Sellafield was initially set up as a plutonium production facility for nuclear weapons, similar to the US Hanford Reservation operation which is also a disaster in terms of hazardous materials and pollution control (saying that, a lot of the worst pollution in such sites is from toxic chemicals rather than radioisotopes and nuclear material). I understand the locations of the early Soviet nuclear weapons plutonium production facilities are in a similar mess.

I find the "forty year lifespan" and "70% annual operation" figures mentioned in the linked article a little puzzling. Some operating PWRs (including Japanese ones) are being licenced for 60 and even 80 years of operation and new-builds today are expected to be operable for a century. Annual uptimes for modern PWRs and BWRs are typically 80% and higher according to IAEA records.

The price per kWh mentioned will include end-of-life decommissioning and insurance since that's factored into the cost of all nuclear generation in the Western world. Over sixty and more years a nuclear power reactor will produce a lot of electricity and so it's easy to pay for the decommissioning operation from ongoing receipts and compound interest of the accumulated funds.

UK decommissioning of nuclear reactors is done by SafStor (sic), a process where the radioactive parts of the plant are "stored" for about eighty years to let most of the radioactivity decay to the point where final dismantling can be undertaken more easily. The cost savings supposedly make up for the extended supervision of the site during this period.

China mostly imports metallurgical-grade coal (i.e. anthracite) from Australia for use in its iron and steel industry. In early 2024 Reuters reported "China imported 52.47 million metric tons of Australian coal in 2023". In contrast China mined about 4.5 billion tonnes of indigenous low-grade coal in 2023 for local consumption in power stations, ninety times more than its coal imports from Australia.

I think there are a few coastal coal power stations in China where the cost of imported coal delivered by ship is less than the cost of transporting it thousands of kilometres by rail from the coal mines in the far north-west of the country, however most coal power stations are supplied exclusively from Chinese coal mining operations.

Almost all the coal China burns to provide electricity is mined in-country. It can't be limited by sanctions by hostile countries preventing it being imported. Energy security is something most countries don't think about until bad things happen.

Bad coders write bad code in _any_ language.

Fifty percent of all programmers writing production code today are worse than average programmers. Ninety percent of all programmers writing production code today think they're better than average and the other ten percent think they never make a mistake ever.

There are lots of "ethical investment" pension funds offered by financial houses. I took a look at some of them a few years back when I was making changes to my main pension fund, rearranging the balance of the investment vehicles I had previously chosen. Generally the climate-friendly and Green funds underperformed the funds I had my money in, the ones which included fossil fuel companies like the Dow Jones Industrial Index (which is up over 11% this year and still rising).

It was a while ago but I recall one ethical fund I had looked at had actually lost significant amounts of money -- you know that disclaimer that says the value of your investment might go down? Well it was true for this one. It was a weird hair-shirt fund though, from memory it didn't invest in meat production or pharmaceuticals or companies with operations in places like China and definitely no fossil fuels or nuclear too.

I've played with the idea of writing a science fiction story about "hunters" who gain money and fame by tracking down certain board members and CEOs, and their descendants, and delivering some measure of retribution to them for the world they are creating.

I own an oil company. A couple of them, in fact plus some gas businesses and possibly even a coal mine or two, I don't know. You see, I've got a couple of retirement pension funds and they invest in fossil energy companies because they are profitable and provide a decent return on the money I squirreled away into my pension funds over my working life. Okay, I only own a fraction of each company but I do have an interest in them.

The executives running fossil energy companies are not the owners of those companies, the big institutional shareholders are, pension funds and investment vehicles and the like. If your "hunters" went around killing pension-fund beneficiaries like Granny and Grampaw then maybe they'd do some good for climate change in your simplistic eliminationist worldview, but it's usually easier to find someone else to label as bad and kill them to fix the problem regardless of how the real world works.

Irish corporation tax is lower than in most EU countries but the Irish government gave Apple a special deal. Other Irish companies were required to pay the full amount of corporation tax due and the Irish government went after them if they didn't pay up. Apple got special treatment from the notoriously corrupt Irish government and under EU rules that's not permitted.

Ben there, Dunn that, bought the Taoiseach.

Spending 90 minutes a day fighting traffic really doesn't add to my productivity.

BigCompany Pty LLC Inc doesn't care and they're not paying you to commute 90 minutes a day in your own car at your own expense. They have long leases on expensive city-centre offices and they want you there under direct managerial surveillance to justify their jobs. Meetings per month is a job metric for managers and Zoom calls aren't the same thing.

Actually I haven't used most of those tools and I probably couldn't use them perfectly 100 percent of the time if I was called on to use them. It would help if those tools didn't need to be used so much, and even when they are used they clearly don't do the job of preventing problematic code being released into the wild on a daily or even hourly basis as the constantly updated CVE lists show.

Anything that can reduce the number of civilisation-destroying oopsies making their way into production is a good thing in my opinion. Rockstar coders who never ever ever make mistakes don't really exist despite their claims of being "practiced and disciplined" and like I said earlier, half the programmers out there are less than average.

It does take practice and discipline, but it's possible to do what GP claimed.

Absolutely, they just have to be practiced and disciplined 100 percent of the time they're coding. Absolutely no oopsies or bad days, no glitches or slips of the keyboard are allowed. I'm sure, for example that the coder who released Heartbleed into the world is a practiced and disciplined programmer almost all of the time, ditto for the genius coder who recently broke CrowdStrike and nearly brought down Western civilisation.

That last bit was sarcasm, by the way. Half the programmers working today are less than average after all.

I seldom write the sort of bugs that Rust seems designed to prevent, but I am very careful and I've been doing this a very long time.

People who truly believe this about themselves are the reason memory-safe programming environments like Rust are desperately needed in today's world.

I remember reading a story a while back about smuggling in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region which had been automated in a more primitive manner. The smugglers used real mules that were familiar with the routes across the border and they'd fit a Sony Walkman with an endless tape to the animal's harness. The tape played "keep moving" and "hurry up" in the local dialect and the mule would follow the usual path without needing to be accompanied.

Which nuclear power plants are not based off Western designs?

The RITM-200 reactors in the Russian icebreakers which were modified for use in their floating-barge power plant (which has just started its first refuelling cycle after seven years of operation) are not based off Western designs. Similarly the BN-series fast-spectrum reactors which use sodium for cooling are native designs with no real comparable technology in the West. I think they have two BN-series reactors operating at the moment and China is building a couple of licenced versions.

The bread-and-butter Russian power reactors, the VVER-TOIs they're building at the moment are similar to the American Westinghouse-derived PWRs but that's more like form follows function, any PWR is going to look like the Westinghouse designs from the 1970s. The Russians are also selling and building reactors in other countries, export versions of the VVER-TOI design.

China imports a small amount of anthracite coal from Australia for steel-making. China's coal-fired electricity production is fuelled almost exclusively by indigenous lower-quality coal mined in the north-west of the country.

Much of Australia's coal exports go to places like Indonesia and other Pacific Rim countries for power generation but they also burn a lot themselves, about 5 tonnes per capita annually. That's actually twice the per-capita coal consumption of China and the US (both around 2 tonnes per capita per annum).

U-238 is not fissile and does not provide energy in a CANDU heavy-water reactor[1]. All the heavy lifting is done by the 0.6% or so U-235 in natural uranium. In practice most CANDUs use enriched fuel since it has a better return on investment compared to natural uranium (longer periods between refuelling operations, fewer fuel assemblies needed over time etc.)

[1] Okay, there's the case where U-238 atoms are transmuted into Pu-239 and subsequently fissioned but that's not the main energy source from a fuel load.