Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Most nuclear fission products don’t remain radioactive for long periods either, let alone “virtually forever.” Bear in mind that the longer-lived a radioisotope is, the less radioactive it is.

    For JET, I dug up the actual numbers (LLW is low-level waste and ILW is intermediate-level waste):

    Radioactive wastes arising from operation and decommissioning of the JET experimental nuclear fusion reactor, located at Culham, are already factored into the UK radioactive waste inventory. Forecast LLW and ILW packaged volumes are 4,120 m^3 and 480 m^3, respectively; activated steels and alloy plant and equipment, including the JET vacuum vessel, are a major contributor to the ILW arising.

    According to this page a typical 1-gigawatt fission reactor produces 3 m^3 of high-level waste per year, 7 m^3 of intermediate-level waste, and 90 m^3 of low-level waste per year while operating.

    I’m having trouble finding easily comparable numbers for the wastes produced during decommissioning, this page had a lot of detail but was focused more on the area of land that needed to be sealed off rather than the cubic meters of material contained there. It does talk about the mass of some of the turbines being considered as low-level waste being in the range of a few hundred tons, which isn’t much.

    It’s true that spent fission fuel rods are high level waste, but the total volume of that is quite small and it’s in a very manageable form. So overall, I’m not really sure there’s going to be a big improvement on nuclear waste production with fusion power. It’s certainly not going to be a panacea, we’re still going to need nuclear waste repositories and still be dealing with processing and sequestering large amounts of materials there.







  • I’m in a similar place to you career-wise. Personally, I’m not concerned about becoming just a “debugger.” What I’m expecting this job to look like in a few years is to be more like "the same as now, except I’ve got a completely free team of “interns” that do all the menial stuff for me. Every human programmer will become a lead programmer, deciding what stuff our AIs do for us and putting it all together into the finished product.

    Maybe a few years further along the AI assistants will be good enough to handle that stuff better than we do as well. At that point we stop being lead programmers and we all become programming directors.

    So think of it like a promotion, perhaps.






  • Okay, so you’re fine with it. Bully for you. There are a lot of people in your society who are living much closer to the edge and will find themselves in a lot of trouble if prices for the stuff they need go up.

    The point of why this is a problem is ripple effects. None of us own shares in Evergrande. But Evergrande’s collapse could cause such big ripples that it’s bound to affect us anyway, even way out at the fringes of seemingly unrelated economies. Your lifestyle may not be impacted directly but you’ll find yourself wondering “why are there suddenly a bunch of wars in southeast Asia?” Then “why are gas prices through the roof?” And then “why are all the prices through the roof?” And finally “why are the poors rioting in the streets and burning my house? Don’t they know how expensive it is now?”







  • Throwing soup on paintings discredits environmentalism to a lot of people. But what they should really be upset about is misleading graphs cherry-picked to look as alarming as possible.

    Sea ice is a concerning indicator, sure, but if you look at other news and other graphs about it you’ll not find anything like this gigantic drop. In particular in the section of that page about Antarctic ice:

    At the beginning of December, ice extents were at record low levels. However, the seasonal decline in Antarctic ice extent subsequently slowed. As a result, by the beginning of the new year, extent was only sixth lowest.

    It also notes that Arctic sea ice extents were typical during 2023, so whatever was happening to Antarctic ice wasn’t necessarily an indication of global trends.

    I am an environmentalist, I want to see continued effort being made on switching to renewable resources and ameliorating the effects of climate change. But I worry that a lot of environmentalists are crying wolf very loudly and it’s going to harm the movement in the long run when people realize how overblown some of these arguments are.