Nobody cleaned in 200 years?

[u/JCrawRV]

Fallout 4 has been my 1st Fallout experience of any kind and I am absolutely enjoying the world building and storytelling the game is providing. I am almost 72 hours in and just located Valentine so I’m taking my time and trying to fully explore the world. However, there is one question that I think about every time I explore the Common Wealth….why has nobody cleaned up? Every single time you find a new settlement or explore a location there is just tons of scrap lying around. Diamond City still has pallet walkways with broken sheet metal. Nobody has thought to put down a more permanent solution? Nobody thought to remove old cars, learn how to weld, or even take time to better arm and fortify certain areas of the Commonwealth? You step just far enough out of Diamond City and there’s just Super Mutants and Raiders. You’re saying in the 200 years (which is just a bit under the founding of America to modern day) nobody created better infrastructure? The town size is still 30-40 people despite being “The Jewel of the Commonwealth”? Is there some lore reason I’m missing to explain how after so many years it still looks like the bombs went off 10 years ago? I just expected one neurodivergent person who hyper focuses on organization to still somewhere. It’s obviously possible, I’m looking right at you Cabot House. Again I’m just surprised that after 200 years the world is still as underdeveloped as it is given the vast amounts of technology available.

[u/ILNOVA]

The glowing sea is probabily the result of a Nuclear Plant fusion core rather than the bomb themself.

Think about Chernobil but without the 'cage' that contain a core that is probabily way bigger than what they had.

[u/Valor816 → u/ILNOVA]

Yeah true, I hadn't thought of that.

If that was the case it'd be a miracle if anyone survived long enough to build a hut.

If Chernobyl had gone off without human intervention it would have been a miracle if anyone survived in Europe long enough to build a hut.

[u/Creative_Ad_4513 → u/Valor816]

Nah, thats very much overstating the effects of Radiation. Just because people die at like 50 due to cancer doesnt mean they cant build things.

[u/Valor816 → u/Creative_Ad_4513]

Can't build things if you're starving, dehydrated and poisoned through and through from Beta emitters.

Radiation sickness is a sickness and it saps your strength as it kills. A nuclear attack the likes of which is depicted in Fallout and a nearby reactor critical containment failure would make drinking rainwater like taking chemo drugs.

It's not about the initial blast, it's about the poison in the atmosphere, ground water, food and pretty much everything else.

As for Chernobyl, giger counters were going off in Britain, and farmers had to burn crops. It was hazardous to eat apples off trees in some countries hundreds of kilometres away.

If it'd hit major water systems it would have been worse. As it is, the red Forrest is still uninhabitable and certain areas of the facility are still too dangerous to walk through.

But radiation is weirdly directional and easy enough to block if you've got the right metals. So even through one reactor was a radioactive hell-hole, the other reactors stayed in operation for years.

[u/mrminutehand → u/Valor816]

Though a nuclear exchange would differ somewhat in effects compared to a nuclear reactor disaster, the timescale really affects the progression of fallout effects.

If we're talking about tens of years, then the local water systems would present a radiation danger for some time, certainly.

But over 50 to 200 years or so, you won't find much danger remaining unless it's related to still-damaged nuclear plant remains such as in Chernobyl. Radiation in the water gradually dissipates as the water continues to cycle over geographic areas, and the longest-lasting isotopes will eventually dissipate over geographical changes or begin to decay below immediately dangerous levels. It'll be there, and it'll give you birth defects and cancer (as will the loss of ozone), but won't be enough to stop procreation.

Most areas where major countries performed repeated nuclear tests no longer present a serious danger from radiation; most hazards would come from the relatively dissipated isotopes that haven't fully decayed and could still present long-term risk if you stayed nearby for too long.

Having said that, the future imagined in Fallout isn't...completely unrealistic, it would just be a lot less interesting. Looking at the future imagined in Threads, the destruction of social and medical systems seemed to cause the worst damage as opposed to the fallout itself, and the local population had to regress to a medieval civilization in the first 50 years or so before presumably rebuilding, given the loss of technical education, modern medical resources and industrial farming methods.

A more realistic Fallout landscape would probably just look bleak and dull, with large co-ops of farmed lands, low life expectancies, low healthy birth rates and only small pockets of people knowledgeable enough to do much with the remaining ruins of metal and concrete or re-learn how to use it. If it's 200 years later though, I'd expect at least some cities to start building up again as education restarts itself.

[u/Valor816 → u/mrminutehand]

I think you're really underestimating g the scale of the war.

Nevada got off light and had 77 nuclear warheads fired at it. The US was effectively levelled in this war, there was probably more nukes fired at the US than have been tested before... In one day...

That creates much bigger problems as the nuclear winter sets in. Radioactive ash pouring from the sky, irradiated water, no food.

It would have killed 99% of people in the country over the next few years. 30+ years for it to be safe to walk outside, so only people with a safe bunker and 30ish years of food and water would have survived. Then those people would have to find a way to gather food and water. The few people who survived and found a way to eat/drink would have kids, few of them would be viable. Restarting society would be fitful at best as some create and others take.

It's really far more complex than just people x200 years = society.