment units! and a barrel of fun play toxic waste! that is real!

- ralph

[scipunk]

Oppenheimer (2023)

[iguessitsjustme]

Me to Atom when he sat beside the trash can instead of getting in it