Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2016

The Post-Apocalyptic Chemist: Fuels. "Fertilizers." and "Fire"

You've seen Rick and the group from The Walking Dead find a new car, start it up, and drive away. It happens in other post-apocalyptic stories, too. Cars driven away after a long time of sitting still somewhere. The Mad Max dystopia deals with this issue by putting refineries in its story world, but other post-apocalyptic story universes don't do that to my knowledge. Guess what? Fuels within a vehicle go bad due to their volatile nature in usually 3 to 6 months. Sometimes they make it all the way to a year, but not more than that (according to what I've read). The Walking Dead Wiki states 547 days have passed in the story timeline from the beginning of Season 1 to the end of Season 6. Which means, none of the cars should be running anymore. Even the fuel in fuel trucks should have gone bad. (Photo: Fuel truck from Mad Max Fury Road) What this means for story realism is there are a number of things about fuels you should considered (but perhaps haven't