fullsquare @ fullsquare @awful.systems

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4 mo. ago

at least this operation won't leave behind any e-waste, since it all will burn down when orbit maintaining engines inevitably fail

"People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers," Schmidt said. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation

I reasoned that the former Google executive might have bought Relativity Space as a means to support the development of data centers in space.

absolutely not peak of bubble type bullshit, please give microsoft-sized theranos more money, nothing weird or stupid is happening there

last time i've seen someone wanting to put compute in orbit it was cryptobros trying to avoid everyone's jurisdiction, presumably to do some financial crimes there. turns out you can get away with this on earth, so it's unnecessary

These are mostly combustion byproducts btw. Mercury emissions come from coal fired powerplants, PCBs are an old and long discontinued type of nonflammable coolant, HCB also isn't even manufactured probably

I mean, they have to make new republicans somehow

wtf leaded gasoline is back too? (there are very few other uses for alkyllead compounds and it would be hard to make it accidentally)

no, all people here are 30-40 years old communist programmers from california

idk if i want agent orange to get a stroke because on one hand might just die but on the other hand the nonsense he speaks could just get more powerful

i'm convinced that rhyming slang is just 19th century coal mine brainrot. you cannot change my mind

These were not supposed to be breeders, but this is only due to agreements that are ignored ny now. Technical capability is there

This sounds like that material would be more useful in high performance radars, not as flash memory

time travel (backwards) would break physics as we know it, what are you talking about lol

These are fast reactors and operate on different principles. The coolant there is sodium and while hard to design and run, it's doable. French had similar reactor but only one and it was shut down. Nice thing about fast reactors is that these can burn even-numbered isotopes of plutonium, useless in water moderated reactor, and give fresh mostly 239Pu plutonium of good quality. weapons grade even, and IAEA doesn't like it. But who cares since nonproliferation is dead anyway?

SMRs too

yeah either that or sometimes that one biologist illegally gene-editing embryos shows up

i will call MSRs (not thorium power, this is fine) toys until a single 100MWe+ unit gets built up. wanna bet that it won't happen in 20 years?

they haven't demonstrated anything yet, but maybe they will develop something. perhaps. maybe. it's all uncertain at this point and technology for it doesn't exist yet.

high voltage transmission lines are a thing, look up where lignite or hydro power plants are situated relative to where people live. this is a solved problem

You're confusing subcritical reactors with thorium power

You absolutely can make a nuke out of thorium-derived material (first in Teapot MET, 1955, then possibly later by India). It's not widely used because plutonium is similar and in some important ways superior material

The tradeoff in using salt as fuel/coolant is that now almost all the fission products are in soluble form, instead of nice ceramic chemically inert pellets, which makes any spill much worse, and i wouldn't say it's safer for this reason - it's different, and it's a tradeoff few thought it is worth making. We have figured out how to make PWRs not explode so it's not that big of a problem. This goes both for uranium or thorium as a fuel

The reason Yucca Mountain is needed is that nuclear waste exists, if US reversed their policy on reprocessing maybe it wouldn't fill up so quickly. It's a matter of political will

At least now, the chemical engineering for reprocessing fuel when reactor is on is not there. Maybe it'll get developed in this project, but this didn't happen yet. It all has to be weighed against existing alternatives, and it's possible to breed 233U in normal water-based reactors, so maybe there's a little reason to make MSRs in the first place. India has some thorium energy projects as well, but they're slowed down by lack of fissile material to bootstrap it (you can't fuel reactor using thorium only, it needs some fissile material)