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Joined 3年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月4日

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  • I know this is probably unpopular, but there is a youtube channel by a supposed nuclear power plant engineer that pointed out that our current radiation standards are not like any other standards. IIRC he said the current standards don’t set a given exposure level and simply say as low as reasonably possible. Which sounds great till you realize that what’s reasonably possible is a constantly lowering standard - what I mean is as tech gets better the standard is always stricter. Which sounds great, but in reality isn’t how we regulate (as far as I know) anything else - we set a safety level and politically revisit it as makes sense.

    As I understand it - this would be like saying lightbulbs must use as little energy as reasonably possible for a given lumen output. This sounds good too - except that it means we never get to attain cost savings, or ever reach a “good enough” level. And this isn’t new installs, this is under legal and inspection threat that if you haven’t replaced your incandecents as soon as florescent came out, then replaced those with LED, then replaced those with more efficient LED basically as soon as it was available, constantly planning and replacing your otherwise working lightbulbs - you get huge fines.

    And our radiation protections only apply to nuclear plants etc, yet I’ve widely seen reported that coal plants actually give off more radiation now, it’s just diffuse. So we’re not actually worried about radiation exposure in general. We’re also not comparing to background radiation …