Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> needs to be a law that all nuclear and nuclear-adjacent facilities have no connection to the Internet

Why the special treatment for nuclear? Do you really think redlining a dam or storm-levee system would be less damaging?

Also, turning off internet connections means less-capable remote shut shut-off. Less-responsive power plants. Fewer eyes on telemetry.

We should be mindful of what is and isn't connected to the internet, and how it's firewalled and--if necessary--air gapped. That doesn't mean sprinting straight for the end zone.

View on HN

> Also, turning off internet connections means less-capable remote shut shut-off.

Why does it have to be remote what's wrong with it being in-house? Besides a shut-off should never be able to be triggered remotely.

The same goes for digital emergency shut off buttons; all should be physical.

> Less-responsive power plants.

What? How is remote any more responsive than physical workers being in-house?

If power-plants operated efficiently back in the 50's without internet, they should be able to now without internet.

> Why does it have to be remote what's wrong with it being in-house?

Nothing wrong with it being in house. But having a back-up is never bad.

> How is remote any more responsive than physical workers being in-house?

If the on-site workers are incapacitated. It's a remote (hehe) risk. But so is foreign hackers doing anything with our nukes.

> If power-plants operated efficiently back in the 50's without internet, they should be able to now without internet

If you're fine paying 50s power prices again, sure, I'm sure a power company would happily run their plants retro style.

> But having a back-up is never bad.

It is always an increase in risk, in a security sense.

good argument against having nukes

One can paraphrase the joke about democracy for nukes. Having nukes is the worst, other than every situation where you don’t have nukes and the other guy does.

Most of the other guys get nukes because we have nukes and threaten them militarily. They're very expensive, countries don't want them unless they need a deterrent, and we're often the main threat.

> When expressed in constant 2019 dollars, the average price of electricity in the United States fell from $4.79 per kilowatt-hour in 1902 (the first year for which the national mean is available) to 32 cents in 1950.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/electricity-its-wonderfully-afford...

$0.32 is $0.41 accoreit BLS, which is less than I'm paying today (I live somewhere with expensive electricity), so I'd enjoy the discount if they did!

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=0.32&year1=201...

> $0.32 is $0.41 accoreit BLS, which is less than I'm paying today

Out of curiosity, what was the real power price where you live in the 60s?

Had a long back-and-forth with ChatGPT and it says, accounting for inflation, that it's roughly the same from the 50s and the 60s versus today.

The one exception I can think of is remote shutdown in the face of a rapid natural disaster. Like how the japanese train network is set to shut down rapidly when a high power quake is detected.

But that is very geography dependant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com