Are you looking for information on lethal gases in mines, or on lethal doses of radiation? They're two different things. Your guards may somehow be immune to poison gas, but immunity from radiation damage, again, is a separate thing.
When dealing with radiation, please be aware of the Exact Time to Failure trope, which is guaranteed to causes screams of agony in anyone who knows about radiation poisoning in RL.
Just lethal gases, because - I hope I got it right - raw uranium can't do that much damage here and now. It becomes lethal over time, being carcinogenic, but it doesn't make you drop dead. So lethal gases is my next best option. I chose an uranium mine as main setting because I need the long-time health effects, both on guards and prisoners.
My guards are cyborgs, technically speaking (they have bionic implants), and I was thinking about them being given *something* to slow down the long-term damages. However, they'll get their share of health issues too. I just have to figure that out, and if it's plausible even for a sci-fi story :/
Questions: 1. why aren't they using either robotic or in situ leeching? (These are typically the way uranium is mined now - most of it being ISL). Unless the *goal* is to kill the workers, I'd assume that they'd be using the same techniques that are currently used in uranium mines
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My premise is a planet where the government (a dictatorship) sends prisoners sentenced to death. Think gulags; the main goal is to exploit prisoners that would soon be dead anyway.
I can certainly come up with something else than uranium, something that needs real people to be mined, but right now I'm wondering why such kind of mines still exist then? I mean, I read about ISL, but I thought it was one of the options, not the default one. Is coal mining, for example, less dangerous for people? And why? As I understand it, uranium ore doesn't emit so much radiations, the real danger is in the dust particles. Is that right?
As for the ventilation system, I saw that (some) are dug into the ground. If the rock has cracks, gases can get into the system? Forgive me if my questions sound dumb; I read a lot, but there are still so many things I'm trying to figure out :/
Well, for coal, getting it all wet would kind of defeat the purpose. ;) I believe the danger for uranium is a combination of dust particles and escaping radon gas. (I'm not super familiar with uranium mining, though, aside from knowing that it uses ISL.) I believe ISL is used in part to eliminate that, possibly in part because it works. (I know ISL does not work for coal. There are likely other substances where it doesn't work at all or is highly inefficient. Gold, for instance, often is found in narrow veins, so you'd have to use a lot of leechant to get at a tiny, tiny amount of gold if you tried ISL, while if you drag the gold to the surface, you can only leech the rock that actually has gold in it.) I'll also admit that, from a "technology will probably advance in the future" perspective, I'm not entirely sure why all mining would not be done by semi-autonomous robots, although you could probably play with robots being too expensive, not quite working, whatever
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Ahhh, got it! I thought the ventilation system used different, dedicated shafts. When I looked for pictures online, I came over this and this, for example, so I imagined these huge shafts that would just be used to pump fresh air in and exhausts out. The big fans I saw oh the outside and some maps I checked somehow reinforced that idea. Ops :/ Thank you for clarifying that.
I'm going to rework some part of the plot, but I agree that a roof collapse might be my best bet. It's not su much about drama, rather than setting up a good scenario for later purposes. This is a toes dip, I have enough room to make changes :DI
Well, uraninum produces helium gas. You'd have to work out a real trick to make that dangerous though. It could wriggle into a piece of equipment that needs a vacuum, perhaps, since it's smaller even than hydrogen, and it could suffocate by filling up a location and excluding oxygen from it.
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When dealing with radiation, please be aware of the Exact Time to Failure trope, which is guaranteed to causes screams of agony in anyone who knows about radiation poisoning in RL.
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My guards are cyborgs, technically speaking (they have bionic implants), and I was thinking about them being given *something* to slow down the long-term damages. However, they'll get their share of health issues too. I just have to figure that out, and if it's plausible even for a sci-fi story :/
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I can certainly come up with something else than uranium, something that needs real people to be mined, but right now I'm wondering why such kind of mines still exist then? I mean, I read about ISL, but I thought it was one of the options, not the default one. Is coal mining, for example, less dangerous for people? And why? As I understand it, uranium ore doesn't emit so much radiations, the real danger is in the dust particles. Is that right?
As for the ventilation system, I saw that (some) are dug into the ground. If the rock has cracks, gases can get into the system? Forgive me if my questions sound dumb; I read a lot, but there are still so many things I'm trying to figure out :/
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I'm going to rework some part of the plot, but I agree that a roof collapse might be my best bet. It's not su much about drama, rather than setting up a good scenario for later purposes. This is a toes dip, I have enough room to make changes :DI
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Thank you everyone! :)
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