Nuclear power
This is personal for me. I remember the Three Mile Island meltdown. I was not in that location, but I remember how close it came to a major disaster that would have impacted a wide area. Before that meltdown I remember listening to nuclear energy "experts" exclaiming how safe and clean nuclear energy is.
Then Chernobyl happened. We were living in southern Germany downwind of that disaster. Our daughter was 11 months old and vulnerable. Unless you've lived this you cannot imagine what it is like to fear invisible radioactive fallout and the danger to your family. You keep your family inside, off the grass, out of the parks, away from pets, and you can't get information about the danger. We were lucky and were able to return to the US shortly after. But you never forget the experience.
And then Fukushima.
You get the idea. I don't want to hear any BS about how safe nuclear power is.
Or any BS about how clean it is. Uranium mining is not environmentally safe or clean and there is no clean way to dispose of nuclear waste.
I know there is a climate catastrophe in progress right now. I just don't believe we should be activating nuclear power stations to power AI or anything else.
[#]AI #Nuclear #Radioactive #Climate #Microsoft
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@patrick_townsend I am very sorry to read your trauma. Public communication has failed you.
I understand your fear.
You are left in a mental state that rejects objective facts that are crucial for your survival, as shown in the last paragraph.
Please try to realize that your fears were mostly engineered by bad actors. Chornobyl was bad, but you were never in danger in Germany. Nobody died from TMI, nobody died from the nuclear accident at Fukushima.
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@Ardubal @patrick_townsend
@Steveg58
@humanhorseshoes
Worst of all: Public communication is always bad at this type of event.
The Sowjets in Chernobyl did no communication at all, the Western world only found out two days later through an automated alarm at a swedish nuclear plant.
At Three Mile Island the council members went "door to door through the town providing information" half a day later. The governor issued a evacuation after two days. 140.000 people fled.
https://onlineethics.org/cases/three-mile-island-nuclear-accident
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@Ardubal @patrick_townsend @Steveg58 @humanhorseshoes
In the region of Germany where I live, you still have to test hunted wild boar for radiation contamination due to Chernobyl 40 yr ago.
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@alex_mastodon @Ardubal @Steveg58 @humanhorseshoes
Oh my, this brings back memories. I was living near Wasserburg Am Inn in a rural area (lots of cows, ha ha). Milk was quickly quarantined due to contamination of the fields. I am sorry you still have to deal with this.
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@alex_mastodon @patrick_townsend @Steveg58 @humanhorseshoes
And the evacuation was entirely not warranted, just as in Fukushima. All human damage was caused by fear, not by the accident.
Just last month we had two much worse industrial accidents in Ohio, without the corresponding industry branch being put into question entirely.
This is not a rational base for policy.
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@Ardubal @alex_mastodon @patrick_townsend @humanhorseshoes
Oh god, you are the CANDU loonies. You know, you have all the intellectual rigour of a bunch of flat earthers. Take you conspiracy lunacies and go be sheeples elsewhere.You are ignorant in the deepest sense of the term.
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@alex_mastodon @Ardubal @Steveg58 @humanhorseshoes
I remember the communication failure quite well. Little was known about Chernobyl for several days. I was watching German TV (no internet then) with poor language skills. Very frustrating.
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@Ardubal
Wow, there are a lot of assumptions here. Just couple of follow on thoughts.
My main takeaway is that we humans are very bad at assessing certain types of risk. I accept that nuclear energy production is generally safe and accidents are a low probability. That probability is not zero, obviously. When an accident happens with this technology it can have very drastic consequences. For obvious reasons I don't feel this type of risk has been adequately assessed and understood.
I disagree about the danger in Germany, as do many Germans. I was able to leave, but most could not. People did die in the Ukraine due to the meltdown and a very many lost their homes. That no one died due to the TMI meltdown is lucky. If I understand correctly it was very close. I don't think that is an argument in favor of nuclear energy safety.
In my InfoSec practice I worked with many companies that could not imagine the consequences of a ransomware attack. Some of them did not survive as viable companies.
I think we are meant to learn from trauma in order not to repeat it.
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@patrick_townsend Well, yes, we learn, but learning doesn't mean that we abandon e. g. networked computers altogether.
We don't abandon Ammonium Nitrate altogether, even though it has killed many more people in many more and much more drastic accidents than nuclear power.
What we better learn is proper handling, and in the case of nuclear, we do. It's not luck that nobody died from nuclear power at TMI and Fukushima, but defense in depth. (Which Chornobyl lacked.)
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@Ardubal
I certainly accept that nuclear power plants implement a defense in depth strategy, as best as I understand that. However, I don't believe that the defense it depth strategy worked adequately in any of these cases. My experience with complex systems leads me to believe that it may not be possible to anticipate all potential failures and have a mediation for them. I guess my issue is with the scope of the impact of an unhandled failure. I suppose I would argue for this perspective:
Assume that this technology will fail, is it morally correct to inflict the subsequent damage on all of the potential victims?
If my laptop is bricked due to a security failure, that is one thing. If a reactor meltdown makes 1,000 square miles uninhabitable for 10,000 years that is something else.
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@patrick_townsend
Two answers for both parts of the probability times damage risk equation:
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@Ardubal
I think this might be helpful, especially the section on Exclusion Zone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
I suppose we will have to disagree on whether the defense in depth strategy worked adequately.
I don't think I have much more to add to this. Good luck.
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@patrick_townsend We agree that Chornobyl did /not/ have defense in depth.
If I may cite from there: »It is the only instance in commercial nuclear power history where radiation-related fatalities occurred.«
I retract the 1000 sq. m. as overblown, but the 10000 y still stand as exaggeration (look up the relation of half life to radiation intensity), and it is functionally a wildlife preserve now. Again, this is the thing that did /not/ have defense in depth, and that has not been cleaned up.
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@patrick_townsend The thing you have to ask yourself is: why do you accept the damage from fossil plants /in normal operation/, which is much higher than even the Chornobyl disaster?
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@Ardubal I did not say that. This is gaslighting. We are done.
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@patrick_townsend I agree that it shouldn't be used to power AI. But I know that the energy within fissible materials is enough to sustain us for eons. This said, I think the priorities and decisions made by hierarchical societies guaranee these failures. Especially capitalism. We can do it if we aren't stupid. Alas, everyone with any power, is very, VERY stupid. I still think we may not have a choice. Our choice is to depower, or use nuke. Solar and Wind cannot fulfil our current demand.
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@patrick_townsend
I mean...statistically, it is remarkably safe. Safer than wind, safer than solar even. In terms of humans lives lost per amount of energy produced, nuclear is the safest form of energy on planet earth. You can deny that if you want, but it's objectively true.
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@AlexanderKingsbury
Yes, I agree with the statistical point of view. No argument at all.
My concern is with the scope of the impact of a failure. The failure of a windmill has little impact on any living being and can be easily fixed. The failure of a nuclear reactor can be devastating to all living beings in the vicinity and poison a large area for thousands of years. This is the perspective that I think is missing in the safety discussion.
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@patrick_townsend
The failure of a windmill can and has had a catastrophic impact on living beings; humans, specifically. People can and have died in windmill accidents.
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