Kiwi browser also has ublock (and supports adding any desktop add-on) and still does not crash or slow down like firefox does. I'd really like to use firefox in mobile too but with Kiwi being an option, there's almost 0 reason to use firefox.
"The meteorite broke up over Kentucky and passed over West Virginia and Pennsylvania on its north-northeast trajectory before striking a parked 1980 red Chevy Malibu at approximately 7:50 pm EDT. After traveling through space at a cosmic velocity of 8.8 miles per second (14 km/s, 31,600 miles per hour), the speed of the meteorite at impact had slowed to 164 miles per hour (264 km/h)."
The meteorite was worth way more than the price of a new Malibu. And the Malibu itself sold at auction for way more, too. So, hope every day to have your car struck by a meteorite.
I always wondered why was Germany concerned about the events in Fukushima as that was caused by the earthquake/tsunami. Is that a common phenomenon in Germany?
The whole reason is historical, because of Chernobyl, Sellafield, the Fukushima. People have been wary for years. Netflix series Dark reflects this mindset pretty well.
The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government.
> The idea of nuclear energy being clean that we see repeated here in Hacker News is not as widespread as it looks, HN is just another bubble. People are not hearing about it. It will take a while for the population to change their mind, and longer still for the government.
German here. We Europeans also have another issue: where to put the waste. Unlike Americans who have lots of deserts where no one gives a flying f..k about anything you dump there because there is no human life in a hundred km range, Europe is densely populated and surprisingly people don't want to live near a nuclear waste dump.
Additionally, unlike Americans we have personal experience with nuclear disaster from Chernobyl - to this day, many decades after the event, you have to check wild pigs and fungi in Bavaria for radioactivity if you want to sell them. And current operators of nuclear plants haven't been exactly trustworthy, given many thousands of incident reports of which quite a number can be boiled down to shoddy construction or maintenance.
On top of that, we have had massive fuck-ups of our governments in the attempts to find a permanent storage site:
- former salt mine "Asse" which was used from 1967-1978 turned to be a colossal disaster - the barrels rusted and leaked, to make it worse it was known at the time that the barrels would only last three years, and now it's estimated to need billions of euros for retrieval of all the waste
- former salt mine "Gorleben" was inspected from 1979-2000 as a permanent storage site, but (again) it came out that the location was chosen for political reasons, not scientific
- former GDR site "Morsleben" is unstable, needing billions of euros to prevent collapse
- current projects to search a new final site are expecting to take until (at least) 2031 with finalization of storage in year 2095-2170 (!!!), at a total cost of 50-170 billion euros.
As a result of all of this - especially the last point, who can even guarantee there will be a German nation in over 150 years of time from now?! - German public is extremely skeptic of nuclear energy.
In other European nations, French and British projects for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns. Even if there were public support for nuclear energy, no one trusts government to complete such projects in time and budget anymore, further weakening nuclear energy.
Edit: Totally forgot about the boatload of issues involving power plants europe-wide, see e.g. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-ageing-nucl... for a list. You really have anything there, from fundamental construction issues over your run-off-the-mill accident and old age (many plants are 30 years or older) to outright gross negligence. To put it short: We Europeans can't operate nuclear power responsibly, no matter if organized under capitalist, communist or modern-ish government control.
There won't be much of a future for nuclear fission power in Europe, no matter what some of our bought-off leaders (Macron, Orban) spout.
The waste is the biggest advantage of nuclear. Consider that when you burn hydrocarbons, you produce waste, too. And much of that waste is simply dumped into the air where we all breathe it.
You might say, well, hydrocarbon waste is much less dangerous. But that's negated by the fact that you need about 1,000,000x as much coal to replace the energy provided by nuclear. And in fact, the total amount of radioactive contaminants in that quantity of coal is roughly equal to the amount of nuclear fuel you would have required in the first place had you just used nuclear alone!
> Also with burner reactors you can use the "waste" as fuel.
As far as I know using the waste as fuel is only possible in new reactor types, which are still under development - and in the case of molten salt reactors, it's not even sure yet if these actually can be built because of material science issues (aka, how to construct piping that stays durable for decades when exposed to hot, aggressive molten salt).
It is simply not fair towards future generations to literally dump even more waste to them and hope they manage to figure it out, when we could alternatively also build out the European power grid and go fully renewable using wind, solar and ocean/rivers for generation, batteries and hydro for storage and natural gas/hydrogen for peak demand.
Counterpoint: If we cannot switch to those other kinds of renewables in a reasonable amount of time compared to Nuclear, we're leaving them with a way bigger clusterfuck in the form of runaway greenhouse gas driven global warming.
Germany managed to get from 6% renewables in the energy mix in 2000 to 46% in 2020.
It is not impossible to get even faster buildout in the next ten years, all we need is politicians deciding to do so instead of giving billion dollar handouts to fossil fuel companies and actively impeding buildout!
The problem is German insane requirement of "permament" solution. Sure, the biggest problem here is what will happen 10000 years from now with waste that could easily be repackaged; instead, let's kill the planet in the next 100 years.
>In other European nations, French and British projects for new nuclear reactors (Flamanville and Hinkley Point C, respectively) have managed to surpass the infamous disaster airport BER in budget and time overruns.
China has managed to build reactors using same EPR design on time.
German people demand a safe permanent solution simply because time has shown over and over again that nothing is as permanent as an unsafe "temporary" solution that ends up being permanent because of inertia, budget cuts, insolvencies or whatever.
It's the same as with tech debt, with the difference that your average startup's tech debt can't be turned into a dirty bomb by flying an airplane into it.
And nothing is as expensive and company-killing than complete tech stack switch and rewrite of all software.
>unsafe "temporary" solution
There's nothing unsafe in this particular temporary solution. It's the other way, if something leaks, you can relatively easily fix it. It's only problem if you bury leaking stuff underground.
Also, proper solution is to use "waste" in breeder reactors, which only problem is political opposition to them.
1) Store the stuff above ground => risk terrorism, sabotage and "normal" accidents (e.g. lighting strike, earthquakes, corrosion leading to leaks), additionally: no one wants to live next to a nuclear dump so you won't get political support but rather fierce backlash from the people living near the chosen site
2) Store the stuff under ground => risk of collapse, of leaks and other issues as have already happened in the existing attempts
> Also, proper solution is to use "waste" in breeder reactors, which only problem is political opposition to them.
Breeder reactors IIRC have the problem of plutonium proliferation, molten-salt reactors aren't even close to being developed enough to be put into production.
Todays nuclear waste is futures gold… i would be happy to buy all the waste. In the future it will be burned in next gen reactors. What now seems crazy will be reality in couple of decades.
The obvious solution seems to be to ship the waste to the US, paying them for the disposal. Or you can sign a deal with some North African countries (Libya, Tunisia), and have them store the dump in Sahara.
My reading of the situation is that Merkel went anti-nuke because the greens in Germany were anti-nuke and she needed more support. It was all about electoral politics.
I'm not sure about that.
IMHO, one of the major reasons Germany (beyond party lines) went anti-nuclear after Fukushima was the sentiment that "something like Tschernobyl can only happen in countries like the Soviet Union / the eastern block", that was the political position of most parties (except Greens, of course) since the 80s. The West German nuclear plants were "always safe", something like Tschernobyl "could never happen here".
This sentiment was a major part of the reason why the East German nuclear plants were shut down immediately after the collapse of East Germany, even before the Unification. They were Soviet and unsafe.
But Fukushima is in Japan, and Japan and Germany feel much more similar, from a technological standpoint, than (West) Germany and the ex Soviet Union. Even though Fukushima was geographically much farther away than Tschernobyl, it somehow was "closer", politically.
"If it happens in Japan, it can happen here, too" - I know a few people that regularly vote / support the CDU (Merkels party) and most of them had this exact change of mind.
The question is - why did this trend arise specifically in German-speaking countries?
Chernobyl/Pripyat is in northern Ukraine, on the border with Belarus.
Ukraine is totally fine with nuclear power. Belarus plans to expand the existing plants. To the west, Slovakia's grid is mostly nuclear and is currently doing finishing touches on their new reactors. Hungary is also pro-nuclear.
The radioactive plume from Chernobyl then moved northwards, towards Baltics, reaching the populated parts of Scandinavia. Well, the grids in FIN and SWE are heavily nuclear-based, Finland is about to launch another 1500MW reactor.
So - the countries most affected by the Chernobyl disaster are unanimously pro-nuclear, while DACH countries, basically unaffected by it, are somehow in panic-mode whenever the word 'nuclear' is uttered.
I don't think "unaffected" is the right term. Yes, DACH didn't get much radiation in median, but in some areas (mostly Bavaria[1] and Austria[2]) there was quite a bit of radioactive rain. For example, its still not allowed to eat wild boars / deers in parts of Bavaria, because they accumulated too much (> 10k Bq/Kg) radiation, mostly Caesium 137 from the Tschernobyl incident.
Also, Austria did reject nuclear power in the 70s, before Tschernobyl, with one power plant (Zwentendorf[3]) already built but not yet running, via a very close referendum. So the anti-nuclear sentiment was already partly there (in Austria more than in Germany), but its very probable that Tschernobyl (and Fukushima) pushed enough people "over the edge" to give the anti-nuclear sentiment a comfy political majority across almost all political parties.
Why the other countries did not follow this trend, I don't know. They'll have their reasons :-)
The nuclear power plant in Belarus is a political project funded mostly by Russia to increase political ties with Belarus. It cannot be profitable without "free" money from Russia.
Ukraine was against nuclear power and nuclear weapons until war. Now, we need to have an ability to quickly produce few plutonium nukes in case of emergency, so we need weapon grade nuclear reactors to produce nuclear waste with plutonium.
I can’t make any immediate guarantees around sending our kit to Europe. However, we do not collect payment until after we ship the kit, so please sign up on our early access page to hold a spot in line. If/when we reach critical mass we may be able to onboard customers in Europe.
If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
What if your opinion is proven to be wrong but you are just not respecting the fact. Does it make sense to respect someone's opinion just because it is an opinion in such a case?
