Top
Best
New

Posted by Vincent_Yan404 12/28/2025

Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert(substack.com)
810 points | 369 commentspage 5
thatsadude 12/28/2025|
Nice read!
kome 12/28/2025||
i absolutely loved the story, thank you for sharing!

...and the absolutely unhinged reaction of many commenters to AI use is rich in sociological insight. i have the impression that native english speakers feel somehow threatened... but in general, it's rich for the HN crowd huffing and puffing about AI translation after having turned the world in the most inhuman technology mediated thing, way before AI...

pointbob 12/28/2025||
[dead]
edfeewe 12/28/2025||
[flagged]
Obscurity4340 12/28/2025||
> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment (ending with someones couch being neutralized) makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me.

Thats a bit much, isnt it? This was in the early days of their nuclear progress, of course at the time it wasnt going to be a linear, completely efficient and sanitized. Kind of a weird comment, nothing develops perfectly while its development chugs along

jama211 12/28/2025||
It’s a personal emotional experience, nothing weird about it at all. Only weird thing is how you singled it out.
nephihaha 12/28/2025||
The development programme was haphazard. They got bits and pieces off the Soviets and had to figure the rest out.
Obscurity4340 12/28/2025||
Right, but the statement extends to the present state of mind of the writer. They're saying that they currently find the notion that nuclear energy can be clean or the cleanest as absurd based on their childhood in the infancy of the program.

Isnt it currently the consensus that nuclear energy can be one of the more clean energy sources? Because they seem to hold their childhood view that thats crazy

nephihaha 12/29/2025||
The problem with the PRC is that if you complain about things you can get in a lot of trouble. That includes issues like safety and pollution.
zizon 12/28/2025|
> I was born in 1991, thirty years after China’s first atomic bomb explosion, and right around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

I smell cooked