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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Very well, let’s agree to disagree. Perhaps I am wrong. But I am in no way right wing or spreading misinformation.

    The people I’ve spoken who work in the nuclear field bitch about unneeded red tape all the time. Some of it is important for sure, but a lot of it can be cut if we wanted to without safety becoming an issue. The price of nuclear has gone way up the past 20 years, whilst the knowledge and tools have become better. This makes no sense to me. We should be able to build them cheaper and faster, not slower and more expensive. And there are countries in the world, that can get it done cheaper, so why can’t we?

    I’m all for renewables, I have solar panels. But I’m not 100% convinced we have grid storage figured out. And in the meanwhile we keep burning fossils in huge amounts. If we can have something that produces energy, without fucking up the atmosphere, even at a price that’s more expensive than other sources (within reason) I’m all for that. Because with the price of energy from coal, the money for fixing the atmosphere isn’t included.

    Thank you for answering in a respectful manner.



  • I have never heard being pro-nuclear is the anti science stance and it being on the rise among right wing political parties. All the right wing is talking about it more coal and less things to be done about the climate.

    The people who I talk to who are pro nuclear seem very well informed and not anti science at all.

    I believe nuclear can help us get to the future we want and we should have done it a lot sooner. Nuclear doesn’t mean anti-renewable, both can exist.


  • Nuclear is by far the safest form of energy production. Even with the big accidents, the impact hasn’t been that big.

    Chernobyl was by far the biggest, but that was 40 years ago, in a poorly designed plant, with bad procedures and a chain of human errors. We’ve learned so much from that accident and that type of accident couldn’t even have happened in the plants we had at the time in the west. Actually if the engineers that saw the issue could contact the control room right away, there would not have been any issue. In 1984 that was a problem, in 2024 not so much, we have more communication tools than ever. The impact of Chernobyl was also terrible, but not as bad as feared back in the time. In contrast to the TV series, not a lot of people died in the accident. With 30 deaths directly and another 30 over time. Total impact on health is hard to say and we’ve obviously have had to do a lot to prevent a bigger impact, but the number is in the thousands for total people with health effects. Even the firefighters sent in to fix stuff didn’t die, with most of them living full lives with no health effects. And what people might not know, the Chernobyl plant has had a lot of people working there and producing power for decades after the disaster. It’s far from the nuclear wasteland people imagine.

    Fukushima was pretty bad, but the impact on human life and health has been pretty much nonexistent. The circumstances leading up to the disaster were also very unique. A huge earthquake followed by a big tsunami, combined with a design flaw in the backup power system, combined with human error. I still to this day don’t understand how this lead to facilities being closed in Germany, where big earthquakes don’t happen and there is hardly any coast let alone tsunamis. It’s a knee jerk reaction that makes no sense. Studies have indicated the forced relocation of the people living near there has been a bigger impact on people’s health than anything the power plant did.

    Compare this to things we consider to be totally normal. Like driving a car, which kills more people in a week than ever had any negative impacts from nuclear power.

    Or say solar is a far more safe form of power, even though yearly hundreds of people die because of accidents related to solar installations. Or for example hydroplants, where accidents can also cause a huge death toll and more accidents happen.

    And this is even with the non valid comparison to the current forms of energy where we know it’s a big issue. But because the alternative isn’t perfect, we don’t change over.


  • Agreed, dealing with the waste is a thing. But for me a solvable problem and something that doesn’t need to be solved right away. We currently store a lot of nuclear waste in holding locations till we figure out a way to either make it less radioactive or store it for long enough. The alternative however is having coal plants all over the world spew all their dust (including radioactive dust) and CO2 straight into the atmosphere. This to me is a far bigger issue to solve. It isn’t contained in one location, but instead ends up all over the world. It ends up in people’s homes and bodies, with a huge impact to their health. It ends up in the atmosphere, with climate change causing huge (and expensive) issues.

    The amount of money we need to handle nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude lower than what we are going to have to pay to handle climate change. And that isn’t even fixing the issue, just dealing with the consequences. I don’t know how we are ever going to get all that carbon back out of the atmosphere, but it won’t be cheap.


  • Agreed, building a nuclear facility takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. However… This doesn’t need to be the case at all.

    A lot of the costs go into design, planning and legal work. The amount of red tape to build a nuclear plant is huge. Plus all of the parties that fight any plans to build, with a heavy not in my backyard component.

    If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly. Back in the day we could build them faster and cheaper. And these days we build far more complex installations quicker and cheaper than nuclear power plants.

    The anti-nuclear movement has done so much to hold humanity back on this front. And the weird part is most people do think nuclear fusion plants are a good thing and can solve stuff. But they have almost all of the downsides nuclear fission plants have in terms of red tape, complexity and cost.



  • Multiple reasons:

    Higher speed impacts penetrate deep, but also cause the rock to melt. This fills in deeper craters, limiting the max depth a crater can be. There are still very deep huge craters, but these look more like big depressions than craters, because of how big they are. They are also themselves covered with craters usually, making their size and shape harder to see.

    Because the diameter of the moon is 3474km, a difference of several kilometers would only amount to a fraction of a percent. So even though one crater is for example 10km deeper than another, relative to the size of the moon this is practically nothing. When viewing pics like these where the whole moon is visible, this matters.

    The moon is a very uniform gray color and lacks the indicators our brain use to gauge depth. This makes it very hard to guess how deep the different craters are. You can see some craters have more shadows where others don’t, but they are also different shapes and sizes and the lighting is different so it’s hard to see.

    There is also probably some part of the speeds of incoming stuff being within a certain range and the moonrocks being relatively uniform in materials, so the range of craters than can exists is probably limited. But I’m not certain how big of an factor this is and what the range is.






  • People always confuse multiple things.

    There is gravity, the actual effect we see every day all around us. Gravity is a real thing, it exists. Then there’s the law of gravity, this is a math formula you can use to predict the effect gravity has on things. There’s multiple variations of this one, think Newton and Einstein. For almost everything the Newton version works just fine. Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does. This is the tricky one we don’t really have a grip on.

    By mixing these things it is often portrayed that “scientists” don’t know anything, they don’t even understand something as simple as gravity.



  • Good advice, just to add to this:

    • Comments should be part of code review, having at least two pairs of eyes on comments is crucial. Something that’s obvious to one person maybe isn’t so obvious to another. Writing good comments is as hard or harder than writing good code, so having it checked for mistakes and quality is a must
    • Comments aren’t the actual documentation and aren’t a reason not to write documentation to go along with your code. Often I see larger projects where each class and function is documented in comments, but the big picture and the how and why of the overall structure is completely missing. Remember that in the real world you often have a lot of folk that need to understand how the code works, who aren’t programmers themselves. They can’t read the code or don’t have access to the code. Writing documentation is still important.
    • Please for the love of god when you change code, check if the comments need to be updated as well. Not just around the immediate area, but also the entire file/class and related files. I’ve worked on large codebases before with a high wtf factor and having the code do something different to or even opposite the comments is a nightmare. I’d rather have no comments than wrong comments.


  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoScience Memes@mander.xyzExploration
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    1 month ago

    Well no, if you think that I’ve failed to communicate it properly. Sorry for that. I mean the exact opposite.

    Say for example we have some unit of knowledge called T. The moon has in this hypothetical unit about 1000T of possible knowledge and humans know about 900T of things about the moon. In this case the oceans would have at least 1000000T of possibility knowledge and humans know about 800000T. We thus know much more about the oceans than we could even ever know about the moon.

    You might argue that we know 90% about the moon and only 80% about the oceans and thus know less about the oceans than the moon. But this fails on three parts:

    First of all, we can’t know what we don’t know. So whilst we might guess the moon has somewhere around 1000T of total knowledge, we can’t know this for sure. This means talking about percentages makes no sense. We can only say with some certainty there is orders of magnitudes more to learn about the oceans than there is about the moon.

    Second of all, we can estimate the total number of knowledge about the moon is a relatively low order of magnitude compared to the order of magnitude of total knowledge possible about the oceans. This means the percentage is meaningless as even relatively little knowledge leads to a high percentage.

    Third of all, knowledge isn’t linear. There is always low hanging fruit that can be learnt with little efforts and says a lot about what a thing is. Then as it is studied further, more details emerge which fill in the gaps. The gaps in knowledge get smaller and smaller, and the overall picture stays more and more the same. As I said we’ve studied the overall structure of the ocean and focused down where interesting stuff is.

    Thus comparing knowledge based on percentages makes little sense.

    These kinds of things are often used to justify things that aren’t grounded in reality. Such as the lost civilization. It’s in the same vain as something having a non zero chance of happening means it can happen. For example there is a non zero chance your atoms scatter within the next nanosecond. It’s theoretically possible but can’t happen in the real world.

    Hope this makes more sense to you.