So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/
An army veteran and Purple Heart recipient who served two tours in Iraq was deported on Friday morning from an immigration detention facility in Florence, Arizona.
Arizona state representative Raquel Teršn told Fox 10 Phoenix that Jose Barco, a Venezuelan-born veteran whose family fled Cuba as refugees, was deported at 4am from Arizona.
Anna Stout, a volunteer on Barco’s defense team, told Denver 7 his team was not notified of plans for his deportation.
Barco’s family has s…
Big news for the energy transition!
And a nice little 'told you so' moment for yours truly :)
In the first half of this year, renewables produced more electricity globally than coal, for the first time.
And 2025 is the date I predicted for this to happen, back in 2016, in a blog post for Ecofys! The score was 23%-40% at the time, with most of the renewables share still coming from hydro, and the prediction was less than obvious.
Announced pick for No. 2 at NSA won’t get the job as another candidate surfaces
https://therecord.media/announced-nsa-deputy-director-pick-joe-francescon-not-taking-job
«Truth be told, who gets to wear the pager for Rubygems’ on-call rotation is unlikely to impact my life. I can still run gem install, my code will still load, I can still upload new gems. The anxiety it produced in me ultimately comes from the feeling that there is no corner of my life that weird, creepy, rich people are not trying to dominate, to control.»
https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
The CEO of the Illinois Press Association says he has resigned after his board told him to pull out of a lawsuit supporting Chicago-area journalists (Mary Randolph/Local News Initiative)
https://localnewsinitiative.northweste
Mark Bray, a historian who has taught courses on anti-fascism at Rutgers university, was attempting to board a plane at Newark airport late on Wednesday when he was informed at the boarding gate that reservations for him and his family had been cancelled.
“‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second,” Bray posted on Bluesky. “We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared’.”
Th…
A college freshman trying to fly from Boston to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving
was instead deported to Honduras
in violation of a court order, according to her attorney.
Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, 19,
had already passed through security at Boston Logan International Airport on Nov. 20
when she was told there was an issue with her boarding pass,
said attorney Todd Pomerleau.
The Babson College student was then detained by immigration off…