I'll never understand how "let's just fuck with our clocks a few times a year" became a "solution" to anything.
Do people not know what clocks are for? What time is? "ohhhh it's dark outside it can't be dark when my clock says this I must change time itself" shut up
my anger about this has to go somewhere, someday. the anger is just growing, constantly, with nowhere to go, as the cowards are hiding behind their residential proxy mafia
Yay. I just got hit on the nose by rsync sloprot. Somehow I had avoided it so far. The "don't worry, it's fixed in the next version. Just upgrade" response doesn't fill me with warm fuzzy feelings. I'm now pondering my options. I haven't found a clear obvious safe choice for a slop free fork yet, and switching to another implementation will involve a verification process, and possibly porting of tooling.
Can we please just keep our software working reliably?
RE: https://chaos.social/@fluepke/117426899552148217
Oh neiiiiiiiiiiiiiin 😭
RT: https://chaos.social/users/fluepke/statuses/117426899552148217
Since some SoMe discussions again debate Germany's decision to not pursue nuclear power with wild ideas like "it's due to Fukushima" or "the German green party is a bunch of useful idiots for russia", I suppose it's time for That Timeline, again.
All in all: The theoretical ability to manage and contain the technology wasn't _seriously_ in question.
The problem was that reality presented a fair amount of misconduct in Germany that was swept under the rug: This wasn't "The soviets don't care for the well-being of their worker drones, and also they can't do tech, haha!", this was "good" German public officials and capitalists doing their best to run a mess of a reactor, failing, and then hiding the extent of their malpractice, some of it to this day.
It's was an experimental reactor, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_(J%C3%BClich), and sure, stuff _could_ happen. But instead of doing what is safest for everybody (e.g. report incidents, clean up properly), the approach that was chosen is material for a horror movie or three.
Combine that with having no actual clue what we're supposed to do with the waste, and the number of ways this can be (and extrapolating from history: will be) messed up, and you know what led to nuclear power's unpopularity in Germany.
Without further ado, the timeline:
1967-1973: AVR Jülich had a non-functional Tritium filter, resulting in Tritium emissions, oops.
1972: The first pipeline project for natural gas from the soviet union starts, despite representing "opposing systems" and all that. This isn't very relevant for nuclear power considerations, but there's some tie-in 50 years later, so mentioning it for completeness' sake.
July 1973: The Tritium issue was finally reported with the authorities.
1974: Gamma radiation and neutrons from the reactor detected 100m outside the fence, oops.
1975: Faced with threat of closure, they finally build protective measures to reduce emissions by 50%. A nearby patch of forest still needs to be locked down, oops.
1976: Caesium and strontium see 1000x rise in the cooling circuit. No satisfactory explanation is published until today, oops.
1978: Water enters the reactor core, reported to the authorities as "none to little impact on safety"-class incident. As a result of that incident, the ground water and soil below the reactor are radioactive to this day, oops.
Some people who used to work there consider this the biggest radioactive contamination incident of ground water in Western Europe due to a civilian plant, ever.
1982: They find out that the system they use for measuring the remaining radioactivity of extracted fuel (it's a pebble reactor, can't measure directly) was non-functional. They improved it to "functional, but not satisfactory". As a result, spent fuel of that reactor is of uncertain radioactivity, oops.
Also 1982: The last new construction project for a nuclear power plant in Germany starts.
Also 1982: The conservative coalition government of the next 16 years ("black-yellow"¹) takes charge.
1986: Chernobyl, 'nuff said. Except for a side-note: 4 years of conservative nuclear power "champions" in charge up to this point and not a single new project approved. How comes?
1988: The Jülich reactor goes offline for good.
1990: Increased number of leukemia cases in children in nearby towns. There are water quality controls in Germany, but none of the places around the reactor checked for Tritium, so it's hard to say with certainty if the various incidents played a part here, oops.
1998: The Social-Democrat / Green parties form a coalition government ("red-green"¹), replacing the conservative governments that ruled since 1982. Ending nuclear power is a priority for them.
1999: The reactor's concrete base was found to be broken, and some fuel elements fell through or are stuck in the gap. It's still too radioactive to do anything about it. No investigation on the impact done whatsoever, oops.
2000: Taking samples, folks found out that the amount of ¹⁴C in the reactor is 25× higher than was assumed before, oops.
2000: The red-green government signs the "nuclear consensus", an agreement with the big energy providers in Germany that defined how much energy the nuclear power plants may still feed into the system. Since it wasn't time based and there was some flexibility, no explicit due date was defined, but it was estimated that the last NPP goes offline around 2021.
In addition, they also started schemes to push renewables (such as guaranteed feed-in prices and other incentives for building renewable energy producers).
The idea was to get at much as possible moved to renewables and maybe use natural gas for peak demand, ideally as a temporary measure.
2008, 20 years after shut-down: the reactor can't be torn down because it's still too contaminated. It gets filled up to keep the radioactive graphite dust in place, at least.
2010: The, once again, conservative government decides to extend the lifetime of NPPs. Pre-1980 NPPs got 8 more years, post-1980 NPPs got 14 more years - again, with some room to shift energy allotments between power plants, but without more changes (or new power plants), the due date for NPPs would be around 2035. They planned nothing but this extension. The law went into effect in December 2010.
2011, March: Fukushima, oops.
Shortly after: That infamous emergency turnaround happened. The result was moving back to the agreement made by the red-green government, so no change compared to pre-December 2010. Except that the government is due 4bn EUR in damages to the energy corporations. Good job, folks!
Merkel, Chancellor at that time and with a PhD thesis about nuclear decay processes under her belt (that is, she knows that stuff!), explains both her willingness to extend the lifetimes and the turnaround by that she didn't consider such an incident possible in a "modern and well-run power plant, like those in Western countries and Japan." - "oops", I guess?
2011: During the Fukushima discussion, the former lead of the reactor team asserted that the Jülich reactor was "sufficiently safe". Ok, then…
(Bonus content for the natural gas / renewables side quest:)
2012/2013: The (conservative) minister of energy decides to reshape the electricity financing schemes in favor of large consumers, driving up domestic electricity prices in turn, and also reduces the incentives for renewables.
At that point Germany has a thriving photovoltaics industry employed some 120k people. That industry all but dies, and today Germany buys its panels from China like everybody else. At about the same time, the remaining 40k coal miners in Germany are used by politicians to argue for measures that cost _way_ more than their lifetime earnings, arguing that their jobs need to be protected. (they could have been offered early retirement and we would have come out ahead.)
Also of note: that very same minister approves an assessment that minimizes the risk that the newest natural gas pipelines ("Nord Stream") could be used as a political lever by an increasingly unhinged russian leader.
2022, December: the red-green-yellow¹ coalition, with the green energy minister in charge, decides to give the last few NPP a few months extension until spring 2023 to help the country through the winter, given the various issues around natural gas, after russia refused to deliver, then attacked Ukraine, and finally the big pipelines were blown up.
Around 2060: Maybe we'll finally have the technology to clean up the reactor. Hopefully it lost most of its radioactivity by that point, too: We don't know for sure what this corpse of a high tech machine is filled up with exactly, so even knowing decay rates helps only a little.
Around 2100: We'd love to be done with that stupid reactor by that point. Fingers crossed.
¹ We color-code most parties, although that's hitting some limits by now. In order of appearance on the political scene: "red" represents the social-democrats (SPD), "black" represents the conservatives (CDU/CSU, "Union"), "yellow" represents the sometimes-liberals-sometimes-libertarians (their focus shifts a bit between those two over the decades, depending on who's at the helm), "green" represents the Green party.
Since then, we also gained "Die Linke" ("The Left") which is sometimes shown in some dark-red, the "Alternative für Deutschland" (Alternative for Germany, AfD) in light-blue, "BSW" (a Linke spin off, the letters don't really matter) using purple. Those are usually called by name, though.
RE: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/117396625341557692
Hey #FreeBSD folks, NetBSD hit more than double their funding target after adopting a strong no-LLMs policy. Something to think about while you draft yours, perhaps?
RT: https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/netbsd/statuses/117396625341557692
How to get into nature, by Rosemary Mosco.
https://rosemarymosco.com/comics/bird-and-moon/how-to-get-into-nature
#Mosstodon #LichenSubscribe
My sister is an emergency doctor in a deep "blue" (aka right-wing) area in Germany, and she sent me this photo of a button she and her colleagues are wearing when on duty: "Your are safe with me." on a Progress Pride flag.
This is so awesome!
@netbsd I wish you good luck finding an artist to make your artworks, and I salute your no AI policy for it! 🧡
Here is a little watercolor sketch freely inspired by your logo.
🙏🏼 Bitte, bitte, bitte viel & oft teilen🙏🏼
✨Fediverse PLZ do ur magic✨
"Wo sollen denn all die Fachkräfte herkommen, wenn sie niemand ausbildet??"
Ich mache eine Umschulung und brauch dringend ein Praktikum als FACHINFORMATIKERIN DATEN- & PROZESSANALYSE!
Im Raum Leverkusen/Köln/Langenfeld vom bereits 04.11.26 bis 15.10.27.
👉🏼 !!! ICH BIN KOSTENLOS !!! (und garantiert nicht umsonst!) 👈🏼
Nach >100 vergeblichen Bewerbungen: Jemand noch 'ne Idee..??