4 ms·

When I was growing up, my granddad had a row of a weird black raspberry. It had huge, berries with a distinct taste, and all the assorted insects always present

When I was growing up, my granddad had a row of a weird black raspberry. It had huge, berries with a distinct taste, and all the assorted insects always present on other raspberries never showed up on these ones. They also never got moldy. He said the variety is called Cumberland. Now I can't stop wondering about any connection to that nuclear waste.

saulrh 3y ago
[flagged]
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  Yes, because we would have had that quick and clean and easy and cheap way out of all the mess, so simple, but everybody stupid blaming everything on nucular, and now boom, climate catastrophe!
  - saulrh 3y ago
    Yes, actually, widespread top-down deployment of nuclear power would have been a safe and economical way to transition gracefully off of fossil fuel power starting in the 1970s.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Safe? If you take the number of failures as a constant fraction of the total you'd have that many more disasters or near disasters, and if the numbers get large enough you'd probably start to see actual meltdowns, we came close enough a couple of times as it was. And then the costs: Those are the plants that we have no idea of how to decommission them properly without incurring a cost penalty that invariably makes them too expensive to operate after the fact. And nobody wants to actually pay for it, they're passed around like hot potatoes. For the latest generation that's a maybe.
      - saulrh 3y ago
        Yes, safe. I would guess that the absolute failure rate of nuclear power is likely a function of reactor design count, not reactor count, and that the current failure rate at reactors is greatly increased by the part where every reactor is essentially unique and bespoke so you can't easily generalize learnings from post-mortems. Compare to aviation safety, for example, which can just not have repeat failures because after one crash they refit every plane of that model with a new posterior tertiary retroencabulator and then that particular crash never happens again. Plus, y'know, the part where 1 GW of current real world nuclear power at the current real-world failure rate is safer, quality-adjusted-life-years-per-megawatt-wise, than 1 GW of coal or oil, even before you take higher-order effects of greenhouse gas emissions into account. Similarly, the cost to decom a reactor is paid once per design, and scaling up would amortize those costs across the fleet rather than across a single unique reactor.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        That's some pretty faulty reasoning. Reactor failure rate is a function of age and number of reactors.
        saulrh 3y ago
        If the number of reactor designs is equal to the number of reactors built IRL, then of course the historical data would fail to distinguish those factors. I went and did looked up some stats from aviation, since that's an industry that would be able to distinguish them and operates in a comparable safety-and-reliability regime. Here's a graph of count of active Boeing 474s by year: https://www.iba.aero/insight/evolution-of-the-boeing-747-fleet https://www.iba.aero/insight/evolution-of-the-boeing-747-fle.... Pay attention to the bright blue showing the count of active hulls. Now compare that to the rate of 474 hull losses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747_hull_losses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747_hull_losses. Note that the rate of hull losses is basically flat - there were just about as many 474s lost in the 1970s, with only 200 hulls active, as there were in the 2000s with 1200 hulls active, and as there were in the 2010s with 600 hulls active. At worst logarithmic, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the actual way that failures are probabilistically exposed by increased hull count. I also didn't do any work to exclude "ate a SAM" and other causes that are independent of the airframe. Either way, in a healthy, scaled-out fleet, failure rate is a function of the design much more than it is a function of the fleet size.
- dang 3y ago
  Please omit swipes and personal attacks from your HN comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

saulrh 3y ago

[flagged]

throwbadubadu 3y ago
Yes, because we would have had that quick and clean and easy and cheap way out of all the mess, so simple, but everybody stupid blaming everything on nucular, and now boom, climate catastrophe!
- saulrh 3y ago
  Yes, actually, widespread top-down deployment of nuclear power would have been a safe and economical way to transition gracefully off of fossil fuel power starting in the 1970s.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Safe? If you take the number of failures as a constant fraction of the total you'd have that many more disasters or near disasters, and if the numbers get large enough you'd probably start to see actual meltdowns, we came close enough a couple of times as it was. And then the costs: Those are the plants that we have no idea of how to decommission them properly without incurring a cost penalty that invariably makes them too expensive to operate after the fact. And nobody wants to actually pay for it, they're passed around like hot potatoes. For the latest generation that's a maybe.
    - saulrh 3y ago
      Yes, safe. I would guess that the absolute failure rate of nuclear power is likely a function of reactor design count, not reactor count, and that the current failure rate at reactors is greatly increased by the part where every reactor is essentially unique and bespoke so you can't easily generalize learnings from post-mortems. Compare to aviation safety, for example, which can just not have repeat failures because after one crash they refit every plane of that model with a new posterior tertiary retroencabulator and then that particular crash never happens again. Plus, y'know, the part where 1 GW of current real world nuclear power at the current real-world failure rate is safer, quality-adjusted-life-years-per-megawatt-wise, than 1 GW of coal or oil, even before you take higher-order effects of greenhouse gas emissions into account. Similarly, the cost to decom a reactor is paid once per design, and scaling up would amortize those costs across the fleet rather than across a single unique reactor.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        That's some pretty faulty reasoning. Reactor failure rate is a function of age and number of reactors.
        saulrh 3y ago
        If the number of reactor designs is equal to the number of reactors built IRL, then of course the historical data would fail to distinguish those factors. I went and did looked up some stats from aviation, since that's an industry that would be able to distinguish them and operates in a comparable safety-and-reliability regime. Here's a graph of count of active Boeing 474s by year: https://www.iba.aero/insight/evolution-of-the-boeing-747-fleet https://www.iba.aero/insight/evolution-of-the-boeing-747-fle.... Pay attention to the bright blue showing the count of active hulls. Now compare that to the rate of 474 hull losses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747_hull_losses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747_hull_losses. Note that the rate of hull losses is basically flat - there were just about as many 474s lost in the 1970s, with only 200 hulls active, as there were in the 2000s with 1200 hulls active, and as there were in the 2010s with 600 hulls active. At worst logarithmic, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's the actual way that failures are probabilistically exposed by increased hull count. I also didn't do any work to exclude "ate a SAM" and other causes that are independent of the airframe. Either way, in a healthy, scaled-out fleet, failure rate is a function of the design much more than it is a function of the fleet size.
dang 3y ago
Please omit swipes and personal attacks from your HN comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html