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☁️ chance of wicked rain
2 July 2024 at 20:12
"Cloud problems offer no such assurances. They are inherently complex and unpredictable, and they usually have social, psychological, or political dimensions. Because of their dynamic, shape-shifting nature, trying to "fix" a cloud problem often ends up creating several new problems." [mit]
"For instance, to make nuclear reactors as reliable as jetliners, that industry would need to commit to one common reactor design, build tens of thousands of reactors, operate them for decades, suffer through thousands of catastrophes, slowly accumulate lessons and insights from those catastrophes, and then use them to refine that common reactor design. "This obviously won't happen." cf. [Harper's:] "It's generational," observed Navin. "If you were active in the environmental movement in the Seventies, if you went through Three Mile Island"—the plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that sparked panic in 1979 when it began melting down—"you're likely to be antinuclear today. But for young people concerned about the environment, anyone under thirty-five, it's not an issue. The polls barely registered a blip over Fukushima." . . . Moorpark, a small town northwest of Los Angeles, became the first American community to draw its electricity from a nuclear reactor. Moorpark's power came from the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory twenty miles away. ...intoned Murrow. "Here at Moorpark, a chain reaction that started with [Fermi/wiki] washed the dishes and lit a book for a small boy to read." No such lyrical announcement marked the day in July 1959 when the plant's coolant system failed and its uranium oxide fuel rods began melting down. With the reactor running out of control and set to explode, desperate operators deliberately released huge amounts of radioactive material into the air for nearly two weeks, making it almost certainly the most dangerous nuclear accident in U.S. history.
"For instance, to make nuclear reactors as reliable as jetliners, that industry would need to commit to one common reactor design, build tens of thousands of reactors, operate them for decades, suffer through thousands of catastrophes, slowly accumulate lessons and insights from those catastrophes, and then use them to refine that common reactor design. "This obviously won't happen." cf. [Harper's:] "It's generational," observed Navin. "If you were active in the environmental movement in the Seventies, if you went through Three Mile Island"—the plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that sparked panic in 1979 when it began melting down—"you're likely to be antinuclear today. But for young people concerned about the environment, anyone under thirty-five, it's not an issue. The polls barely registered a blip over Fukushima." . . . Moorpark, a small town northwest of Los Angeles, became the first American community to draw its electricity from a nuclear reactor. Moorpark's power came from the Sodium Reactor Experiment, operated by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory twenty miles away. ...intoned Murrow. "Here at Moorpark, a chain reaction that started with [Fermi/wiki] washed the dishes and lit a book for a small boy to read." No such lyrical announcement marked the day in July 1959 when the plant's coolant system failed and its uranium oxide fuel rods began melting down. With the reactor running out of control and set to explode, desperate operators deliberately released huge amounts of radioactive material into the air for nearly two weeks, making it almost certainly the most dangerous nuclear accident in U.S. history.
