Many people keep offering advice to consider a VPN and while VPN is very usefull, I have not yet come accross a reason why not use ssh auth. Like what can actually happen? From my pov the risk of running all sorts of userspace software with internet access is much greater, even without port forwarding.
Exactly. The issue today is that even if you optimize your OS and DE to be very memory efficient, it matters very little as soon as you open a modern web browser. And without a modern web browser a big part of the online experience is broken.
Linux is already pretty decent on memory even with a DE like gnome/cinnamon running. I have an 15 year old laptop with Cinnamon / Arch and it uses 700-800MB once booted.
Frequently the issue isn't memory (I've maxed the memory out at 8GB).
Older systems have issues with composing the web pages itself. A lot of people blame JS, but a lot of the time JS isn't the issue e.g VSCode & Discord runs nicely on the laptop.
e.g. YouTube has a feature called ambient mode, this adds like a white gradient around the video element. On old intel iGPUs this absolutely wrecks video playback performance and you get about 15FPS video. Turning this off the video plays smoothly. The backdrop IIRC is a CSS gradient, the GPU/CPU doesn't have the grunt to render the backdrop gradient with the video on top at a smooth FPS.
So while you might have the memory for the extra tabs, browsing can be a sluggish experience because the GPU/CPU just can't execute the code on the page well.
Eh, kinda. Work forces me to have Jira, Confluence, Gitlab, Copilot, the other Copilot formerly known as Outlook, the other other Copilot formerly known as Teams, as well as Slack of course, and a dozen other webslop apps open… and it still all fits in <8GB RAM.
Which is a lot worse than the <1GB you'd get with well-optimized native tools, but try running Win11 with "only" 8GB RAM.
I'm convinced the next windows GUI will just be an electron app that runs copilot as the desktop, forcing you to argue with it to open a file or run a program. Doesn't even have titlebars or window buttons or a task bar, just one big copilot bar at the bottom that you can ask whats already running or to close an app. All of this written in JavaScript of course
This rule of three structure too: "We are a Western European company, so GDPR and data sovereignty are at the heart of our architecture, not an afterthought."
I understood that their point was not that Docker makes it slow, but that if it needs Docker to run, it probably needs a complicated environment which makes it slow.
I’m not using docker to deploy things because the things I’m deploying need a complicated environment, I’m using it because it’s an incredibly easy and consistent way to deploy things. It’s an immutable image that is highly convenient to distribute, update, and manage, which is pretty much the opposite experience of installing software on virtual machines.
Dropping a docker compose file into Portainer and I’m up and running with a new service in a few seconds. I’ve removed the overhead and spin up time of VMs, there’s no more running Chef/Ansible to do basic VM management for every single service I’m running, no more cookbooks/playbooks or manual SSHing to get software updated, no more minutes to hours of fixing configuration management that never seems to work the first time, no more bad in-place upgrade states, etc.
> it’s an incredibly easy and consistent way to deploy things
I keep seeing people saying this but my experience has always been otherwise.
Docker makes it really difficult to tinker with the internals of the container. They call it a development environment but you can’t easily edit a file and restart a service. There is bind mounts but the IO performance is terrible, necessitating use of volumes. Every base image is opinionated in how things are done, where things are stored even for the same software.
Since it’s so difficult to tinker with the internals most vendors will provide a web interface abstraction on top of their software (like NPM for nginx) and if you so much so veer off the happy path by 1 inch the abstraction can no longer track the state of things and breaks, necessitating a full reinstall or editing the config manually.
Of course this is in the context of self hosting. If you’re paid in your day job to maintain a tower of babel then by all means fire up all those dynos.
Why do I need to tinker with the internals of the container?
Even if I need to do that, the existence of a Docker image doesn’t stop me from making my own implementation as long as the application in question provides some kind of alternate distribution.
E.g., if there’s an RPM/DEB package, binary executable, JAR file, source code, etc, I can just make my own docker container with my own implementation and mess around with the internals as much as I want.
I don’t think of it as a “development environment” so much as a “deployment environment.” Yes, it is more difficult to “tinker” with a running container. And for services that are just supposed to run and not be tinkered with, that’s wonderful. I’ve deployed services that run on literally tens of thousands of containers and needing to tinker with the innards at this point is kind of a smell, like if you said “yeah, but I need to be able to add oil to my car while driving down the street because you never know when it’s all gonna suddenly leak out,”
How would you form this response to make it less condensending and patronizing? I won't judge if it is patronizing or not because I'm not very good at this kind of thing but would like to understand the issue.
OP has given all that they need, English is probably not their first language, and the first response was to ask for even more unpaid time and labour (presumably in English) in a format that is likely much more difficult for them to summarise coherent thoughts succinctly in, while addressing zero of their issues. They’re asking for MORE effort of the volunteer to fix their bot’s fuckup.
I’m honestly struggling to think of a more insulting way to respond to this. At least “Fuck off” isn’t pretending to care, it’s fewer words to read and isn’t asking for an indeterminate amount of time from you.
a) don't apologize for the other persons feelings, but for your actions that lead to it
b) don't look like you are trying to take the conversation out of the community space it's happening in and/or hiding details by going to a private call (you can offer a call, but it shouldn't be the expectation)
c) Acknowledge the concrete complaints made. Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means when they complain that it didn't happen in a staging environment first?
d) a-c also lead to "don't sound like any cookie-cutter PR response to a complaint ever, people have learned those are not genuine". Especially if you are a project that makes a big deal out of its community interacting with said community.
e) ideally announce some concrete first step, e.g. pausing the bot
One point I'd like to add as someone who has worked in IT support for years:
Don't answer when you haven't done your homework. Either you check for yourself if what they claim has happened happened and acknowledge the fuckup or you just trust them as go on "if this is true and we have no reason not to trust you, it should never have happened".
But not understanding? The description of the incident was pretty clear. Maybe think about it and investigate till you understand what the problem is, and then answer.
Or answer being clear about that if you feel like you need to respond now. Acknowledge there is a problem, say you'll have to look into the details before you can say more, come back with specific questions if you need answers.
> Are you truly "struggling to understand" what someone means
You've turned this around into a very different quote, and shouldn't use quote marks for that. They wrote:
> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.
I don't like their response and agree with a lot of people in the thread it looks like they are trying to do the call to take it private. But we don't have to make up stuff.
Yes, but what is there to understand? A bot erased the hard work of people. That is the point.
Sure there may be more fine detail to understand around the guidelines etc, but first you should acknowledge that (A) your bot fucked up big time, (B) everybody would be pissed if years of work would be overwritten in such disrespectful manner and (C) that this isn't how you want to treat your community.
If you don't manage that this person made the right call when they decided to leave.
Sure, but there is no reason to fabricate a quote they never said. Their offputting real response can stand on its own without imagining a new one that never happened.
If the post gave any acknowledgement to the already stated complaints I'd agree with you, but it does not, and that does stand out and leads to my reading.
"We are sorry for overwriting the manual translations of all our volunteers. We have disabled the workflow and are working on restoring the old, manual translations.
We had planned to use the translation bot to help you guys, but based on your response, we have understood that we have overshot our target, and actually made it harmful.
Would you be interested in a call where we can apologize in person, and interview you about how the workflow integration could be designed so it actually helps you and other translators?"
Oops, sounds like we screwed up really badly. Sorry. :(
We'll turn off the sumobot, and put things back the way the SUMO Japanese community was used to operating.
Would you consider not quitting after we've put things back the way they were? :)
"Fuck, sorry, we're going to take the bot behind the barn and shoot it. Hopefully one day we can make it up to you. Also the person responsible for this atrocity was just fired."
Or, alternatively, if you do not intend to even try to do better, at least be honest: "ok, bye."
Solar energy has a place in the modern grid but some crucial information is missing from this commercial. Energy return on energy invested. When you calculate the amount of land, mined resources, labor, waste disposal issues and other resources needed to make the dream building a vast excess of solar, upgrading the grid to accommodate it and storing energy in hydrocarbons or even hydrogen, you begin to realize how far fetched this dream is.
The truth is usually somewhere in the middle. We will use the technologies described but when something sounds too good to be true, it is.
But the hype is huge. Hydrogen has much more people working on it in the EU Commission than nuclear despite nuclear being the biggest single electricity source in EU and hydrogen still in the prototype stage.
Solar and battery is bigger than you can tell from where you're looking.
Large cities in S.E. Asia are absolutely choking on smog, much of produced from shitty motor bikes and rickshaws. A shift to battery powered personal transportation with the batteries powered by local solar panels installed on buildings or walls or anywhere and everywhere they can stuff them can completely eliminate that pollution and completely eliminiate the need to import massive amounts of fuel.
The supply chain for the electricity can literally be like 200ft from the panels on a roof to the stand of motorbikes charging below. Compare that to trucks that have to drive miles to reload gas stations, or the maintenance costs of installing pipe infrastructure to transport it.
Sure on that regard and many others, this looks really great.
We still have long pipeline and centralized infrastructure for producing the panel themselves, with also its own environmental impact. I don't mean to lower the benefits of solar panel here, and other practical solutions we have under the hand clearly have at least as many negative impacts.
As other stated, we don't have yet a fabulous solution that allows to give every human the opportunity to blow and flourish with an abondance of energy that isn't generating pollution and large scale destruction of biodiversity. However the simple fact that such a goal is distinctively clear and considerable is already a big asset
Both solar and wind will create many periods of abundant electricity. This is happening. EU is betting on hydrogen as a strategy for dealing with this abundance. There is a hydrogen ladder [1], which describes the best opportunities currently known for hydrogen.
They already create periods of abundant electricity, which is why we have negative prices. In practice this means you have to pay the producers for the electricity and then pay once more someone to take it and use it. This could be solved by removing the guaranteed purchasing price and dispatch priority, but then the entire solar economy becomes a lot different.
While periods of abundant electricity might seem like a good business opportunity, it turns out it is not easy to efficiently use huge amounts of electricity that come and go according to the weather. Most factories need to have reliable production to be economical.
I know this is the internet but you have no idea what are you talking about. Nuclear power has nothing to do with nuclear arsenal as the spent fuel from modern reactor is not viable weapons material. There are many countires that have peacefull nuclear power programmes and no nuclear weapons and there are also countries that heave nuclear weapons or even their own nuclear weapon program, but no nuclear power.
France has nuclear because oil was expensive and they didn't have many other alternatives like the Germans.
>Nuclear power has nothing to do with nuclear arsenal
That's not true. Once you have the expertise and infrastructure to handle nuclear fuel and waste you can also relatively easily reprocess the fuel to create weapon-grade material. It's certainly much harder if you start with solar panels and wind turbines! :)
Likewise if you have the facilities needed to create nuclear weapons, it makes sense to make some money on the side making electricity as well.
__modern__ reactors are build to be rarely opened and burn off as much plutonium as possible. But that's obviously not how the french nuclear program started.
Only doing nuclear research for military purposes is frowned upon by your neighbours and makes you look suspicous, and only having a civilian program is super complex and expensive and doesn't even make you untouchable.
Luckily building the infrastructure for a nuclear arsenal goes hand in hand with building the infrastructure for civilian uses, so you have a buy one, get one free situation.
>> The National Assembly approved the initial nuclear energy plan for a five-year term on July 24, 1952. The plan sought to build two experimental reactors at the Marcoule nuclear site, and construction began in 1955. Shortly thereafter, the construction of a third reactor commenced. In addition to generating electricity, these reactors would produce plutonium in sufficient quantities to support a civil advanced reactor program and potentially a military one, at a cost three times lower than highly enriched uranium.[69][70][71]
>> In 1957 Euratom was created, and under cover of the peaceful use of nuclear power the French signed deals with West Germany and Italy to work together on nuclear weapons development.[18] The Chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer told his cabinet that he "wanted to achieve, through EURATOM, as quickly as possible, the chance of producing our own nuclear weapons".
I agree. Prehaps my wording that civilian use has nothing to do with military was too strong. There were other examples of civial programs in the past (like RBMK) that complemented military use very well. I'm frustrated because this argument is used to bash nuclear power, but never other energy sources. In general it helps to have developed technology and energy abundance to develop military tech and any technology can be missused.
Civilian nuclear power is not needed to have a weapons programs, it can help tho.
I'm genuinely curious, why are there so many extraordinarily pro-nuclear people on this forum? And how many of them have greater than zero experience with nuclear anything? I worked in the nuclear power industry for a decade and people in the industry are not as maniacally pro-nuclear as the people in this forum.
This forum has lots of highly intelligent individuals and nuclear power is the most intelligent energy source to switch to so we can stop relying on fossil fuels.
Perhaps you were working with people who don't feel the need to talk about how great nuclear is all the time because you all work in the industry and understand that already.
It's weird, isn't it? There's a lot of nuclear cheerleaders, and it makes me suspicious when they're also anti-renewables rather than "yes, and".
Essentially everyone has forgotten the arguments of the nineties: nuclear weapons proliferation, waste dumping, and covering the entirety of western Europe in a thin layer of airborne radioactive particles. As well as the more practical cost overruns. Personally I think it would be worth someone giving SMR a go, but in a different country from me and at their own expense.
"nuclear weapons proliferation,..."
Seems like we got that anyway thanks to the military industrial complex without getting much in the way of nuclear energy generation.
Lots of places built dual-purpose reactors? The initial UK nuclear program (Windscale) was weapons-first. The famous French reactor programme and their independent nuclear deterrent are also linked.
Also, this is why people are reluctant to let some of the world's larger carbon emitters, the oil states in the middle east, build nuclear reactors. Iran has a small, heavily monitored fleet.
Fair enough, but my point is that nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons development are two different things and one doesn't necessarily lead to the other. In other words one can be against a particular use of a technology without being against the technology itself.
That's a "yes, and" kind of thing. We can't build nuclear fast enough yet. So we need both. I'd argue that wind and solar is much more important at this point since the growth of those is now faster than nuclear has ever been. And fast growth of non-fossil energy sources is priority #1 right now. We can free up some land later with nuclear. Wind and solar isn't going to push any species to extinction, so any damage is reversible.
Though I'm a bit wary of nuclear given there are studies indicating that the heat energy added by thermal power plants contributes surprisingly much to global warming. If we can replace all thermal power plants with renewables that's a nice contribution to reducing global warming. On the order of CO2 emissions from planes if I remember correctly.
I'm sure we could "afford" the heat from thermal power plants if we didn't have so many greenhouse gases. But when we're already so close to the edge of the cliff, every little bit counts.
If we produced a gigawatt of energy by cleanest way possible, where do you think this gigawatt ends up? Some "energy dumpyard" somewhere outside the solar system?
The temperature is a balance between energy incoming from the sun and energy being radiated off into space. Wind and solar don't change that balance directly, although the lower reflectivity of solar panels makes a small local difference. Ultimately it's the transmissibility spectrum of the atmosphere that matters. Which is why we care about CO2 in the first place.
Nuclear weapons aren't that tough on a nation-scale to produce. It's generally thought that places like Saudi Arabia, Japan, Australia, etc. could make a nuclear weapon in a few months if they really wanted.
Can you elaborate on that? Are the processes for making fuel for energy so different from the processes for bomb material that one doesn't help the other at all?
And by wanting nuclear, within the context of the build pace of nuclear is to support the status quo - ie oil and gas.
It's the same conclusion as hydrogen car investment. It's easy to maintain ice technology, but the generation, storage, trabsport, use are riddled with issues.
In the macro, it created a nature preserve that humans will barely visit, won't hunt in, won't deforest; and requires no active enforcement to keep that way.
Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally and we are not talking about Nuclear Waste, as the title suggests, but clean water. We also cannot compare the tritium with mercury, because tritium, even if released in the ocean, decays away. Mecury, on the other hand, stays forever. The concerns that the water will affect marine life might be well intended but will cause more harm than good. In the worst possible case, this water will do less harm than what the other industries are releasing routinely, including water treatment plants. If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else.
People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution, because we are irrationaly overestimating the dangers of nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity. These deaths are SOLELY a consequence of fear-based decision making. I cannot envision a bright future if we don’t start evaluating the consequences of different scenarios with a scientific approach and stop taking decisions based on feelings.
> "Tritium is already present in the ocean naturally"
Exactly. And if the quantities Japan are talking about are correct (860 TBq / trillion becquerels), this is a huge fuss about nothing. France's La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility discharges many times more tritium than that into the English Channel every single year as part of it's normal operations!
> In addition to high levels of hazardous radionuclides such as strontium-90,
TEPCO on 27 August 2020 acknowledged for the first time the presence of
high levels of carbon-14 in the contaminated tank water
And so do nuclear plants as part of their day to day operations. I don't have the figures to back that up but it's more than likely that The Fukushima Daiichi plant released more tritium during its operational life than the amount we're talking about right now. (Edit: according to the source from Wikipedia[1], we're talking about ~800TBq, which represents between 2 years and a decade of a operating plant discharge).
> People are dying every day due to fossil fuel caused pollution.
You don't dive into this in a single sentence, but I do want to raise the point that fossil fuels, while they are bad are better than the alternatives for many countries, especially developing ones. Let's consider some alternatives.
Wood and animal waste: for developing nations that need any energy they can get, they will burn these 2, which are massively worse than fossil fuels, and no where near as energy dense.
Coal: massive step up from the above. Yes it burns dirty, but there are capture methods to make coal cleaner.
Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions and again, energy dense. Turned into LNG, it's easy to transport and use elsewhere.
Nothing... This is the point that I think lots of people miss. Having access to energy dense materials like coal or LNG are a major factor in bring developing nation people out of poverty. Not having these "dirty" energy sources that kill some is way worse than not having it at all (more people will die without the energy).
People need to be reasonable and realize that rich nations can go nuclear and renewable, but we still need to allow developing nations to have access to the others, even encourage it. That means first world nations need to produce more LNG and supply it wherever possible. Sadly many want to stop all fossil fuel production.
Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas.
Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the developed world. We have better technology and far more options now.
I've never actually sat down and worked it out, but it seems to me that this is more of a political buoy than legitimately optimized.
Once you factor in all the processing of certain biomass, specifically I recall a European nation, the UK perhaps, was burning wood product. Wood is significantly less energy dense than coal for instance... If your workers are driving to and from work, if you're cutting it down with two stroke chainsaws, loading it into trucks, packing it into trains... I think these factors were all removed from calculations to conclude it's "carbon neutral".
And for some reason, probably wrongly, I'd like to imagine leaving the trees up is more beneficial (even if the fuel is a byproduct of industry), but I can imagine during a tree's lifecycle there's a "peak sequestration" age/size they're maybe targeting.
You're quite right that wood biomass is not fully carbon-neutral when fossil fuels are expended in harvesting it and transporting it.
UK biomass is estimated to have a total-lifecycle carbon footprint of 230g CO2 per kWh. This is much worse than wind, solar, or nuclear. But still a very significant improvement on burning coal and natural gas! Compared to coal, it's about a 4x improvement.
> Also known as biomass. These are a renewable resource and massively better than fossil fuels when it comes to climate change. Obviously you need to ensure they are burnt in a controlled environment (not dumping smoke into people's kitchens, for example), but in the right circumstances they are vastly preferable to coal and gas.
And won't they decay, releasing the CO2, anyway? IIRC, I think I heard decay referred to as "slow fire."
The only bad aspect of biomass fuel that I can think of is that people might be tempted to cut down established forests to get it.
Let's not forget the simple logistical difficulty of using biomass. It is not as energy dense, which makes moving its own weight around more expensive too.
"The net energy ratio between energy output and input was 10.41.. Energy used for hauling hog fuel represented the largest part (36.27%) of the total energy input. The net energy ratio decreased 0.11 with each additional transportation mile
the net energy ratios reported here were on the high end of this range as energy
input for possible active drying, storage, and final delivery was not included.
" [0]
"The energy content was taken at 137,000 BTUs per gallon for diesel, and
125,000 BTUs per gallon for gasoline (Adams 1983)...
output: the mean HHV ranged from 8,946 to 9,105 BTUs/pound
" [0]
A gallon weighs about 6 pounds, so it seems like pound-for-pound (pine-tree) biomass is less than half as productive as gasoline.*
Honestly, I was expecting worse. But over doubling energy costs isn't negligible, especially for poorer countries.
*this is at a glance work, not an actual deep dive
[0] Net energy output from harvesting small-diameter trees using a mechanized system
Fei Pan
Han-Sup Han
Leonard R. Johnson
FOREST PRODUCTS JOURNAL VOL. 58, NO. 1/2
William J. Elliot
> Developing countries need not repeat the same mistakes as the developed world. We have better technology and far more options now.
They can only do so if we help them. Providing the technology FOR FREE.
Human race is slowly outgrowing the concept of money. Current system does not fit into the future we have ahead of us. And quite a bit of high profile ppl see that and are afraid of losing power.
When you burn a tree, everything that's released into the atmosphere is something the tree absorbed from the atmosphere as it grew. So it's plus minus zero in terms of pollution.
When you burn non-renewables, i.e. stuff dug up from the ground, you're adding pollution into the atmosphere.
> Natural gas: one of the best out there. Low emissions
Per BTU heat output, natural gas outputs more than half as much CO2 (about 60%) compared to coal. That's not "low emissions" by any stretch.
Plus, the entire natural gas distribution system is leaky to an extent that is not fully understood yet. Recent reports suggest it is very leaky. Leaking...methane, which is 80-200x worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Keep in mind that this is really just a nicer-sounding way of saying that we get xxx-xxxx (can't be arsed to do the half-life based math at the moment) years worth of equivalent C02 warming in just 8 years. Given how global warming is accelerating toward/through various points-of-no-return, stopping to point out that it's 'only' 8 years is doing a disservice to the efforts of communicating the danger of our current situation.
Well, one reason is that a lot of people casually assume that the baseline level of radiation in the natural environment is 0.0000000...., but it's not.
Uranium has been extracted from seawater before. It's not economically practical, but it can be done, because seawater has uranium in it already. Tritium is also already in there.
Issues of concentration at the point where it is put into the ocean can be an issue, but once dispersed this won't turn the pristine, 0.0000000...% radioactive ocean into a radioactive hellscape, it represents an impercetible percentage increase of what is already there. That doesn't mean we shouldn't think about the implications, but "thinking about the implications" shouldn't start from incorrect understandings of the nature of the current world.
Earth is an amazing environment. It does an incredible job of giving us a low-radiation environment, compared to most of the rest of the universe which ranges from "dangerous" to "radioactive wasteland". But it's not perfect and we are not at a flat 0 even here.
No one really does make decisions like that though. The world is not a lab where you can control all the variables. Nor can anyone have the breadth of knowledge to understand all relevant research. We just adopt a set of heuristics based on our own experience and understanding.
And here is a good example of this in action. The optimal way to connect a nuclear power station to the grid is with a big overhead power line. Except that you would have to build it in a scenic area. Millions of people have a heuristic that make them believe thag powerlines damage the environment. There is no scientific basis for that. But you put the cable underground anyway at huge expense. The objective is to generate electricity, not deploy an absolutely optimal solution. And a piece of infrastructure built in the world has hundreds of issues like that. The only solution we have to that is politics.
Nuclear is like a religious thing. No one is actually looking at facts and science, they just have belief that this is a solution or the problem. Look how conclusions from an expert panel are shrugged at as "nuclear is obviously the only right solution", no one cares whether those conclusion are based on science or not.
Personally I don't disagree that nuclear is probably needed at least short term, but it's not a a reason to ignore or deny the problems it causes, some of them are hard to solve, and probably some also even hard to anticipate.
Well, it's actually that radionuclides like radioactive strontium and cesium are still present in the wastewater above regulatory standards. These heavy metals bioaccumulate as they have similar characteristics to biological nutrients like potassium and calcium, and so are absorbed into biomass. Successive rounds of predation in the ocean can concentrate these elements in food species like tuna etc.
> In the 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, public trust in the government and the power company has suffered. As the decommissioning process will last at least another 30 years or more, the Japanese government should reconsider how it makes decisions about decommissioning and reconstruction. Public concern related to the government’s recent announcement that it will release treated water into the sea is the tip of iceberg. It is the responsibility of the Japanese government and nuclear industry to manage this process successfully on behalf of all citizens of Japan and the world. The accident is not over yet."
And in order to come to any of those conclusions you have to get independent experts to perform a review. Your comment is an emotional defence of your own heuristics. Science requires verification.
Also, the ad hominem attack on people wasting their time on this kind of study is really weak. We should want proper reviews of all large scale industrial processes that release into the ocean. That does not preclude nuclear power.
There is sure a lot of water in the ocean, but it's still possible to poison stuff locally, wherever you drop the stuff is going to have higher concentration, at least for a short while.
>The process for releasing typically dilutes to a standard level before releasing into the ocean/ other water way. So when it's released, it's already at a level you could swim in (drink?), there's no process for it accumulating into a more concentrated form in the ocean, and it has a half-life of 12 years.
Yes, I am a researcher and a Ph.D. student in the field of nuclear reactor physics. I regularly operate and do experiments on a research nuclear reactor. My name is in my hn username and I have no problem defending my claims. I also own a popular TikTok account where I do science communication about nuclear reactors. My information about the water discharge comes from reports by IAEA, who is the authority on the matter.
That seems like an odd request. Something that is safe diluted across an entire ocean may not be safe to drink. In fact, regular seawater isn't all that great for you.
It's the released water not the seawater. That causes
vomiting, delirium, and hallucinations :-)
“A Japanese official said it’s okay if you drink this water,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a news briefing. “Then please drink it.”
The poster you asked is not that Japanese official. They just said dumping it was not a concern. Posting someone else's claim and asking them if they're ready to "back their claim" is disingenuous.
I realize that, and I would imagine everybody else in this thread.
That was why, to try to avoid sounding disingenuous, I tried to apologize upfront for the question, and recognized and appreciated the poster qualifications.
I was trying to qualify what safe means in this context. A bit like when talking for example to an aircraft manufacturer CEO, for example as in:
1) "This new airplane model is perfectly safe to fly" ...type of safe
OR
2) "This new airplane model is perfectly safe to fly, I will do a weekly
trip on it with my family" ...type of safe
This argument is not useful. #1 and #2 differ based on the disposition of the CEO. A stupid, or not good at thinking about statistics and risks, CEO will happily get on a plane to get a bigger bonus, even if it's not that safe.
You're probably thinking of getting a speck of a radioactive metal (like Uranium or Plutonium) in your lungs. That gets stuck there, the body has no mechanisms to eliminate it, and it will keep emitting gamma rays all your life.
Tritium is very different. It is an isotope of Hydrogen, and a water molecule containing one atom of Tritium is fairly indistinguishable from any other water molecule. The most important thing is that it has no reason to stick to any other Tritium from that glass that you drank. It will spread throughout your body. Like all other water molecules, it will probably be out of your body in a mater of days. Tritium's half life is 12 years, so the vast, super vast majority of all the Tritium you'd drink with that glass of water will be long gone before it has a chance to decay.
But even if some of these atoms decay, their decay is a beta particle (an electron, and if you really care one antineutrino as well, although that antineutrino will probably travel through a few galaxies before it interacts with anything). The beta particle is not very damaging (compare that with the gamma rays emitted by Plutonium). For sure a single one is not damaging at all. Now, in contrast with the speck of the radioactive metal above, this beta particle will not be followed by others like it, because the Tritium that emitted it doesn't have any other Tritiums next to it.
Hmm, if people were worried about ingestion I was certain it had to be alpha particles. I stand corrected.
I’m not sure how much the half life matters a lot if you ingest a lot. To be fair, kinda unlikely from drinking water, but might be if a fish has been gathering Tritium it’s whole life (but then, it’s probably already doing that now for much larger quantities).
Either way, I suppose the 3 X-rays I had today completely obviate any relevance of the tritium.
> might be if a fish has been gathering Tritium it’s whole life
Unless fish have some mechanism for selectively keeping tritium (which might be very useful) or don't replace their water, there's no way for a fish to "[gather] Tritium its whole life".
Notwithstanding your qualifications, this reply is a bit off the mark. The tritium in that vial is indeed no danger, the beta decay of the tritium won't get past the vial itself. Tritium ingested is indeed a danger, however, because once in the body, the water molecules that carry the tritium can and will go anywhere in the body. Most will be excreted in the urine, but some will some will end up in cell nuclei, where their low energy beta decay can and does do real damage to DNA.
Note that I am not arguing that the tritium releases proposed in Japan are dangerous. They are far below any theshold for risk that should concern us. But that's because the concentration is so low, not because ingested tritiated water isn't potentially dangerous.
Richmod may be an expert in his field. But even he couldn't point to anything that could actually happen.
His report, and that of his colleagues, is intentionally vague, with no predictions and lot of FUD. Seriously, there is not a single thing they point to and say: "This could happen!"
It's almost as if tritium wasn't that problematic and they were trying to get people who payed them for the study at least something for their troubles.
Tritium has half-life of 12 years, into helium. It isn't something that would persist for generations in considerable levels.
Indeed. I was assuming that the comment I was replying to was referring to helium in general because they were not more specific, and the normal form is ⁴He — we’re not filling party balloons with it.
Another silly question. As is known that Tritium is bioaccumulative to the point of probably acting as a persistent organic pollutant, why they don't use biology to concentrate and eventually remove it from the tanks?. Or to keep it safely trapped in the tanks?
Tritiated water isn't particularly bioaccumulative: chemically, it's water and acts like it. The body doesn't preferentially retain tritium compared to normally hydrogen, so it doesn't concentrate in tissues like, say, dioxins or mercury. It can be incorporated into tissue, but not preferentially to normal hydrogen.
Making dioxins with tritium atoms in place of hydrogen would probably be a bad idea, though.
“HTO has a short biological half-life in the human body of 7 to 14 days, which both reduces the total effects of single-incident ingestion and precludes long-term bioaccumulation of HTO from the environment.”
> Because some people are concerned about biological accumulation of OBT in the environment, we briefly summarize the behavior of OBT in the ecosystem. Scientific data about the environmental behavior of OBT are still limited, however, it is clear that biological accumulation is not the case for tritium including OBT.
"A factory worker ingested tritium over 7.4 years. His exposure dose was estimated at 3–6 Sv. He developed isochromic anemia, and subsequently died of pancytopenia"
At a dose factor of 0.000018 mSv/kBq for tritiated water, you would get a 3 Sv dose from "only" 1/5000 of the water.
Drinking (or inhaling) 50,000 gallons of the (undiluted, so best case in terms of volume) water from storage tanks would probably get you with kidney failure somewhat before the tritium does.
I know very little, but the amount of tritium involved likely decays into a trivial amount of helium. A quick look at Wikipedia suggests that there is 2.1 g of Tritium in 860,000 cubic meters of water.
It is without doubt a critical gaps in information. We need to know first how much radionuclides already exist in the ocean (per volume), and where those comes from. All combustion and mining release to some degree radioactive isotopes into the environment, and much of it ends up sooner or later into the ocean.
A common popular science experiment for kids is to show water samples from different sources and store them for a few days. Most assume that rain is pretty clean, but in reality it tend to be almost comparable to untreated sewage water and one of the more nasty samples after a few days.
More studies are needed is something everyone should agree on regardless on which outcome people are voting for.
But what's the alternative? You want any random idiot to have a voice? I'd assume there are more un-educated idiots than educated ones - your personal issue is not getting the credential to prove your worth.
> nuclear power which are and have always been the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity
Definitely not. There's a good argument to be made nuclear power in the 'global North' is relatively safe today. At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.
> At the same time you will be hard pressed to find evidence that nuclear power was safe in the past or is safe today in politically unstable environments.
First of all, that isn't the same claim the post above to you was making. Second, [1]here's a chart showing the cleanest and safest power sources, backing up the claim made in the comment above yours. Nuclear is cleanest, and on safety it's close but falls behind the renewables (still 2-3 orders of magnitude safer than the fossil fuel sources).
That's the issue with "safe" - it's difficult to capture in a single factor like number of accidents and for this factor, the distribution of the metric is very different.
Here's a different metric that entails both: Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency?
It's very hard to explain away. So my point is: It's not black and white unfortunately, and it's both a technological and societal effort to make nuclear power safe.
> Market price to ensure a nuclear power plant against damages. Why are they so high as to make nuclear power creation uneconomical? A market inefficiency?
Yes. The nonrenewable energies (coal, natgas, oil) in my source are constantly emitting carbon dioxide, an unpriced negative externality. This cost is entirely socialized - insurers don't pay for it, producers and users don't pay for it - it's largely being shifted to future residents of planet earth, with a small fraction of the cost starting to be felt now, and paid by government (emergency relief). Has both high cost and high (100%) risk. Insurers don't take on any of this. Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.
Very unlikely. In this case 'the market' is not WallStreetBets, it's experts around the world who do nothing else but assess and estimate the risks.
There are two explanations I can think of:
> Compare that with nuclear, where the negative impact is risk of meltdown - high cost but low risk - and insurers are the ones taking it on.
This may be one reason. The risk of a 'meltdown' is actually so high cost but very low risk, that the corresponding distribution has no first moment. The 'expected cost' is infinite. I've heard folks use it as a real-world example of a Cauchy-type distribution, for more info see [1].
Another explanation might be that there is some sort of recency bias. But that would mean the cost was estimated correctly for the past - which is not what you would want to hear either.
You make a good point that externalities for fossil fuels are not priced in either, but that doesn't explain the phenomenon here. And I'm not arguing for or against the use of nuclear power - societies have already agreed to socialise the cost. I'm pointing out it's not as black and white ("nuclear power is and has always been safe") as some HN commenters may think.
That is correct - if we were to price in "cancer" for coal maybe indeed coal may not be economic anymore.
But that's unrelated to the insurance cost of nuclear power. Either 'the market' (i.e. the people most knowledgeable to pricing the risk) are off or HN commentators don't see the whole picture?
I'm just pointing out nuclear power is no blanket solution to climate change (it may well be part of the solution), and that there are non-negligible risks that we have to consider as societies (and different societies already are dealing with the risk differently). For some reason HN tends to be a bit defensive when that is pointed out.
> If you want to put your energy into preventing dirt from getting into the ocean, look literally anywhere else.
This line of thinking is what brought about our current environmental clamities. Everybody says: Look, what I am doing to the environemnt is just a tiny, tiny bit of what others are doing. The end result is a massive destruction of the ecosphere. Every dumping of waste into the ocean is a liablity.
> the safest and cleanest way to produce electricity.
Only if you hand pick studies in favour of your opinion. The wast will be around until the end of humanity. No one really knows whether the optimists, who want to store it away "forever", will succeed. If not, ...
You have completely missed my point. Every time you drive to work or flush your toilet you make an impact to the environment. How do you justify this action? Is it ok because you think that the impact to the environment is small? Will the end result of your action be a "massive destruction of the ecosphere"? Maybe it will be, but you have no other choice in life than evaluate all impacts and improve where you can and where it matters most.
I think, I understood you very well. The flushing of the toilet is of course also a liability. But my point is, nevertheless to take it serious, even though its impact might be small. I think we should not only focus on where it matters the most, and ignore the rest, but try to improve the situation across the board, including the smaller things.
The problem is that people think there is a lack of proportionality until they discover that there reall isn't. That happend again and again. And this is the reason why an ecologically sensible society fights on all fronts. There are reaons why you are not allowed to flash anything down the toilet, there is ongoing research how to improve wastewater management, etc., etc.
To get back to the original issue: the OP told us that the dumping of Tritium does less harm than other discharge and thus we should look elsewhere for improvements. As I understand this sentence, he means we should not worry about it at all. This is out of proportion: he could have claimed that we should worry less about it, but it does not follow, that we should totally ignore it.
How did you arrive at that number? Going by one of the comments in this thread it would be 760 TBq of tritium, which would require 76,000,000 m^3 of water to get below the 10 Bg/m^3 limit of the world health organization.
(granted I don't know where the 760 TBq figure came from either, I'm just trying to get some clarity)
The process for releasing typically dilutes to a standard level before releasing into the ocean/ other water way. So when it's released, it's already at a level you could swim in (drink?), there's no process for it accumulating into a more concentrated form in the ocean, and it has a half-life of 12 years.
