61–70 of 92 posts
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I still find it terrifying that even robots couldn’t survive the Chernobyl hot zone.
Electronics tend to fail at dosages (20 greys or so) similar to what destroys your nervous system.
Today I learned of the existence of "organic, wheat-based cat litter"
I did a sort of internship at Los Alamos which involved building some drones. A year or two later I got a call from my advisor there, out of the blue asking me if I had anything immediately available that could do recon underground effectively. I didn't really, so I declined. I asked what they needed it for and he said it would be easier if I got the info from the news. That was kinda terrifying ... turned out to be…
I still find it terrifying that even robots couldn’t survive the Chernobyl hot zone.
Why they were useless is interesting in itself. It turned out that controlling robots, when all you have is a bad TV camera, is hard. And robots also tend to get stuck on things.
As a result, the "Joker" robot that was helping to clear the roof got its tracks wedged on a firefighters water pipe.
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Electronics tend to fail at dosages (20 greys or so) similar to what destroys your nervous system.
I'm a non-bio person. Is that a coincidence, or is that because of similarity between our nervous system and electronics?
My first take is that I'm not surprised from a fermi problem standpoint that you can destroy two computers made from small parts smashed by radiation with a similar dose. But maybe that intuition is wrong because your brain could survive losing a few neurons but a microchip could be 0% functional after losing one transistor. My rule of thumb is about right for conventional chips but you can certainly get rad-hard chips that hold up better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening
Space is a big market for that sort of thing.
I keep asking this question: "Hot" nuclear waste means theres still a lot of energy left to capture. Why are we disposing of materials that still have a lot of energy to capture? Seems like the closer we get to lead, in terms of capture, the better. It would be like taking my half-full of gas car to the pump, dumping the existing gas, and getting fresh. Its a waste of energy, waste of resources, and generates worse n…
And in this case, the reaction had nothing to do with nuclear energy. It was a regular chemical reaction, that got into thermal runaway.
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Right, people need to feel empowered and not just worried about ruffling feathers.
The second accident here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents was an example of where that "empowerment" went wrong. It is usual for workers in Japanese factories to make continuous improvements in process for quality and cost and it is usually a good thing... but criticality accidents involve invisible dangers and "following procedures strictly" in that kind of work saves lives. Notably Japan ha…
I also want to put things in perspective: far, far more people are dying from fuckups with fossil fuels, but like "Florida man" (Florida has a law that crime reports must be published) we actually report and collect accidents involved in Nuclear production, so you can see every mistake. But you don't see mass protests because natural gas infrastructure failed in Texas and building pipes burst and people froze to death, including a young boy.
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That's... a shocking level of lack of professionalism. I mean, as a software developer, when someone tells you to implement something, do you do it just based on the notes you took while your project manager discussed the task with you, or do you read the actual Jira ticket and use the information you (hopefully) find there? And we're (mostly) not writing software that handles nuclear waste...
Very often the notes contain a lot more information than the ticket. Tickets are often written by people who barely understand the problem.
I'm submitting this based on the current top item "North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names" [0]. This accident was traced to a manager transcribing "inorganic absorbent" as "an organic absorbent". A more serious example of the need to have competent people with domain knowledge in the room and empowered when documents are written. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492161
A literal, or literary, bit-flip.
I'm submitting this based on the current top item "North Dakota law lists fake critical minerals based on coal lawyers' names" [0]. This accident was traced to a manager transcribing "inorganic absorbent" as "an organic absorbent". A more serious example of the need to have competent people with domain knowledge in the room and empowered when documents are written. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492161
I'm surprised they made critical material purchasing decisions based on what some guy thinks he heard in a meeting, rather than official written documents written by and cross-checked by multiple engineers.
It's not the litter, it's the typo. It was not sufficient to just write "inorganic". Given the seriousness of possible consequences, some redundancy should have been added. E.g. "inorganic mineral-based kitty litter can be used; organic kitty litter is not acceptable". A few more words would have prevented an actual nuclear incident.
so you're saying this was really an unclear incident?