@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io2025-11-14 21:05:53
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/
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-11-21 14:40:06
I keep thinking that I should text a friend of mine, tell him how much I've been writing, tell him I mentioned him in something I wrote. Then I remember he died like 4 years ago.
Edit:
It must have been more like 6 or something now that I'm thinking about it. It was part of the way through the first Trump administration. He would have really appreciated the way Trump is unraveling now. One of the last times we talked he was like... "You know man, You used to play 'Baby, I'm an anarchist' and I'd think... ' don't want to throw a brick through a Starbucks window. I kinda like their coffee sometimes.' But the way things have been going lately, I'm kind of looking around and thinking you might be right. Fuck Starbucks. Where's that brick?"
At least I won the SRV vs the Hendrix version of Voodoo Chile debate. Hendrix is just better.
We used to talk about music, especially punk (and rockabilly, and ska, and 2 tone), and poetry, and beer. He liked hop stupid, but I always thought it didn't have the body to match the hops and I always preferred Racer 5. Of course, this time of year we'd be shifting in to red and stout season, and I'd be excited for Lagunitas Russian Imperial and this year's Bourbon County Stout batch.
He was really big in to Star Wars. He missed all of Andor, which is probably the best thing to have come out since the original 3. But I guess he also missed the new trilogy, so maybe it balances out.
He would have really liked all the good music I've run across in the last few years. He had a music blog for a bit.
Yeah... I don't know why it's hitting me so hard now, other than maybe I never had time to really process it before.
@jhamel@social.linux.pizza2026-01-22 10:25:48
@StephenRees@mas.to2025-11-14 22:07:23
Old growth threatened by logging increases in BC
The Narwhal reports on a new study by Sierra Club BC that finds efforts to protect old growth forests in BC have largely failed since the ruling centrist NDP party has been in charge starting in 2013. The report found that "13,000 football fields worth of old-growth deferral zones were logged" in the past 4 years in BC. Meanwhile, premier David Eby has urged forestry production in BC to increase by 50% over 2024 levels.
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