Sorry, that doesn't cut it against a UN report. Even the published report that contradicts the UN reports have the maximum number at 27 birth defects in 100.000 births - a far cry from your tv-show's unknown Ukranian doctor's claim of 90%.
I thought we'd agreed not to base our view of reality on what we see on tv?
No you idiot, the message is that the spent fuel rods are in a purpose-built area specifically designed to hold them while they cool down enough to move them somewhere else. There's simply no better place to put them while they cool down than inside a nuclear plant, in actively cooled pools built specifically to hold spent fuel rods.
Nuclear power is - even with this accident still ongoing - still the safest form of power generation we have.
Chernobyl, an area where over 90% of children born have serious birth defects.
[citation fucking needed]
In a 2005 report, the UN said there were "no evidence of an increased risk of birth defects or other reproductive effects in areas contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl accident". A recent study claims there does exist a slightly elevated risk of birth defects in some of the areas (up to 27 in 100.000 births as compared to EU average 9 in 100.000), but even that study says it's findings are "not definitive" and lacks information about pregnant mothers exposure to radiation as well as their diet and alcohol habits. The same effects can be attributed to overconsumption of alcohol:
This is important because the birth defects that were elevated in Rivne can also result from fetal alcohol exposure or, in the case of neural tube defects, a deficiency in the B vitamin folate early in pregnancy.
"In the Ukraine," Wertelecki said, "alcohol is also a problem. Malnutrition is also a problem."
It is not clear to what extent alcohol, folate deficiency and low-dose radiation exposure may each explain the findings. It's also quite possible, Wertelecki said, that all three factors work in combination to raise the odds of congenital defects.
If the reactor is running and the cooling fails Bad Things occur. Remember, after the scram the secondary reactions produce about 1% of the heat/energy of the main reaction before scram. What they're struggling with now is a hundred times less than what they'd be facing if the reactors had been online.
Contrary to popular science fiction, electronics and radiation don't mix well. The robots they tried to use at Chernobyl stopped working almost immediately.
If you think keeping a reactor cool without all power lost is anything like "simple", you're an idiot. They got hit by a magnitude 9+ quake and a 30ft tsunami. Nothing is "simple" at that point.
it is still a critical situation getting worse every day, and it could end up worse than chernobyl.
It's still a critical situation, but it's getting better by the hour. They now have power restored to reactor 2 and are working on the others. It is unlikely in the extreme that it'll end up anywhere near a Chernobyl.
A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?
Because that's where you have the safety measures already installed to store nuclear fuel and waste.
In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility.
Short of being hit by a magnitude 9+ earthquake followed by a 30ft tsunami, power shouldn't go out.
Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.
The reactor facility was designed to withstand a magnitude 8.4 earthquake. There exists areas specifically designed to handle storage of spent fuel rods within the facility. In short, the spent fuel rods are already in the safest place they can be.
In case you've missed it, the area was hit by the largest earthquake in recent history and a 30ft tsunami. It might not be as easy as going to the corner shop to get that equipment in there with all the surrounding land in ruins and 11.000 people dead or missing.
Your summary implies that EA could, at any time, swoop in and prevent gamers from playing their games. This may actually be true. But that isn't what's happening here.
They can. Check out the Bioware answer in the last post of the thread that's linked from the summary:
2. EA Community bans come down from a different department and are the result of someone hitting the REPORT POST button. These bans can affect access to your game and/or DLC.
Except that you're wrong. Follow the first link in the summary, scroll down to the last post:
1. BioWare community bans are forum-only and can be for as little as 24 hours. These bans should have no effect on your game, only your ability to use all the features of this website/community. these bans are handed out by BioWare Moderators as the result of our travels around the forum and/or issues reported by fellow community members.
2. EA Community bans come down from a different department and are the result of someone hitting the REPORT POST button. These bans can affect access to your game and/or DLC.
Stormtroopers are excellent marksmen - what you see depicted in those Rebel propaganda videos is a tactic called "herding". Funnily enough the makers of the propaganda videos never show what happens after the stormtroopers have herded the scruffy nerf-herder rebels into their trap...
Wicked was, indeed, wickedly clever. I also very much enjoyed Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. While not retelling a well-known story from the PoV of the antagonist, it is a role-reversal where the classical antagonist is the books protagonist (the book is written from the perspective of a super-villain).
Yup, same here: 1. I don't use sudo. 2. I use the one true VI. 3. My regexp fu is actually registered as a deadly weapon. 4. I'm lazy enough to spend eight hours making a repeatable fix to a two-hour problem. 5. I very much prefer elegant solutions over band-aids (see #4) 6. The problem IS with the one asking the question 99 times out of 100. 7. I spend more time researching WHY then fixing the HOW. 8. I know more about Windows than I'd ever admit. 9. Rebooting is for kernel updates. That's it.
'#' vs '$' actually - '~' is just a shorthand marker that you're in the $HOME of the user account you're logged into. But you knew this already, right? 'Cause you're a Veteran Unix Admin, right?
Ok, logging into to a database is *not* being a Unix/Linux Admin, it is managing a database.
Listen. The people who log in to make changes to the database, and update the website(sorry, application server), are *USERS*, even if some of them are in sudoers, they are not the Admin (who put them in sudoers).
Su to root, solve the problem, get out. I don't see what isn't methodical about that?
By using sudo, you get to skip the last step.
Only if your solution to the problem only involves one command. Which, in my experience it seldom does. Sudo is a crutch for home-users who don't trust themselves to remember if they're in a root shell or not. "Real Unix Admins" don't have that problem and don't need sudo.
Or, you could just use sudo -s 'for i in/root/*txt; do file $i; done' and skip all the backslashes.
But even so, I agree with the article that sudo is a crutch for lazy admins. You should be in a non-root shell for all actions that don't require root access, and su - to a root shell for those that do - and when you're done, exit the root shell. Do no leave it open.
But then again, I smiled with recognition at all nine points in the article...
As far as video game music goes, Age of Conan has a truly wonderful soundtrack. Here's just one (eerily beautiful) example: The Dreaming Anew - Memories of Cimmeria.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, that doesn't cut it against a UN report.
Even the published report that contradicts the UN reports have the maximum number at 27 birth defects in 100.000 births - a far cry from your tv-show's unknown Ukranian doctor's claim of 90%.
I thought we'd agreed not to base our view of reality on what we see on tv?
No you idiot, the message is that the spent fuel rods are in a purpose-built area specifically designed to hold them while they cool down enough to move them somewhere else. There's simply no better place to put them while they cool down than inside a nuclear plant, in actively cooled pools built specifically to hold spent fuel rods.
Nuclear power is - even with this accident still ongoing - still the safest form of power generation we have.
Chernobyl, an area where over 90% of children born have serious birth defects.
[citation fucking needed]
In a 2005 report, the UN said there were "no evidence of an increased risk of birth defects or other reproductive effects in areas contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl accident". A recent study claims there does exist a slightly elevated risk of birth defects in some of the areas (up to 27 in 100.000 births as compared to EU average 9 in 100.000), but even that study says it's findings are "not definitive" and lacks information about pregnant mothers exposure to radiation as well as their diet and alcohol habits. The same effects can be attributed to overconsumption of alcohol:
This is important because the birth defects that were elevated in Rivne can also result from fetal alcohol exposure or, in the case of neural tube defects, a deficiency in the B vitamin folate early in pregnancy.
"In the Ukraine," Wertelecki said, "alcohol is also a problem. Malnutrition is also a problem."
It is not clear to what extent alcohol, folate deficiency and low-dose radiation exposure may each explain the findings. It's also quite possible, Wertelecki said, that all three factors work in combination to raise the odds of congenital defects.
The "radioactive crap" will be 90% gone within a few months.
Look at Chernobyl.
If the reactor is running and the cooling fails Bad Things occur. Remember, after the scram the secondary reactions produce about 1% of the heat/energy of the main reaction before scram. What they're struggling with now is a hundred times less than what they'd be facing if the reactors had been online.
Contrary to popular science fiction, electronics and radiation don't mix well.
The robots they tried to use at Chernobyl stopped working almost immediately.
They tried it at Chernobyl, the radioactivity fries the electronics very fast, making it impractical at best and impossible at worst to use robots.
simply keep something cool
If you think keeping a reactor cool without all power lost is anything like "simple", you're an idiot.
They got hit by a magnitude 9+ quake and a 30ft tsunami. Nothing is "simple" at that point.
it is still a critical situation getting worse every day, and it could end up worse than chernobyl.
It's still a critical situation, but it's getting better by the hour. They now have power restored to reactor 2 and are working on the others. It is unlikely in the extreme that it'll end up anywhere near a Chernobyl.
A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?
Because that's where you have the safety measures already installed to store nuclear fuel and waste.
In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility.
Short of being hit by a magnitude 9+ earthquake followed by a 30ft tsunami, power shouldn't go out.
Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.
The reactor facility was designed to withstand a magnitude 8.4 earthquake. There exists areas specifically designed to handle storage of spent fuel rods within the facility. In short, the spent fuel rods are already in the safest place they can be.
In case you've missed it, the area was hit by the largest earthquake in recent history and a 30ft tsunami.
It might not be as easy as going to the corner shop to get that equipment in there with all the surrounding land in ruins and 11.000 people dead or missing.
Your summary implies that EA could, at any time, swoop in and prevent gamers from playing their games. This may actually be true. But that isn't what's happening here.
They can. Check out the Bioware answer in the last post of the thread that's linked from the summary:
2. EA Community bans come down from a different department and are the result of someone hitting the REPORT POST button. These bans can affect access to your game and/or DLC.
And that's just so messed up it's unbelievable.
Except that you're wrong. Follow the first link in the summary, scroll down to the last post:
1. BioWare community bans are forum-only and can be for as little as 24 hours. These bans should have no effect on your game, only your ability to use all the features of this website/community. these bans are handed out by BioWare Moderators as the result of our travels around the forum and/or issues reported by fellow community members.
2. EA Community bans come down from a different department and are the result of someone hitting the REPORT POST button. These bans can affect access to your game and/or DLC.
Item 2 kinda says it all, doesn't it?
Stormtroopers are excellent marksmen - what you see depicted in those Rebel propaganda videos is a tactic called "herding". Funnily enough the makers of the propaganda videos never show what happens after the stormtroopers have herded the scruffy nerf-herder rebels into their trap...
the probe does a bunch of gravity assists by sling-shotting near Venus, Mercury and maybe even the earth.
It sling-shots around Mercury to get to Mercury?
We tried making the systems idiot-proof, but people kept coming up with better idiots...
Wicked was, indeed, wickedly clever. I also very much enjoyed Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. While not retelling a well-known story from the PoV of the antagonist, it is a role-reversal where the classical antagonist is the books protagonist (the book is written from the perspective of a super-villain).
From TFA: "Lookout for auroras in the next couple of days."
Yup, same here:
1. I don't use sudo.
2. I use the one true VI.
3. My regexp fu is actually registered as a deadly weapon.
4. I'm lazy enough to spend eight hours making a repeatable fix to a two-hour problem.
5. I very much prefer elegant solutions over band-aids (see #4)
6. The problem IS with the one asking the question 99 times out of 100.
7. I spend more time researching WHY then fixing the HOW.
8. I know more about Windows than I'd ever admit.
9. Rebooting is for kernel updates. That's it.
'#' vs '$' actually - '~' is just a shorthand marker that you're in the $HOME of the user account you're logged into. But you knew this already, right? 'Cause you're a Veteran Unix Admin, right?
If you're leaving a root shell open, nevermind where, you're asking for trouble and are just lucky it hasn't bit you on the ass yet. Stop doing it.
Ok, logging into to a database is *not* being a Unix/Linux Admin, it is managing a database.
Listen. The people who log in to make changes to the database, and update the website(sorry, application server), are *USERS*, even if some of them are in sudoers, they are not the Admin (who put them in sudoers).
+1 Informative.
Su to root, solve the problem, get out. I don't see what isn't methodical about that?
By using sudo, you get to skip the last step.
Only if your solution to the problem only involves one command. Which, in my experience it seldom does.
Sudo is a crutch for home-users who don't trust themselves to remember if they're in a root shell or not. "Real Unix Admins" don't have that problem and don't need sudo.
Or, you could just use sudo -s 'for i in /root/*txt; do file $i; done' and skip all the backslashes.
But even so, I agree with the article that sudo is a crutch for lazy admins. You should be in a non-root shell for all actions that don't require root access, and su - to a root shell for those that do - and when you're done, exit the root shell. Do no leave it open.
But then again, I smiled with recognition at all nine points in the article...
As far as video game music goes, Age of Conan has a truly wonderful soundtrack.
Here's just one (eerily beautiful) example: The Dreaming Anew - Memories of Cimmeria.