"A citizen is going to have his head cut off over tweets on an anonymous account with less than 10 followers," one rights group said.

Saudi Arabia has sentenced to death a government critic who denounced alleged corruption and human rights abuses on social media, his brother and others familiar with the case told AFP on Monday.

The judgement was handed down against Mohammed al-Ghamdi in July by the Specialized Criminal Court, a secretive institution established in 2008 to try terrorism cases that has a history of unfair trials resulting in death sentences.

The charges against al-Ghamdi include conspiracy against the Saudi leadership, undermining state institutions and supporting terrorist ideology, sources briefed on the details of the case told AFP.

  • @halcyoncmdrEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    we still don’t have a good answer for the waste

    Yes we do, because 95% of the waste is low level waste that is safe within a dozen years. This waste is currently almost entirely stored on site at every plant. These are things like paperwork, clothing, safety materials, etc. The remaining 5% high level waste that humanity has ever produced from all plants worldwide, the stuff that’s dangerous for thousands of years, would fit within an area the size of a football field.

    Nuclear waste is a boogeyman just like nuclear power in general has become due to a poorly educated public and a ton of misinformation. Just look at the blowback from the recent Fukushima news regarding the release of radioactive water into the ocean bcause the holding tanks are finally running out of capacity. The treated water only has one radioactive isotope, Tritium, that can’t be filtered since it’s an isotope of Hydrogen, and that’s kid of a big part of water itself. It’s not uranium that nearly every damned comment I’ve seen online seems to assume. Tritum is a weak source of beta radiation, too weak to even penetrate the skin. The treated water is being diluted further with seawater and the plan will take decades to release the water off the coast through an undersea tunnel which would further dilute it. The resulting release would be lower than that of many currently operating plants that release similar water else where in the world every day. In addition, the half life of Tritium is only 12 years, and the oldest portions of this water which would be released first date back to the disaster in 2011, which is already 12 years ago now, so effectively the released water would already be halfway decayed. Numerous professors and nuclear experts have stated that the risk from this is nearly non-existent both to humans and to marine life. Yet people are stupid and panic about things they don’t understand.

    People just aren’t educated about how radiation works, they only see the extreme cases because that’s what makes for good media. The media is absolutely fucking terrible now at anything that requires nuance or a true explanation. If it can’t be summarized in a simple catchy headline, and the public needs to get some ecuation to understand it properly, the media doesn’t care enough to report it properly. It won’t bring in that ad revenue from clicks online.