World timekeepers have decreed there will be no leap second on December 31, 2020. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/leap-second-june-30-december-31-why-need-controversy…
Tag: meltdown
Japan Decides To Release Treated Fukushima Water Into the Sea
hcs_$reboot shares a report from CBS News: Japan will release more than a million tons of treated radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea in a decades-long operation, reports said Friday, despite strong opposition from environmentalists, local fishermen and farmers. The release of the water, which has been filtered to reduce radioactivity, is likely to start in…
Linux 5.9 Boosts CPU Performance With FSGSBASE Support
FSGSBASE support in Linux “has the possibility of helping Intel/AMD CPU performance especially in areas like context switching that had been hurt badly by Spectre/Meltdown and other CPU vulnerability mitigations largely on the Intel side,” Phoronix wrote back in August. As it started its journey into the kernel, they provided a preview on August 10: The FSGSBASE support that was finally…
Nuclear ‘Power Balls’ May Make Meltdowns a Thing of the Past
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new generation of reactors coming online in the next few years aims to make nuclear meltdowns a thing of the past. Not only will these reactors be smaller and more efficient than current nuclear power plants, but their designers claim they’ll be virtually meltdown-proof. Their secret? Millions of submillimeter-size grains of uranium…
An Adult Cam Site Exposed 10.88 Billion Records
CAM4, a popular adult platform that advertises “free live sex cams,” misconfigured an ElasticSearch production database so that it was easy to find and view heaps of personally identifiable information, as well as corporate details like fraud and spam detection logs. According to Wired, the database exposed 7 terabytes of names, sexual orientations, payment logs, and email and chat transcripts –…
Radical Hydrogen-Boron Reactor Leapfrogs Current Nuclear Fusion Tech
HB11 Energy, a spin-out company originating at the University of New South Wales, claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected. Along with this announcement, the company also announced a swag of patents through Japan, China and the USA protecting its unique approach to fusion energy generation. New Atlas reports: The results of decades of…
France Shuts Down Oldest Reactors, But Nuclear Power Still Reigns
An anonymous reader shares a report from Agence France-Presse (AFP): France will start closing its oldest atomic power plant on Saturday after 43 years in operation, the first in a series of reactor shutdowns but hardly a signal the country will reduce its reliance on nuclear energy anytime soon. Unplugging the two reactors at Fessenheim, along the Rhine near France’s eastern…
For hottest planet, a major meltdown, study shows
In the scorching atmosphere of exoplanet KELT-9b, even molecules are torn to shreds. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-hottest-planet-major-meltdown.html…
Germany Rejected Nuclear Power — and Deadly Emissions Spiked
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On New Year’s Eve, while the rest of the world was preparing to ring in a new decade, employees of the German energy company EnBW were getting ready to pull the plug on one of the country’s few remaining nuclear power plants. The license to operate the two reactors at the Philippsburg nuclear…
Geoengineering Wouldn’t Be Enough to Stop Greenland From Melting
An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:
When the Greenland ice sheet went into a record meltdown in the summer of 2019, it raised a very terrifying specter of the future. Here was a 12.5-billion-ton mass of ice — one that’s been melting at a quickening pace since the 1980s — melting in a way scientists didn’t expect to happen for decades. While the…