It could still be to cover up war crimes that the BBC team hadn’t got quite close enough to discover yet, but the IDF were concerned that they might have if not scared away. It could just be for opsec, but them having been competent at stopping the BBC seeing whatever it was they were hiding isn’t proof that the thing being hidden was benign.
Solar’s a little bit less killy than nuclear (people die when mining raw materials and from falling off rooftops when installing panels) and wind turbines are a little more dangerous than nuclear (mining raw materials, falls during installation/maintenance and people burning to death during maintenance), but hydroelectric power is much more dangerous than nuclear (mainly from drownings after dams burst). Until very recently, nuclear was the safest means of power generation by a wide margin, so if safety is the main concern, there should be a lot more of it.
A big reason for this is that a single nuclear power plant can power a city despite having the same footprint as a small village worth of wind turbines or solar panels and running for decades off a wheelbarrow of fuel, so there’s much less for construction workers and miners to do and fewer opportunities for them to die. It only kills when there’s an accident bad enough to make international news and remain in the public consciousness for decades, and accidents that bad have only happened a handful of times.
Then I’ve got some bad news for you about Putin, too.
There are people who have genuine medical reasons to not take vaccines (e.g. an allergy to a common ingredient) or who are so immunocompromised that a vaccine won’t keep them alive, and they rely on other people getting vaccinated to avoid dying. It’s not just antivaxers who antivaxers kill.
A billion dollars worth of bitcoin isn’t that much of the total amount of bitcoin any more, so any impact on the price would be because of people reacting emotionally to the news, not because they’re was suddenly a flood of extra bitcoin in circulation.
You’re not throttling between 0% output and 100% output, as that takes weeks or months, and instead throttling within a limited range at the upper end of the output power. Because a nuclear reactor puts out so much power compared to a combined cycle gas turbine, going down to 80% power has a comparable impact to totally shutting down a gas turbine. It doesn’t need to be instant to be used for dynamic load - throttling a gas turbine isn’t as it takes time for the heat exchanger to warm up or cool down after increasing or decreasing the fuel flow, and time for the first turbine to speed up or slow down after the flow of the Brayton-cycle coolant changes, and then more time for the second heat exchanger to heat up/cool down and more time for the Rankin-cycle turbine to speed up or slow down as the flow of steam changes, and only then is the new desired output power achieved.
Wikipedia puts the average emission time for delayed neutrons at fifteen seconds, which while ludicrously slow compared to a bomb, is really fast compared to the day-night cycle that represents most dynamic load variance in a country with plenty of renewables or heavy industry that doesn’t operate at night time, so there’s plenty of time for the power output to respond as long as you’re restricting the range that it’s operating in.
It’s likely that my data’s out of date, and that graph does include it. If it didn’t, it’s hard to see how photovoltaics could kill enough people to have such a similar death rate to nuclear if accidents like Chornobyl are included.
The ones in service right now are mostly/all designed that way, but that’s a design decision rather than an inherent limitation. They cost basically the same to run whether they’re at maximum output or minimum, so they’re most cost-effective as base load and if you need responsive output, you can probably build something else for less money. If you ignore that and build one anyway, you only need fast motors on the control rods and the output can be changed as quickly as throttling gas turbines, but there’s no need for that if you know you’re just building for base load.
Lots of people die mining the materials for photovoltaics, even with emerging technologies that reduce rare earth usage, especially because the countries with a lot of rare earth mineral wealth mostly have terrible human rights, slavery and worker safety records. In principle, this could be reduced without technological changes, e.g. by refusing to buy rare earth metals unless they’re extracted in line with best practice and that can be proven (it’s typically cheaper to fake the evidence that your workers are happy, healthy and alive than keep them happy, healthy and alive), but then things get more expensive and photovoltaics are already not the cheapest.
Even when disasters like Chernobyl are included, nuclear energy kills fewer people per Watt than any of the alternatives. E.g. dams burst and people like building towns downstream of hydro plants. Even with wind where it’s basically only deadly due to accidents when installing and repairing turbines (e.g. people falling off, fires breaking out too abruptly to climb down), it happens often enough that it ends up more dangerous than nuclear. Burning gas, coal and biomass all work out much deadlier than renewables and nuclear, but if your risk tolerance doesn’t permit nuclear, it doesn’t permit electricity in any form.
It doesn’t help when all the senior employees from last time you built a reactor have retired and anyone who hasn’t retired was pretty junior the last time around. For projects where you have to get everything right the first time, so can’t just try things to see what works, it’s devastating to stop doing them if you ever might need to start again.
It’s not Kessler Syndrome until it’s so bad that we can’t feasibly launch anything new. A single cascading collision chain might calm down again after breaking a lot of stuff without any catastrophic long term impact if all the debris ends up either in a stable orbit that can be predicted and avoided by other objects, or unstable orbits that decay until the debris falls out of orbit.
If your municipal waste is handled responsibly, then landfill at least seals the carbon away, whereas burning the plastic or some of the more controversial varieties of recycling put an equivalent amount into the atmosphere. It’s a big if, as there are loads of ways a mismanaged landfill can contaminate the environment, but it can be one of the least bad things that happen to oil once it’s been dug up.
I don’t think this nuance is what the other poster was driving at, though.
It degrades in a few weeks in a heated industrial composter, and it doesn’t meaningfully degrade in a sensible amount of time in natural conditions. It has the potential to be less bad than other plastics, but anything that biodegrades in a similar way to food is going to go off at a similar rate to any food it’s containing, which is obviously bad for packaging.
Waste metal is basically always going to be purer and easier to deal with than metal ore, so it’s worth recycling nearly anything that it’s worth mining the ore for. Aluminium’s particularly recyclable because it’s expensive to make it from ore, and much less expensive to melt existing aluminium.
The Snooper’s Charter (which made all the things Snowden revealed actually legal) and the thing where it became illegal to film facesitting in the UK both happened under the Cameron administration after being pushed for when Theresa May was home secretary. New Labour didn’t pass anything comparable.
It might well be the case that GCHQ started their mass surveillance of UK citizens under orders from Blair, but given that five independent inquiries have found that the security services lied to the cabinet about WMDs in Iraq, it’s pretty plausible that they did it of their own volition despite it being illegal.
Easy. Everything bad that happens before January 2025 is Gordon Brown’s fault, and everything after it’s Kier Starmer’s. You know it’s true because it says so in the Daily Mail.
Despite how it’s often framed, the NHS doesn’t get to make recommendations one way or the other in this kind of case. Once the patient’s doctors are no longer sure that it’s in their best interest to continue being kept alive, they make the legal system aware, and a court will take evidence from the patient (if they’re in a fit condition to give any, which they usually wouldn’t be), doctors, family members, relevant experts, and any other appropriate witnesses, to determine what is and isn’t in the patient’s best interest. One the court has made a decision (which might involve a lengthy appeals process if the family are upset about the initial decision), the NHS does what the court tells it to. If the patient is capable of experiencing anything other than pain, it’s unlikely that it’ll be in their best interest to die, so the court will order them to be kept alive.
It’s relatively common for anti-abortion and anti-state-funded-healthcare political campaign groups from the US to pay for expensive lawyers to argue in favour of keeping child patients alive and persuade the parents to keep appealing as upset parents saying the state killed their baby makes an evocative headline that can easily be pivoted to make the most merciful option look cruel and callous, and sway people’s votes.
There’s a chapter on this in one of The Secret Barrister’s books - I think the second one.
You’re not going to be able to do an FDM print without there being layer lines and without there being a plane in which the part is more fragile thanks to layers being easier to delaminate from each other than to break. A resin printer can more or less avoid these problems, but you’ll need an expensive engineering resin to get the same strength. None of the problems affect everything you might ever want to make, though, and there are plenty of things you might only want one or two of, so obviously would never machine a mould for.
Originally, that was from Dave, which is owned by the BBC.