[quote=@Shyri]
The hydro-dam talk made me think. How possible would it have been for any nuclear reactors to go into meltdown after the apocalypse? Or should we just assume they were all safely shut down? 
[/quote]

I actually have a few nuclear engineer friends and I managed to corner one on Steam and quiz him. There's several things that can happen.

Primarily in the event of danger like Yellowstone erupting they could theoretically pull some components from the reactors to make them "safe" in a sense. Mostly anything that'd be reason to fear runaway thermal activity that'd melt or actually burn down the plant when left unchecked. Fuel rods would still be in place but there'd be no activity that'd create the basis for a disaster, the reactor room would just become deadly, and those are so shielded and layered in cement far in excess of what actually might be needed nothing would come of it.

Alternatively the coolant could be doused with a reactive "poison" to capture and block neutron emission thereby limiting nuclear reactivity and lessening the risk of a run-away nuclear reaction.

But today nuclear power plants have so many safeguards that if left unattended one safeguard or another will trip and the plant will go into shutdown mode and stop a runaway event from happening.

And if all else fails, or in combination with the above the coolant valves can  be thrown open and the reactor room flooded with water which will by itself absorb and insulate radioactivity while preventing runaway thermal reaction.

In the end, nothing happens.

[quote=@Wernher]
[@Dinh AaronMk]

Quebecois is the french name, we present ourselves to the anglo as quebecers, which  is what they call us. I should know, I'm from quebec.

As for the dams, I wouldn't expect to run the mega ones in the north, at least not for now, but there are plenty of them in the lower regions near the St-Lawrence and I happen to know (After 10 years of mandatory history of quebec in class) that to our pride, quebec has since the 70s an expertise in hydro power and all the components for the maintenance and indeed construction of these incredible pieces of infrastructures have been built entirely and solely in the province.

Still however, I have to say regarding the ash that I used this:

[img]https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/main/articles/scivis_860.jpg[/img]

So I assumed the ash in such a far away region would be minor and as well, its been quite a few generations since this happened.

As for oil, I didn't know that and I assumed the tech levels would be more close to early 20th century.

Does this tech level apply to everything? Radio, automatic weapons, artillery, cars, tanks, etc...

As a compromise I'd suggest maybe only use a few small dams in Mauricie (Between Quebec and Montreal, north coast) that don't nearly have the production volume as the big ones in the north and have that energy monopolised by the metropolitan areas, so no general electrification.

But if you say no, I'll gracefully accept your judgement.
[/quote]

The big thing is even with the infrastructure at home supporting the upkeep of dams is the infrastructure that ultimately keeps those around. When you get down to it in the end this is a world where all of a sudden the means of supporting the modern life-style has come to and end and kicking back several squares. With significant oil you can't really have gas and without either you can't run trucks of automobiles which means transporting entire turbines or turbine parts from factory to plant is going to be a labor intensive procedure, not to mention the other complications this throws into other seemingly simple day-to-day operations.

And even if you have the means to make the parts you'll need to get the resources to make these parts which requires further transportation, which for the scale needed is more economical with trucking and motor-vehicles than carting it in wooden carts pulled by horses.

You could argue that you can make fuel from biofuel but this comes to the paradigm of simple sealants and sealing gaskets to keep still pressurized and prevent leaks of product or heat that can make producing bio-fuel inconsistent. And that doesn't even begin to tackle that ethanol is corrosive to normal fuel-grade rubbers in gaskets and fuel lines in automotives and other machines. And including the complications of fine dust basically glass getting into the moving parts of engines and spoiling those then anything relying on moving parts and with air intake may shorten its life-span.

I'm not completely against having electricity in use but the big thing I want to emphasize is that its production is likely to be downsized from lack of industrial materials that lend to making bigger and bigger power plants, machines, and over all engineering.

You can lay under this all too that people need to eat, and if mechanized farming is dead because farmers can't get their diesel to fuel their tractors then they'll require more humans hands in the field doing labor, taking from the population more workers that'd otherwise be used for industrial applications like maintaining and working in hydro-electric dams, factories, and what not so everyone can eat. A society will need to prioritize and if food isn't prioritized the society starves. And without the luxury of the modern industrial factory farm there's far fewer people to go to work in labor intensive industry than there is now; so then even if you can  get anything working specific dams will need to be prioritized cutting hydroelectric power even further.

Post-Apocalyptic isn't just carving new nations out of the bones of another; it's total system overhauling.

So what I'm trying to say is: think about what you're doing and not just what the advantages of what you're doing is. Because to do a thing you'll need specific things that might not be accessible or doable for the way things are now.

But on guns: I'm allowing those. Automatic weapons theoretically but as far as they go they'll be expensive to fire because bullets will mostly need to be hand-loaded and you can easily tear through a day worth of work in a minute on full-auto and single-shot weapons may be more favorable than full-auto because they're more conservative. But the end demands of building a gun are pretty low-tech and industrial lathes for boring out gun barrels and parts can be hooked up to water mills or pedal power or something. Building guns is ultimately an art that dates back centuries before industrial equipment.