1L flasks, dimroth condenser, heating mantle, heating plate, materials to build an electric kiln, if i have anything left i'd use it on chemicals
and i'm probably already overbudget, home chemistry is fucked price-wise, we're lucky to have synthware for all our glassware needs but for equipment you either diy it or go broke (a good hotplate is ~500$ new, 200$ used in bad conditions)
the reason we scavenge steel from old shipwrecks is because all modern peoduced steel is contaminated with a miniscule - but still present - amount of radioactive isotopes, incompatible with some incredibly precise scientific instruments and other nieche, but essential applications, that not only require old steel, but old steel that wasn't exposed to all the radioactive fallout during the nuclear tests in the cold war, hence why the sunken ships.
adding a personal note here, if some nuclear tests around the world contaminated everything THIS MUCH, what will we say about microplastics in a couple decades? just food for thought
In any major catastrophe they are abandoned and likely the meltdown and other issues could render whole areas uninhabitable. Might be manageable in certain power loss scenarios… but anything major and sudden like if you’re country suffered a nuclear attack or a major natural catastrophe and you survived I’d stay away from nuclear plants or chemical processing facilities.
this isn't chernobyl anymore, we have safe nuclear plants that have excellent emergecy shutdowns (the control rods are held up by electromagnets, and in a power loss they would instantly fall down, stopping the reactor)
with chemical companies, the idea is the same, but since they're handled by private corporations i wouldnt trust them that much with safety shut-offs in case of power loss. at most they'll have a backup battery and a diesel generator, which in a solar flare EMP will get destroyed too
except programmers are gonna continue with what they were already doing, at most putting a script on copilot to get the metrics
don't forget that if you don't turn in the project in time you're fired, the issues always get thrown at the coder, it's never the company's fault