this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Three Mile Island accident (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago

Story time!

In (I want to say) 1981, my dad packed us all in the 1967 Plymouth Fury for a road trip vacation to Hershey, PA, from Illinois. Since it was "on the way," he decided that we should stop at Three Mile Island.

I'm 11 years old, sitting in the left rear seat, right behind my dad. He pulls the car off of the two lane road onto a wide gravel drive that came up to a tall chain link fence gate topped with barbed wire. Apparently, we were going to Three Mile Island.

There's a uniformed officer there who steps up to the driver's window, which my dad has rolled down. He's standing to the rear of the driver's door, like a cop would, which puts him right next to my window. The guy's gun is out of his holster.

"Turn the car around," he says. Dad: "We were just coming to --" "Turn the car around." "But we wanted to see --" "The observation deck is over there. Turn the car around."

Shortly after, there was a picture taken of me from the observation deck in my Reeses Peanut Butter Cups shirt with my arm "resting" on a cooling tower.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I'd say inb4 someone who doesn't know anything about the incident or read the linked page makes a comment about scary nuclear power disaster, but I'm already too late...

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I am a DOE licensed nuclear power plant operator. I worked in the engine room of an aircraft carrier for 4 years. I have received an insane amount of training on TMI.

TMI is terrifying, but not for the reasons people think. The qualified operators of the plant were fucking idiots. They didn’t understand that they had reached saturation conditions in the primary loop. Basically, they created a steam bubble where water should have been. They didn’t understand this. They have all the training and experience required to work the water boiling factory and they didn’t understand water boiling. They assumed that their instruments were malfunctioning, that they knew better. If they were in a more serious casualty situation with their incompetence and egos it would have been a disaster.

Brushing off the incident at three mile island as “just a little leak” completely misses the point. Three Mile Island proves that Chernobyl wasn’t just communist incompetence. It can happen anywhere.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago

I think for most who are anti-nuclear, it’s absolutely human error that makes it scary.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

Facts get overshadowed by constant oppressive news cycling. And nuke plants do have a chance of going badly wrong.... But even Chernobyl stayed operational in one of its units until December 2000.

Knowledge is power.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Is this being posted because of the Microsoft deal?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago

I posted it because I read the article, and thought other people might like to read about it too. So tangentially yes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Not relevant at the moment for any particular reason, nope, nosireee, morning at all to worry about with that plant.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I mean, it ran until 2019 when it was shut down because it wasn't profitable. That's a pretty good track record.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Peak AI shit where they think reopening an unprofitable nuke plant is gonna help AI somehow be profitable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

In particular, that they signed a 20-year-long deal. I'm guessing that gets them lower prices, and it is Microsoft, so I would expect them to weasel out of that contract somehow. But still just wild to me that they would even consider such a long-running contract for technology that's been around for barely a fraction of that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Machine Learning tech has been around for decades. It just became sorta a little bit useful (outside of super specialized uses like photo post-processing or chess engines) around 2017 or so, and since then has exploded in capability, at a speed that the public is kind of incapable of comprehending.

It went from the approximate intelligence of a toddler to a smart high schooler in about 4.5 years, in the last 1.5 years it has nearly reached the level of a STEM PHD in several areas, if the latest whitepapers are to be trusted. And of course it's been much faster than us at reading, interpreting context and summarizing information accurately for a couple years as well.

DeepMind cracked the Protein Folding problem, and that's old news.

I honestly don't think people are ready for how fast AI has been improving.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Even if the AI bubble pops spectacularly and Microsoft aren't training any new models in two years, Microsoft still have massive datacentres that need to compute loads of things, and loads of things they'd like to compute, but don't because they don't have the capacity, but might end up doing if they're suddenly not training AI models on lots of machines. Having free electricity for twenty years is useful for a tech company with or without AI, and nuclear is a good way to get back on track for being carbon neutral soonish like they were going to be before all the recent AI stuff.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

"it" did not, an adjacent unit did.