Anno 2070: .3 mile island

When you start a city in Anno 2070, you choose either the corporate faction or the eco faction. Basically, you decide whether you want progress, or a bunch of layabout tree-hugging hippies whinging about pollution. Not that I’m trying to color your choice in the periodic online elections that determine ingame bonuses.

When you choose the corporate faction, you get your power from coal power plants. Yeah, sure, they’re dirty. But that’s no big deal. Corporate citizens don’t fuss about pollution. They understand that you can’t build a city without cracking a few ozone layers. The bigger problem with coal power plants is that I kind of need that coal for iron, tools, steel, weapons, and so forth. So one of the important early shifts is to nuclear power, which uses uranium and frees up all that coal.

Nuclear power is great. Mostly. I think. I hope. Every now and then I get a little pop-up message like the one in that screenshot, which reads:

Accident at the Nuclear Power Plant! Nuclear power plant in Omicron reports minor incident. Situation under control, no radiation leaked, production unaffected.

So everything’s peachy, right? Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that message is a veiled warning? I mean, I know there’s a small chance of mishaps in nuclear power plants, but it’s so small as to be a non-factor, right? Should I be eyeing the option in my Academy to research increased nuclear safety?

I should have played the eco faction and used windmills.

Up next: down with the sickness