51–60 of 132 posts
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0312425848/ref=as_li_tl?...
The interviews are interesting. I was a kid those days, and my mother keeps telling me that diary products were suddenly put on a sale (before the news release). I live in Eastern-Europe, in the former Warsaw Pact bloc. My father worked in a research institute, so managed to get a hold of the information before the official announcements. He told her not to buy any diary or vegetable for a while. ---- What troubles m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you list scarcity of uranium as an issue for nuclear, then advocate for hydro without mentioning the same? There are only so many suitable locations for hydro, and the further down the list we go the worse the incremental environmental impact.
Tidal is hydro and has barely been tapped.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in terms of cost, risks, environmental impact and power output, hydro is hard to beat if it's an option. The death tolls tell a different story. You aren't alone in this belief, but I've never really understood it. Banqiao dam bursts and kills 170,000 people: hydro is fine, we should do more. Chernobyl melts down and kills 30: nuclear power is inherently unsafe! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure https://en.…
If a dam burst it kill a lot of people in short time. And 36 hours later rebuilding the infrastructure and towns begins. If a reactor bursts it might not kill lots of people but it will devastate a large area for a very long time. We still do not know internal details about the Fukushima reactors because not even robots can go there. A dam burst is a nightmare but it is a nightmare which is easy to clean up afterward…
The construction of the Three Gorges (2012) dam flooded 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages, as well as 1,300 archaeological sites, and caused relocation of 1.24m citizens -- this is permanent and was done entirely on purpose, planned years in advance. Fukushima (2011) has a 20km exclusion zone that is now gradually being reopened a few years later, and 100,000 persons are still displaced.
One of these are acceptable collateral damage in the battle against climate change and the other is so bad that it constitutes conclusive evidence of the fundamental futility of the very technology itself. But you need to drink a lot of koolaid to see which is which on face value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for posting. I'm in the nuclear industry and would like to try to address some of these issues if you don't mind. 1. Uranium in seawater is replenished by erosion through streams at a rate faster than we could ever burn it. It is effectively totally sustainable and even renewable on a 4+ billion year time frame, even without breeder reactors. But really, breeder reactors will become a thing when uranium gets e…
> Uranium in seawater is replenished by erosion through streams at a rate faster than we could ever burn it. Isn't there a substantial energy cost associated with collecting that Uranium? The same goes for gold, there is a huge amount of gold in seawater and yet, nobody has been able to extract it in a way that left money on the table after the process had run.
http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/2013/06/the_cost...
This really strikes chord with how Fukushima was treated - nothing to be concerned about, citizen, move along and enjoy swimming on a Fukushima beach a year later... One would think this would happen only in communist societies but seeing it happening in Japan and everybody being fine with that was shocking. And then there were people pointing out xkcd and bananas, downplaying the effects and conflating radiation dus…
It was same in Chernobyl, tens of thousands got their life fucked. Alcoholism general belief in being damaged and worthles. I fucking hate USSR government(I was born an lived in Kyiv at the time). But people who fear monger come up with bullshit ar just as guilty.
The interviews are interesting. I was a kid those days, and my mother keeps telling me that diary products were suddenly put on a sale (before the news release). I live in Eastern-Europe, in the former Warsaw Pact bloc. My father worked in a research institute, so managed to get a hold of the information before the official announcements. He told her not to buy any diary or vegetable for a while. ---- What troubles m…
What I see on HN is a stream of technological idealism that tends to ignore the practical difficulties. Blaming protestors for lack of progress is very easy as it allows you to neatly ignore those issues. There are many economic and engineering reasons why nuclear is so hard to get right.
I stopped reading right there. Now I expected to reach exasperation somewhere in the article, but not at the second sentence. Chernobyl is a wildlife haven, it shelters a sea of fauna and flora that would otherwise have been the typical suburban death zone of humans, cat and dogs and nothing else. The biggest man made disaster has been committed and is being committed as we speak. Billions of tons of CO2 is pumped into the ocean and into the air right this minute. The Chernobyl accident affected a few hundred square kilometers maybe killed 5000 people. Air pollution kills 700 000 people a year.
Please stop propagating this bloody bullshit.
This really strikes chord with how Fukushima was treated - nothing to be concerned about, citizen, move along and enjoy swimming on a Fukushima beach a year later... One would think this would happen only in communist societies but seeing it happening in Japan and everybody being fine with that was shocking. And then there were people pointing out xkcd and bananas, downplaying the effects and conflating radiation dus…
You wonder how many other liquidators were tricked into doing the job.