In Fukushima four PWR type reactors (which is just a large metal pot) melted but stayed inside the containment vessels.
In Chernobyl, an RBMK reactor, which is a ginormous slab of graphite, exploded outwards and burned for ten days, releasing mind-boggling amounts of radioactive hot particles into the top layers of the atmosphere, thus contaminating the whole world.
They were different kinds of disasters, but not incomparable in terms of the scope and reach of damage done to the environment. Chernobyl didn't have the situation of dumping incalculable amounts of radioactive water into the Pacific.
The ocean is very much not a fine place for perpetual dumping of large amounts of radioactive water, because of the long half lives of various radioactive contaminants. Humans eat the fish, that swim in the ocean. Dumping dangerous wastes into the ocean is not smart.
Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 are examples. They can get into the seafood chain and very much do increase cancer risks.
Unlike chemical contamination (e.g. mercury) radiation doesn't bio-accumulate. The seafood won't have higher radiation levels than the water (less than a banana).
> Unlike chemical contamination (e.g. mercury) radiation doesn't bio-accumulate.
That is a very, very misinformed or misleading statement. Caesium-137 and Strontium-90 have half lives of around 30 years and do get into seafood. There are warnings given out often about radioactive contaminated seafood. That's why Fukushima's radioactive water dumping was such a problem and neighboring countries had issues with it.
Seafood can and does get radioactive contamination and this increases cancer risks in humans that consume it.
Different reactions, by different types of governments and politicians. Chernobyl was also seen as an European problem, thus numerous other nations and organizations were more significantly involved.
With Fukushima, the government and companies involved had greater control over the flow of allowed information and reporting. For instance, Korea was greatly concerned about Fukushima, but could do little to intervene or interfere with internal Japanese affairs.
Fukushima wasn't mishandled quite so badly, didn't kill significant numbers of rescue workers, didn't require emergency containment, and didn't contaminate half of Western Europe (most of it ended up in the Pacific).
However it was still enough to make Germany shut down its working reactors.
I had to go and look it up: none. There is a lot of discourse about the number of people killed directly or indirectly during or after the evacuation, however ..
First big disaster of its kind directly resulting in death, almost certain to get more attention. Plus it allowed for substantial propaganda points (probably well deserved) against the USSR during the Cold War, their opponents would have been stupid not to take advantage of the disaster to ridicule them for their incompetence.
its easy:
- Udssr did something wrong its very useful to this day for the us.
- Fukushima was done by an "western orientated" country.
- The fact that people say that chernobyl was worse then Fukushima is them not thinking. Fukushima was build in a area were this kind of accidents happen all the time.
- If Fukushima happened in China you would have more netflix tv shows about it how bad it was handled.
- Remember western media is going through an American lens. Just watch any main stream holy wood movie about war and think of it as US propaganda and you will see it everywhere
The USSR made several key decisions which made Chernobyl a far more dangerous and deadly situation and it's important that the decision making process is studied and understood to stop it from being repeated. As far as I'm aware Fukushima was a series of unlikely events when brought together ended in a disaster. The decision making process was fairly open to the public and open to international scrutiny and criticism.
How about a movie or more attention to the civilizational cataclysm that was burning coal near inhabited areas? Major cities during the coal burning area would seem post apocalyptic to us now.
They are not comparable accidents, Fukishima had no direct casualties and mostly very local effects and Chernobyl needs no introduction. I guess the cause / back story is more interesting for Chernobyl as well because of the human and political aspects.
There are regular reports on Fukushima progress from the Japanese media agency (whose initials escape me for now*). I'm guessing you're not seeing these.
These are not comparable accidents for a number of reasons, direct radiation deaths for one:
The accident destroyed the Chernobyl 4 reactor, killing 30 operators and firemen within three months and several further deaths later. One person was killed immediately and a second died in hospital soon after as a result of injuries received. Another person is reported to have died at the time from a coronary thrombosisc. Acute radiation syndrome (ARS) was originally diagnosed in 237 people onsite and involved with the clean-up and it was later confirmed in 134 cases. Of these, 28 people died as a result of ARS within a few weeks of the accident.
There have been no deaths or cases of radiation sickness from the nuclear accident, but over 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes as a preventative measure.
1. It was truly the first nuclear disaster of this scale that gave a huge boost to the green movements all over the world, at the time when they were already on the rise
2. Most of that attention actually came years later from the former USSR itself, where Chernobyl was massively influential. It had a nationwide cleanup campaign. Along with the other two major contemporary disasters (Spitak earthquake and Ufa disaster) it brought massive political change. Free press in the USSR, questioning the competency of the party and the scientific/engineering communities, fears of future man-made disasters on chemical plants and other industrial facilities, massive charity campaigns in USSR, creation of disaster relief agencies in post-Soviet republics etc. Even the post-Soviet wave of pulp fiction is partially the result of Chernobyl. Fukushima didn't bring even 1/10 of that change to Japan.
> games
However this one is largely unrelated. STALKER SoC that popularized Chernobyl isn't actually about the Chernobyl disaster at all, it just uses the exclusion zone as a decoration, after pivoting from the original, much more ambitious concept during the development. They famously overpromised and underdelivered, and the interest was mostly there due to the community deciding to mod this jank into the game they've been promised. So it's mostly a coincidence and a result of a great marketing campaign by the original GSC.
I opened shownew just to make sure, 10 out of 30 posts there are AI-related.
I caught myself thinking that because of this AI-hype I read HN less and less.
Sure, it is clear that AI is interesting to people (or at least someone wants more hype around AI), but it would be nice to read about real hacker news and projects somewhere.
I think the problem isn't AI, but the hype attracted a lot of low IQ script kids that think they are programmers because chatgpt can write simple code.
Library was initially written for use with Netflow collector. More precisely for storing filtered and aggregated traffic information. Typical load for such applications is: a lot of updates in "hot" dataset, fewer inserts, deletions are rare and mostly batched, no needs for fast sequential scan (user can wait for a few seconds or even more to get report). Radix trees are perfectly fits this requirements.
Later we made some tests and decided to use it for IP (plus some other information) lookups without underlying file ("RAM-only" mode).
We have to support some old network hardware (for example almost abandoned Tilera TILE-Gx), that's why we're trying to avoid using OS and platform-specific features in library.
Radix trees has disadvantages, the most notable is that it's hard to implement user-defined sorting order for keys and they required more memory for sparse nodes compared to B-trees (however, this statement is not true for on-disk TKVDB database, we don't store empty pointers)
Yes, the first macro is the common trick, and the second is the mistake (wondering, but it works). I update the code. Thanks a lot for pointing it out!
> Can you point out the pros and cons vs above projects?
Briefly speaking, the above projects are way more mature, full-featured and use different data structures for storing data. BDB, LMDB are B-tree-based, LevelDB (and forks), SQLite4 LSM are using log-structured merge-trees.
TKVDB is a lot simpler, a bit more low-level, uses Radix trees and not tested as well as other key-value engines.
> I read this as: only use it single threaded.
If you protect access to data with your OS locks, everything will be fine.
We're using TKVDB in multi threaded environment (in RAM-only mode) for IP lookups with Netmap and DPDK. On 40Gbe full line rate there is only few hundred CPU cycles for decision on network packet, so the locking tricks becomes important.
Intel has guarantees about writing properly aligned data - if one core is writing 1, 2, 4 or 8 bytes, it will be written atomically. We're exploiting this feature when updating our tree - final update operation is 8 byte (4 byte for 32 bit CPU's) aligned pointer update.
So, in some cases you don't need to use locks at all (you may add HW memory barrier (__sync_synchronize()) after tree update, but it will slow down writer). If only one core is writing data, another cores can safely (well, almost) read it. Warning in docs was about this lockless case.
Yet these are quite comparable accidents.
I wonder what the reason is?