World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
view the rest of the comments
Hey, you don't know where the next tsunami will happen. Have to be proactive.
The real irony being that all Japanese reactors shut down due to the quake as designed, and the tsunami wouldn't have been a factor had money not been saved by shortcutting backup generator protection from flooding in a FLOOD ZONE.
Bro, THE FUCKING BACKUP DIESEL GENERATORS FOR THE PLANT WERE BELOW SEA LEVEL.
Make it make sense. If those generators had been above sea level, well probably above 100-year tsunami levels, we likely would not have seen the plant catastrophically fail.
That was part of the problem. Built where it was cheaper, ignoring literal ancient markers saying not to live there because of the past. But they would have still not failed, had they been designed for the potential of being submerged. Again, they were not because that would cost more for a long range risk. It all falls into bad planning and profit, not in any way because it was a nuclear plant.
bad planning and profit are of course words never uttered in connection with German infrastructure projects.
This just serves as a lesson to the "failsafe technology" crowd: That also involves failsafe humans. Those, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to be invented.
Oh and relatedly some German reactor ran for decades without a backup power generator. It was there, present, physically, that is, but noone bothered to check whether it actually worked. Merkel justified her flip-flop on the nuclear exit (shortly before Fukushima, she delayed the exit that SPD+Greens had decided on) by saying, more or less, "If the Japanese can't do it we can't do it either" but if she had been paying attention, it should've been clear that we couldn't do it. That became clear when the first SPD+Green coalition moved responisibity for nuclear safety from the ministry for economy to that for the environment, run by a Green, and they made a breakfast out of all that shoddy work that the operators had done. Oh the containment vessel is riveted... figures they put the rivets in the wrong way. Shut it down, have fun re-doing every single one of them before starting it up again.
Thus, my conclusion: The only people you can trust to run nuclear reactors safely are people who don't want nuclear reactors to exist in the first place.
Human failsafes have been invented. Every nuclear silo has one: two, independent people, with unique keys, have to both agree to launch. Otherwise, it fails safe, and no launch. Even with valid launch orders.
Are you trying to tell us it's impossible for these two humans to fail at the same time? There's some physical law preventing them from receiving false information and acting on it? They can't be manipulated or forced to do things they don't want to?
That's the kind of failsafe GP was talking about. Not "99% safe except for rare circumstances", but actually 100% safe.
Well, it hasn't failed yet...
The tower of playing cards I built this morning also hasn't failed yet, so logically we should link nuclear launch codes to it collapsing. After all, it seems to be a perfect system.
Or you could try actually thinking about the point GP was making.
So, you have done a trial of one, fir a few hrs, with no testing.
Other human failsafe have been repeatedly tested, thousands of times over, over decades.
Hell, the simple Deadman switch is a human failsafe: hold this latch, otherwise machine stops....
Are you willfully missing the point, or is this accidental?
No, not at all. You are missing the point, I think. Human failsafes do work. They are even easier to make and more effective if you remove capitalism from the equation, though.
Wow, okay, you're really missing the point.
Something is either 100% failsafe, or it isn't. If there is even a tiny chance that something will fail, it isn't failsafe in the context of GPs point. We're not talking about "realistic chances" or something here - we're talking about actual physical laws.
Humans aren't failsafe, because they've failed plenty of times, and can still fail plenty of times. Sure, no accidental nuclear launches have been done, but that doesn't mean they can't happen. Both of the humans involved can develop a psychosis at the same time, at which point the system has failed. This even being a possibility means that the system isn't failsafe. It doesn't matter whether it already happened or will ever happen.
The reason we're taking this strict distinction is that human failsafes have failed plenty of times. People in Germany got to know this very well through Chernobyl. There were failsafes in place, and they didn't work due to human error. That's why proponents of nuclear energy are focusing on this point - changes in the design of modern nuclear reactors make it literally physically impossible for the same thing to happen. I'm not talking about a 99.999999999% chance that it won't happen, I'm talking about 100%.
Just to be sure, I'll repeat it again: human failsafes have failed in the past, and humans can fail in every situation. You won't believe how many people lost fingers, hands or even arms in spite of a dead man switch that should prevent it. There are plenty of examples of systems that, according to you, should be 100% safe, yet they failed. Because humans can fail.
You're right. Not 100% failsafe is failproof.
Another way to put it is 100% failproof is failsafe, by definition.
For example, my nuclear launch failsafe, is an example of a human failsafe, that works 100% of the time, unless both humans agree to the launch.
And yes, human supervision can, and should be, the final fail safe for any critical system.
And yes, human failsafes work, when properly designed, and implemented. That's what "fail safe" means. ie, a PBR reactor is "fail safe" by design, as if anything happens, the pebble pile collapses, and criticality cannot be maintained, without a human intervening. No human, no criticality.
And there were very few, if any human fail safes in the Chernobyl incident, which is a huge reason it failed. And the reactor was not designed to fail safe. Modern reactors are designed to fail safe. Which means they cannot maintain criticality without human intervention.
Something tells me you're not very up on engineering principles, because fail safes, including human ones, are used all the time. Like bridges that raise and lower, for example. The bridge CAN NOT rise unless someone is there, holding the button. And it will start a safe descent if the human releases the button. It fails in a safe manner, without human intervention.
Oh, you're actually just trolling. Almost got me, nice one.
It's totally logical even aside from the economics. The consequences are too great, which is why nuclear plants are uninsurable. You think this French plant and Vogtle were expensive? Imagine if they had to be insured like everything else in our society. But they can't, because no insurance company is large enough. By default the public ends up footing that cost to the tune of trillions.
If you exclude the early phases of nuclear development, and later accidents that happened due to bad management, how dangerous is well run nuclear energy? Maybe it's not the form of energy generation that's the problem.
Maybe if the difference between "just an expensive technology" and "deadly disaster impacting the lifes of millions of people" is some bad management and poor regulatory oversight, it is not a technology fit for the use of current humanity.
Personally, drag is pick-your-battles-nuclear. That is to say, scientifically it's a good technology, but fighting a political battle to get nuclear cheap enough to compete with wind and solar is pointless. Advocating wind and solar is much more efficient in terms of political effort spent.
Depends on context, which I think is missed in basically all these discussions. Solar, wind, and hydropower are obviously contextually dependent technologies, that are well suited to particular environments. They have to line up with energy demand curves, or else impose expensive and inefficient battery solutions. They don't have a whole lot of efficiency in terms of land use, which there are some proposed solutions for, but they're pretty efficient both economically, and are pretty ecologically contentious as long as recycling is being done adequately. Nuclear solves a different problem. It provides base load, which is somewhat important, it's potentially not as flexible as a technology, but it's easier to build infrastructure for because it's more consistent. It can also be somewhat land-use agnostic, though things like water use for cooling towers and tradeoffs such as that are definitely a consideration. It's also much denser in terms of land use, meaning it's potentially more efficient for larger cities.
They're both just different technologies, with different applications, and they both have a place in any sensible structuring of the world. I don't understand why people become so split along the obvious astroturfed and petrol-funded propaganda that floats around for both sides. You have pro-nuclear people that are saying solar panels like, require exotic materials mines, which is insanely ironic, and you have solar people who are fearmongering about solved problems like nuclear waste and safety concerns and efficiency in terms of economic cost, which is also insanely ironic. The fact that this conflict comes up every time strikes me as kind of horrendously stupid and obviously favorable to petrol lobbies.