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Cake day: March 30th, 2024

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  • If there is no single being on earth that is able to eat it, I’d consider it non-edible. Even if all humans and animals worked together, they could at best eat some parts of the mountain. But that I’d rather consider eating rocks, not eating ‘the mountain’.

    If we define absorbtion of the mountain by a black hole as eating, I might accept that. Otherwise I double down. :P





  • Indeed my previous statement seems to be a bit outdated. Modern nuclear plants seem to be more flexible than those in the past.

    Historically, nuclear power plants were built as baseload plants, without load following capability to keep the design simple. Their startup or shutdown took many hours as they were designed to operate at maximum power, and heating up steam generators to the desired temperature took time.[2] Nuclear power generation has been also portrayed as inflexible by anti-nuclear activists and the German Federal Environment Ministry, while others claimed “that the plants might clog the power grid”.[7] Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute.[7] Nuclear power plants in France operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control. Some units follow a variable load program with one or two large power changes per day. Some designs allow for rapid changes of power level around rated power, a capability that is usable for frequency regulation.[8] A more efficient solution is to maintain the primary circuit at full power and to use the excess power for cogeneration.[9]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant

    Nevertheless, I am very sceptical regarding the technology. I think our primary target should be to lower the overall energy consumption. And then we should try to reverse the logic and instead of production following consumption, to have consumption follow production. With smart grids, heat pumps, electric cars, thermal storage systems etc. we have many instruments to flatten out peaks in demand.


  • As far as I know nuclear is not scalable at all. Once you start the reaction, you have a more or less constant output. No chance to dynamically increase or decrease according to the highly volatile demand.

    Gas, hydropower etc. can be controlled to the second. Even wind and solar allow you at least in one direction to lower the output if there is an oversupply in the grid.

    Nuclear is the worst type of energy to be combined with renewables.


  • I agree. An open discussion should be as complete as possible and ideally consider all relevant aspects.

    From my perspective, the time perspective in context of nuclear waste is really significant. Until we find a clean solution to fully recycle or dispose nuclear waste, there are almost infinite maintenance efforts even ignoring the danger of the waste itself.

    If we want to monitor the potential radioactive pollution around where the waste is stored, it means roads, elevators, protective doors, sensors, measuring systems, protective gear etc. have to be constantly maintained and renewed. We must upkeep the monitoring for 1 million years until the waste is no longer dangerous.

    How long is the lifetime of this equipment? Even if we assume an unrealistic lifetime of 100 years, it means we have to renovate all storage facilities 10000 times. 10000 new elevators, 10000 new roads etc.

    1 million years is just a completely insane period of time and we have no clue if we really ever find a safe way to deal with this stuff. So people in the future will have to do all this maintenance even if hunanity stopped using nuclear power tens of thousands of years ago.

    And that’s just the pollution directly caused by maintenance. If there’s an accident while installing a new elevator and radioactive material is released, we have way bigger issues.


  • Why does safety only consider air pollution and deaths? The most concerning aspect of nuclear power IMO is the nuclear waste. There is still no safe way to permanently dispose or store it. In Germany we store nuclear waste in salt caves that were meant to be a very stable system. But already after a few decades we find leaking barrels and contamination of groundwater reservoirs.

    This contamination will keep getting worse for hundreds of thousands of years and may have negative health impact on humans and animals.

    Just because it doesn’t pollute the air right now, it doesn’t mean it’s safe.


  • rbn@sopuli.xyzto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    2 months ago

    Yes, I completely see that. This is not a black or white question. You can use Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS… and learn close to nothing or you can geek around hour after hour to expand the boundaries of your device.

    I would just assume, that you learn less if everything you want to do, works out of the box. And ‘working out of the box’ a typical selling point of the Apple ecosystem. Which of course doesn’t mean that you can’t have a steep learning curve. Your use cases obviously weren’t delivered out of the box, so you had to get creative as well.

    I had a jailbroken iPod Touch with a shell on it and spend hours and days overcoming system boundaries just out of spite. I also remember vividly trying to bring mobile games to a Symbian phone, tweaking around with a HP iPAQ on Windows Mobile, manually typing Midi ringtones with a text editor on a Nokia. :D


  • rbn@sopuli.xyzto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    2 months ago

    Personally, I guess that you learn more the more issues you have. MacOS is a more closed down ecosystem compared to Windows, malware is less popular and as hardware comes usually bundled with the OS, you shouldn’t encounter as many driver or hardware issues in general.

    As a kid I had so much trouble with incompatible software, viruses, adware, drivers, broken hardware etc. And as I had noone to ask, it tought me a lot about the fundamentals of IT and how to research such issues myself.