Skip the conversation over phone/skype, and it will work even better. Worked fine for me for 20 years (since 1998), until Covid, when Zoom become the new norm.
1,205 karma · joined July 10, 2019
I don't need to invent or exaggerate arguments, because I can point to problems we already have:
* Chornobyl disaster tanked economy of Ukraine for decades. Ukraine still paying for it. Life-time profits from nuclear energy cannot cover loses from just one disaster. Huge thanks for international help.
* Radiation level in my hometown was higher than in many parts of Chornobyl safety zone, because few hot particles are landed near to town and caused micro red-forest (so they are easy to spot). My parents were not able to move, because the price of land and property sank to the bottom ($600 for a 4-bedroom house). I moved to clean city. As a student, I measured the radiation level and found that my lungs were the most radioactive item in the classroom. It was not funny.
* Long term effects of nuclear poisoning. I watched it effect on my younger brother. People are forgetting about the danger of radiation now, so they're stopping taking iodine pills or iodine salt, and cancer level are rising and rising. For example, a whole school was sick in Northern Ukraine about a decade ago just because the school administration replaced iodine salt with regular salt to pocket the difference.
* Long therm safety of nuclear stations, reciprocal stations, waste sites. How to make them prone to diversion from a state sponsored (RF) agent. How to protect Chornobyl zone: lots of radioactive materials are stolen already. It's not possible to maintain long term full time ground patrol in a zone with dangerous levels of radiation.
* Safety subsystem can automatically shutdown a nuclear station when base level drops below threshold.
* Nuclear stations are competing with cities for fresh water because of drough: Rivne and Khmelnytsk stations from 2015, South-Ukrainian station from 2020. How to solve the problem with water?
I'm tired with nonsense about telegraph failure at Banqiao dam, or mixing of flood protection with hydro power generation, or house maintenance with solar power generation, to make nuclear power look safer in comparison.
We cannot build a nuclear station in a desert, because it needs a river or a lake with fresh water for cooling. Nuclear station is the huge steam machine. It cannot work without water. Fresh water is a scarce resource. For example, nuclear station near to me (Rivne Nuclear station, North Ukraine) is at edge of closing since 2015 because of drought. It competes with the city for drinking water. The same situation is at Khmelnyck Nuclear station, Western Ukraine.
New reactors are better protected from mistakes, but they are not protected from evil intent. We are at the war with RF since 2014 and this is THE problem. We already had issues with drinking water in Dnipro river, which supplies lots of cities including capital, and food after Chornobyl, but Chornobyl was just a mistake, not an act of war. Potentially, a nuclear station has enough uranium to cause environmental damage equivalent to 1M of Chornobyls.
LOL. Nuclear materials, including waste, are extremely dangerous in evil hands. It regularly kills people by accident or due to negligence. Chornobyl was an accident. Just imagine what a team of motivated people with evil intent can do with a nuclear station or nuclear waste. Last attempt to use nuclear waste in war was in 2015: Russia-backed terrorist planed to use radioactive waste (Kyshtym) to throw a dirty bomb at Kyiv.
So, let look at nuclear risks:
* potential damage area is extremely high. If a state sponsored actor will take control over a nuclear station or nuclear waste store, he can blast it and disperse over half of a continent. Unlike nuclear weapon, it will be very dirty, so it's better not to do at same continent, but an Asian or African country can do that in the USA.
* potential loses are very high, up to billions of people, if major part of the continent will be contaminated. Nobody can provide insurance for such event.
If we increase the number of nuclear stations by 10x, risks will increase by 10x or more, because it's easier to guard a few stations than a dozen or a hundred stations.
To keep risks low, safety of stations must be improved by the same number, otherwise, by increasing the number of stations by 10x we will have a Chornobyl/Fukushima level event every 3-5 years.
Do you see a way to improve safety of nuclear stations and waste storage by 10x, while keeping construction cost and construction time in acceptable range?
When we phase out coal, say in 20 years, the next acceptable number will be much lower. We need about 20 years to build nuclear stations, so we should orient at this new number, isn't?
When a next nuclear disaster happen, public will reverse it opinion again, so nuclear projects will be frozen and nuclear stations will be decommissioned, like it happened before. Do you have a Plan B for this case?
If a next nuclear disaster will cover a much larger area (due to evil intent), say half of a continent, how much cancer percentage will rise when people will not be able to escape to clean land, clean food, clean water?
Hey, nuclear energy is heavily subsidized by government, and it badly needs batteries for storage too.
For example, insurance for nuclear stations is provided by government for free, because its price is sky-high. If we include cost of insurance into the price of nuclear energy, its price will be too high for economy.
Nuclear can support base load only. For day-to-day management, a hydro, gas, coal, or batteries are necessary. Nuclear is not an option to reduce CO2 emissions substantially without hydro or batteries. We use nuclear power for decades already.
Risks and long term effects of nuclear is few order of magnitude larger than solar.
We should repaint radiation warnings in green, to indicate that.
> Gas is more interesting. At 500g/kwh it's on higher side normally. So there must be more to this.
Nord Stream 2.
* Yeah, the number of deaths from radiation poisoning is very low, so we can be reckless.
I can create a device, which will harvest 1W of power from starlight infinitely. Good luck with your ambitions.
A typical package manager is already goal-aware, like `make`. It's input DSL is far from English, but it's not hard to translate your English sentence into «apache postgress rsync» by matching text to package descriptions.
Package manager requires a solver for dependencies, constraints, and conflicts, which is far from trivial. For example, Fedora(RedHat) switched from in-house solver for yum/dnf to zypper SAT solver (libzypp) developed by SuSE/Ximian/Novell.
Unfortunately, package managers are DSL, not a general purpose language.
The first 3 generation of languages were powered by higher levels of abstraction, which were possible because of better machines.
However, further increase in level of abstraction did not make developers an order of magnitude more productive, except for niche areas. Switching to a better development process (Scrum) can achieve order of magnitude improvement in developer performance, while switching of programming language cannot.
Anybody can claim that their product is a next gen revolutionary market shaking breakthrough. It's the self-promotion, not a science.
apt-get install foo bar baz
Unfortunately, this is not a general-purpose language, but apt + shell is.
«A Compiler is a software that typically takes a high level language (Like C++ and Java) code as input and converts the input to a lower level language at once.»
«Assembler A translator from assembly language programs to machine language programs.
Compiler A translator from “high-level” language programs into programs in a lower-level language.
Transpiler A translator from high-level language programs into programs in a different high-level language.»
«The compiler is software that converts a program written in a high-level language (Source Language) to low-level language (Object/Target/Machine Language).»