My theory is that social media simply increases the connectivity and reach (of the “rumour mill” or what have you) and thus it amplifies an existing social “failure mode”.

(That and earlier mass media was heavily moderated and regulated, while things like Facebook or twitter/X are basically a free-for-all).

The hack thing spread wildly, indeed. Weird experience.

Rumour huh.

He also make article for each his videos, usually more technical than the video which tends to be more entrainment oriented.

Separate reply for a separate topic: You're repeating the urban-legend version of the McDonalds lawsuit, not the real story, which you can find in numerous places, e.g. https://www.ttla.com/?pg=McDonaldsCoffeeCaseFacts. tl;dr, it was repeated wilful negligence by McDonalds, they'd already injured several hundred other people through it. They knew it was a serious problem but kept doing it anyway.

  Spotted the US-american

Really? Where?

We had a problem some time ago with a major power outage due to operator negligence. When it came to assigning blame it turned out the corporate structure was such that it was impossible to sue the operator. Since it was in effect publicly-owned, the public would have been suing itself.

This is grid following, very effective for small scale generation. It does not work for large scale generation though when the grid is relying on that voltage and frequency from the utility scale renewable generation ("grid forming"). When those large generators exceed their ride through tolerance, batteries step in to hold voltage and frequency up until the transient event ends or dispatchable generators called upon spin up (currently fossil gas primarily, but also nuclear if there is headroom to increase output). Thermal generators can take minutes to provide this support (called upon, fuel intake increased, spinning metal spins faster), batteries respond within 250-500ms.

Tesla’s Megapack system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia was the first example of this being proven out at scale in prod. Batteries everywhere, as quickly as possible.

When that happens, get ready.

Battery storage provides this grid service, as mentioned in my other comments.

Facebook/etc aren't a free-for-all, they're much worse than that - they selectively provide a stream of news designed to drive "engagement", of which angry obsession is one type. Social media aren't "platforms", they're content distributors (despite the industry's own efforts to establish use of the term "platform", which sounds far more neutral).

I agree with your detailed assessment, but importantly, I argue more battery storage would've allowed for the grid to fail gracefully through rapid fault isolation and recovery (assuming intelligent orchestration of transmission level fault isolation). Parallels to black start capabilities provided by battery storage in Texas (provided by Tesla's Gambit Energy subsidiary). When faults are detected, the faster you can isolate and contain the fault, the faster you can recover before it spreads through the grid system.

The storage gives you operational and resiliency strength you cannot obtain with generators alone, because of how nimble storage is (advanced power controls), both for energy and grid services.

> Can this be fixed? Of course. We've had the technology for years for inverters to better mimic spinning slugs of steel. Will it be? Of course. Spain's TSO will make it a requirement to fix this and energy producers will comply.

This is synthetic inertia, and is a software capability on the latest battery storage systems. "There was no market mechanism to encourage the deployment of this technology in concert with Spain’s rapid deployment of solar and wind." from my top comment. This should be a hard requirement for all future battery storage systems imho.

Potential analysis of current battery storage systems for providing fast grid services like synthetic inertia – Case study on a 6 MW system - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2022.106190 - Journal of Energy Storage Volume 57, January 2023, 106190

> Large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) already play a major role in ancillary service markets worldwide. Batteries are especially suitable for fast response times and thus focus on applications with relatively short reaction times. While existing markets mostly require reaction times of a couple of seconds, this will most likely change in the future. During the energy transition, many conventional power plants will fade out of the energy system. Thereby, the amount of rotating masses connected to the power grid will decrease, which means removing a component with quasi-instantaneous power supply to balance out frequency deviations the millisecond they occur. In general, batteries are capable of providing power just as fast but the real-world overall system response time of current BESS for future grid services has only little been studied so far. Thus, the response time of individual components such as the inverter and the interaction of the inverter and control components in the context of a BESS are not yet known. We address this issue by measurements of a 6 MW BESS's inverters for mode changes, inverter power gradients and measurements of the runtime of signals of the control system. The measurements have shown that in the analyzed BESS response times of 175 ms to 325 ms without the measurement feedback loop and 450 ms to 715 ms for the round trip with feedback measurements are possible with hardware that is about five years old. The results prove that even this older components can exceed the requirements from current standards. For even faster future grid services like synthetic inertia, hardware upgrades at the measurement device and the inverters may be necessary.

Outside, right now, it is about 6 degrees C. Much of Spain is a high plateau where you're entirely dependent on sunshine for warmth in winter.

From pleasants 20-25C to -30C in some peaks. Castilles? Snow for granted. The north? Chilly as hell. Not snowy, but the humidity fro the Atlantic will make you feel cooler than the Castilles themselves even if freezing.

Can be hard, and NOT just because of Filomena. Not all Spain it's a Mediterranean beach, trust me. Some winters in Leon can be harder than the average Winter in Poland.

How hard a Winter can be? Pick a height map of Spain... and you will deduce something by yourself.

Spain is more than Barcelona or Valencia. Both the North and the inner part of the country can have crude winters, specially in the mountains. The temperatures range between -22 and 116 Fahrenheit depending on the location. For comparison, Chicago minimum is -25 F, so even if the mean is lower there, some places can be still very cold. Is one of the most diverse countries in Europe.

It can get pretty bad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Filomena

TL:DR Spain is not just Andalusia, and the US is not just Texas.

Spain is like a condensed minigame map of the US. Remember when the Morrowind videogame looked megadiverse because of the mountains generating lots of different terrains and curves? That's Spain. You cross a mountain tunnel by car and your warm 28C degrees in May at Leon somehow shifted to a cloudy, gray sky with 15 degrees in Asturias in -literally, measured by clock- ~10 minutes.

You would think that you where somehow abducted and teleported from a UFO in the road. But no, it's just the rough nature.

And the Winters in Leon are bipolar being a dry, continental climate. So you can have scorching summers... and freezing winters with -10 degrees with ease.

So, yes, Winters outside the Mediterranean sea can be rough.

In some ways, yes, but yet it's what reality is. There was probably some last factor kicking in that triggered the cascade, but there were probably many non-happy-paths not properly covered by working backup/fallback strategies. So a report could totally still tell "it's X fault", pointing the finger there. Government would blame the owner of X, some public statement about fixing X would be made and then the ones working in the field should internally push toi improve/fix their own (reduced) scope.

I don't know what will come of this report in the next months/years, I will keep an eye on it though, since I live in Spain :)

Exactly.

But EU's liberalized energy market gives us resiliency and low prices for electricity! /s

And people might not know what the CSIRO is. They are the Australian governments research body, separated from the current political party. They aren’t some private company or political group. I don’t think you could have a more neutral and unbiased viewpoint.

Well, if that's really the cause, then thanks CCC, I guess. For such a serious vulnerability which is probably non-trivial (not to mention expensive) to patch, is it really responsible to give only 3.5 months of time before disclosing it (according to slide #56 https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5f6498c074436c349716e747/..., they notified EFR about the vulnerability on 2024-09-12 and disclosed it on 2024-12-28)?

I use this model all the time. It's very helpful for explaining the multifactorial genesis of catastrophes to ordinary people.

> As well as the closely related 'that can't possibly have ever worked' and sure enough it never did.

I had one of those, customer is adamant latest version broke some function, I check related code and it hasn't been touched for 7 years, and as written couldn't possibly work. I try and indeed, doesn't work. Yet customer persisted.

Long story short, an unrelated bug in a different module caused the old, non-functioning code to do something entirely different if you had that other module open as well, and the user had disciverdd this and started relying on this emergent functionality.

I had made a change to that other module in the new release and in the process returned the first module to its non-functioning state.

The reason they interacted was of course some global variables. Good times...

In reality the "swiss cheese" holes for major accidents often turn out to be large holes that were thought to be small at the time.

> [Fukushima] No small alignment of circumstances needed.

The tsunami is what initiated the accident, but the consequences were so severe precisely because of decades of bad decisions, many of which would have been assumed to be minor decisions at the time they were made. E.g.

- The design earthquake and tsunami threat

- Not reassessing the design earthquake and tsunami threat in light of experience

- At a national level, not identifying that different plants were being built to different design tsunami threats (an otherwise similar plant avoid damage by virtue of its taller seawall)

- At a national level, having too much trust in nuclear power industry companies, and not reconsidering that confidence after a number of serious incidents

- Design locations of emergency equipment in the plant complex (e.g. putting pumps and generators needed for emergency cooling in areas that would flood)

- Not reassessing the locations and types of emergency equipment in the plant (i.e. identifying that a flood of the complex could disable emergency cooling systems)

- At a company and national level, not having emergency plans to provide backup power and cooling flow to a damaged power plant

- At a company and national level, not having a clear hierarchy of control and objective during serious emergencies (e.g. not making/being able to make the prompt decision to start emergency cooling with sea water)

Many or all of these failures were necessary in combination for the accident to become the disaster it was. Remove just a few of those failures and the accident is prevented entirely (e.g. a taller seawall is built or retrofitted) or greatly reduced (e.g. the plant is still rendered inoperable but without multiple meltdowns and with minimal radioactive release).

I’m not sure why you think those are not a confluence of smaller events or that something outside the design spec isn’t one of those factors. By “small,” I don’t mean trivial. I mean an event that by itself wouldn’t necessarily result in disaster. Perhaps I should have said “smaller” rather than “small.” With the O-rings, the cold and the pressure to launch on that particular day all created the confluence. With Fukushima, the earthquake knocked out main power for primary cooling. That would have been manageable except then the backup generators got destroyed by the tsunami. It was not a case of just a big earthquake, whether outside or inside the design spec, making the reactor building fall down and then radiation being released.

> The decision process that produced that DBA was clearly faulty - the economic and social costs of the disaster so clearly have exceeded those of a building to a more serious DBA.

That isn't clear at all. We're effectively sampling from the entire globe and we've had 2-3x bad nuclear disasters since the 70s. Our safety standards appear to be overcautious given the relatively small amount of damage done vs ... pretty much every alternative. The designs seem to be fine. I'm still waiting to see the justification for the evacuations from Fukushima; they seemed excessive. People died.

> For the cost of maybe maybe tens of millions at most...

You haven't thought for long enough before you typed that. For this particular disaster, sure. But hardening against all the possible disasters is what needs to happen when you become less risk tolerant. It is the millions of dollars to prevent against this disaster multiplied by the number of potential disasters that you have to consider. Safety is expensive.

The numbers aren't small, safety of that magnitude might not even be economically feasible. To say nothing of whether it is actually sensible. And once you get into one in 500 or thousand year events, some really catastrophic stuff starts happening that just can't be reasonably defended against. San Francisco and its fault springs to mind, I forget what sort of even that is but it is probably once a millennium or more often.

In Japan they have the "Tsunami Stones" [0] across the coast, memorials to remind future generations of the highest point the water reached.

It was negligent to construct a nuclear plant at sea level, it was just a plant waiting to be flooded, and for such case they had ten years to design protections after being requested to reinforce measures (along with the other Japanese plants), but I can imagine the ones that should put the money was not very collaborative (I even doubt if such responsible learnt the lesson).

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/century-old-warnin...

If it was a cheese model or not I do not enter (notice that parent of parent and me are different users), their negligence breaks all the possible logic we could apply without introducing the corruption's variable behind such decades of bad decisions.

    << The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant construction was based on the seismological knowledge of more than 40 years ago. As research continued over the years, researchers repeatedly pointed out the high possibility of tsunami levels reaching beyond the assumptions made at the time of construction, as well as the possibility of reactor core damage in the case of such a tsunami. However, TEPCO downplayed this danger. Their countermeasures were insufficient, with no safety margin.>>

    << By 2006, NISA and TEPCO shared information on the possibility of a station blackout occurring at the Fukushima Daiichi plant should tsunami levels reach the site. They also shared an awareness of the risk of potential reactor core damage from a breakdown of sea water pumps if the magnitude of a tsunami striking the plant turned out to be greater than the assessment made by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers.>>

    << TEPCO was clearly aware of the danger of an accident. It was pointed out to them many times since 2002 that there was a high possibility that a tsunami would be larger than had been postulated, and that such a tsunami would easily cause core damage.>>

    << there appear to have been deficiencies in tsunami modeling procedures, resulting in an insufficient margin of safety at Fukushima Daiichi. A nuclear power plant built on a slope by the sea must be designed so that it is not damaged as a tsunami runs up the slope.>>

> Caveating that I'm not really sure it was even an out-of-design event but if it was then it is case closed and the swiss cheese model is an inappropriate choice of model to understand the failure.

This is not how safe systems are designed and operated. Safety is not a one-time item, it is a process. All safety-critical systems receive attention throughout their operating lives to identify and mitigate potential safety risks. Throughout history, many safety-critical systems have received significant changes during their operating lives as a result of newly-discovered threats or recognition that threats identified during the initial design were not adequately addressed. Many (if not most) commercial aircraft have required significant modifications to address problems that were not understood at the time they were initially built and certified. Likewise, nuclear power plants in many countries have received major modifications over the years to address potential safety issues that were not understood or properly modeled at the time of their design. Sometimes, this process determines that there is no safe way to continue operation - usually that there is no economically viable way to mitigate the potential failure mode - and the system is simply shut down. This has happened to a few aircraft over the years, as well as several nuclear power plants (in many cases justified, in others not so much).

Fukushima existed in just such a system, and that the disaster occurred was the result of failures throughout the system, not a one-off failure at the design stage.

> I mean, ok. So say they build the plant 35m higher up, then get hit by a tsunami that is 36 meters higher [0] than the one that caused the Fukushima disaster? If we're going to start worrying about events outside the design spec we may as well talk about that one. If they're designing to tolerate an event, we can pretty reliably imagine a much worse event that will happen sooner or later and take the plant out. That is the nature of engineering.

I think you are missing the point. Obviously it is possible that a tsunami higher than any possible design threshold could occur (it is, after all, possible that an asteroid will strike in the pacific and kick up a wave of debris that wipes everything off the home islands). However, the tsunami that struct Fukushima Daiichi was no higher than a number of tsunamis that were recorded in Japan within the last century. The choice of DBA tsunami height was clearly an underestimate, and underestimates were identified for Fukushima and other plants prior to the accident but not acted upon. This was not a cases of "a bigger wave is always possible", it was a case where the design, operation, and supervision were wrong, and known (by some) to be so prior to the accident.

> And those deaths very much count - you can't hand-wave away the consequences

I don't. If it is what it looks like, the government officials that ordered/organised the evacuations should be harshly censured and the next time evacuation orders should be more risk-based and executed in a safer way. What little I've gleaned suggests an appalling situation where a bunch of presumably old people were forced from their homes to their deaths. The main thing keeping me quiet on the topic is I don't speak Japanese and I don't really know what happened in detail there.

> Did you read the report I put?

No, I'm just trusting that you'll be honest about what it is saying. I don't need to read a report to persuade myself that a 40 year old plant was designed based on the best available knowledge of 40 years ago. That seems like something of a given. I'm just not sure where you are going with that, it doesn't obviously suggest negligence to me.

You're not saying what tolerances you want them to design to. We both agree that there are scenarios that can and might happen. Obviously is is possible for a tsunami to take out buildings built near the shore in Japan so it doesn't surprise me that people raised it as a risk. A lot of buildings got taken out that day. That doesn't obviously suggest negligence to me; obviously a lot of people were happy living with the risk.

> EU raised the maximum permitted levels of radioactive contamination for imported food following Fukushima

Oh well then. I had no idea. I thought the consequences were minor and now I have learned ... there you go, I suppose. I'm not really sure what to do with this new information.

> It seems to me your design goal is fundamentally incompatible with a lot of the specific complaints of negligence. If you want a design that doesn't melt down when there is an earthquake and a tsunami, then moving the reactor to higher ground isn't helpful because it won't achieve the design goal.

My goal? My solution? My design!? you must be now kidding,

- GE original design 30-35 meters above the sea.

- Warnings about reinforce safety along one decade.

- Tsunami at Fukushima's nuclear plant, 15 meters above the sea.

> I wasn't going to reply but that seems like it moves the conversation forward; so why not?

Foward to... nothing it seems. You just replied with hypotheticals like if the event didn't happened, and as if such event would have been impossible to avoid, with some kind of dissociative reflexions that surpass the cynicism. I'm the one that is not going to reply.