My first guess was argon. Argon is inert and used in some bulbs to prevent oxidation of the filament. Other bulbs use a vacuum to void the bulb of oxygen.
I, for one, am confident that the relevant authorities around the world will operate nuclear power plants safely, including protecting them from earthquakes, floods, wars, and all other natural and social disasters, and will store radioactive materials in ways that won't cause any problems in the 500,000 years or so it will take for that waste to be safe. I can't really see what could go wrong.
Even factoring in the worst nuclear disasters in history, and using the most liberal estimates for casualties from Chernobyl, etc., nuclear power has still killed fewer people and done less damage to the environment than coal or oil.
Nope. It actually is much safer. Coal mining is extremely dangerous, and the sheer amount of coal that is required to run a plant only exacerbates the issue. Much less uranium needs to be extracted to run a nuclear plant, and the continued improvement in nuclear technology has made it much safer than when Chernobyl and Three Mile Island occurred. Even then there were relatively few deaths associated with the incidents.
Nuclear power is actually a great answer to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. We just need to accept the fact that there are risks with everything we do. Nothing is ever 100% safe, nor is it ever 100% perfect.
But that's the thing. Looking at that picture, all I could see are a couple of cooling towers, which are not exclusively used in nuclear plants but in other types of power plants and factories as well. Didn't cross my head at all that it was a nuclear plant. I kept thinking of water vapor, which isn't an element, so I started typing air elements like Oxygen and Nitrogen. It's either I am extremely delusional or that clue needs a more specific picture.
I agree with hatemAli. Most cooling towers that I see are associated with conventional (fossil fuel) power plants. I could see nothing in the picture that suggested otherwise and so I too was trying carbon, oxygen, hydrogen etc. I think a better photo is needed.
Most (not all) coal fired power plants I have seen (and my work has taken me to quite a few) don't use the hyperbolic style cooling towers. In my opinoin it is fair to assume that the use of hyperbolic cooling towers suggests a nuclear power plant.
Coal-fired power plants have cooling towers if they are not near a source of cooling water such as a large river or estuary. There is nothing about hyperboloid cooling towers that is particular to nuclear power stations. Do a google search for Drax power station, Eggborough power station or Ratcliffe-on-Soar, for example.
Those cooling towers looks exactly like the coal fired power plants in the Latrobe Valley near where I live in Australia. It is a bad pictorial clue because the cooling towers are not unique to nuclear plants. Go and look up pictures of the Yallourn coal powered plant I'm talking about if you don't believe me.
Well, I was well and truly stumped. A nuclear plant never occurred to me from looking at that picture, none in New Zealand. We have a coal powered plant that looks like this though.
Yep. I grew up able to see a nuclear power plant from the top of the garden and it didn't have one of those. Lots of coal fired equivalents in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, though, look like that.......
The pool threw me for a bit, as H2O is a compound and neither hydrogen nor oxygen worked.... When I clued in I felt really stupid, lol. Great quiz idea!
Was trying to think of an element connected with cooling towers and going through various pollutants. Any chance you can make the picture more specifically nuclear?
Well nuclear bomb would be Hydrogen since they are called Hydrogen Bombs, Nuclear plants use Uranium but that doesn't mean everything with Nuclear in it uses Uranium
I thought for sure the "light bulb" answer had to be phosphorus. I kept trying different spellings of that, instead of trying to think of other potential answers. Oops.
Let's have a contest for which photo represents the most different elements. I vote for the saltshaker: sodium, chlorine; silicon, oxygen (silicon dioxide) in the glass which may also contain boron and calcium; iron, carbon, vanadium, molybdenum, chromium may all be in the stainless steel cap
I feel like for the picture of table salt, both Sodium and Chlorine should be accepted, as it is NaCl (Sodium Chloride), with an equal molar ratio of 1:1.
I suspect not. Generally speaking, they usually spell it like the rest of the world outside the US: aluminium. (Except for US scientists, who tend to spell it aluminium also.)
IUPAC adopted aluminium as the standard international name for the element in 1990. The rest of the world are just waiting for the US (and Canada) to catch up.
got all instantly without a second of thought, ok lead cost me half a second, was huh owyea... but the uranium one, looked at it for allmost a minute, thought it was about the clouds/smoke or something. Took me a long while to realize it is supposed to be a powerplant and the element itself isnt seen in the picture.
Fun quiz! Would you be so kind to add the standard note that elements must correspond to the yellow box? I use a blue blocker and I didn't know it was there until I was halfway through and couldn't understand why my answers weren't working :P
Good quiz. You could add some other interesting ones: Krypton (planet), hydrogen (Hindenburg), nitrogen (Earth's atmosphere), oxygen (scuba tank), tin (can), silver, sulfur (geyser or hot spring), etc.
not suggesting you remove it as the picture necessarily, but despite their reputation, bananas have much lower levels of potassium than most other fruit and veg. the urban myth that they're good potassium sources is the result of a pr campaign involving banana republics, the annexation of hawaii and the textbook industry. find out more from this excellent podcast episode
But really, are environmentalists ever happy?
I could only see grass, concrete and water there...
But pipe fitters are still known as plumbers in english, I guess?
A grey globule?