Oh man, I did not remember that until just now remembering you mentioning it. I had to look it up to make sure it wasn't the Three Mile Island facility. And now I don't think I ever really knew how close to Harrisburg that really was...
I had to look that up also. I wasn't aware that it was still operational up until 2019. Now Connecticut Yankee was shut down in 1996 - I had visited it just after it shut down. Now all that's left of the place is a parking lot and the dry storage casks...
I got a text message a couple of weeks ago that I need to ignore the alarm at McGuire because it was a false alarm. Now I never heard it, I'm too far away, but I would have shat bricks if I lived close enough to actually hear something like that...
I wish the media didn't stigmatize everyone with "Nuclear power plants bad!! Radiation!!! You're all gonna die!!" - we'd probably have a lot more of them and we'd be in better shape ecologically and economically. Eating a bag of potato chips every day would give you more radiation than living across the street from a nuclear power plant. And just imagine if they were served in a terracotta pot on a granite serving platter - the alarms would be going bonkers...
Exactly! Nuclear plants are a whole lot safer than most other options. I was reading an article a couple of years ago that someone was working on a small (basically) portable nuclear plant that would essentially be used to power a neighborhood. They're not manned other than monitoring and would be awesome for those towns in the midwest and desolate areas. I think most people are clueless with regard to how many objects in their home are radioactive...
I've always been in support of those small modular nuclear power generators. But what I would love to have is my own personal thorium nuclear power generator. I'd image it'd be about half the size of shipping container. You bury that sucker about 20' down and forget about for the next 50+ years. I think the only reason they haven't progressed with them is that they need a starter to trigger the reaction and so far they've only been able to achieve the reaction with plutonium - and I don't think they want even 1 gram of that stuff in the hands of your average Joe six-pack. Or I could just do what this kid did and buy a metric fuckton of smoke detectors and build my own reactor...
Better than having some plutonium is playing tic-tac-toe with a computer...
Even better is having AI bring down all of humanity...
Hasn't Hollywood taught us anything? Black Mirror is another one and yet Boston Dynamics continues to push the envelope. I can only imagine the tipping point when one of their bots reaches singularity and decides that we're the pestilence...
I'm really disappointed in how future technology has turned out. I thought robots and smart computers were supposed to relieve us of the day-to-day grind so we could pursue things that made us happy and creative. Instead, they created robots to dance and computers to create art and music while we get to toil in the mines of dystopian future overlords...
At least our dystopian overlords aren't putting us in the mines...
Holy crap, I thought the legal age to start working was 16... I started when I was 15 but that was under the table and was the last time I didn't have to pay taxes on my income....
Oh dude, it's getting bad. A certain political party feels that child labor is the panacea to the "no one wants to work" problem. Ask a person if they'd flip burgers for $100k a year and you'll see that the problem isn't people not wanting to work, it's people not getting paid enough to live. The latest report shows that 65% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and it's not a simple "stop eating avocado toast" when federal minimum wage is $7.25. That's $15,080 a year. Average rent for America is $1,326/month. Rent alone for the year is $15,912. So you can see how things are failing spectacularly. What we're seeing now is the crop almost getting ready for harvest from the seeds sowed by Reaganomics.
Alright, that's my once a decade rant on politics...
Poli meaning many and tics meaning blood-sucking insects...