Challenge accepted. A projector in German is called a Beamer, and almost all Germans believe it is an English word. The German word would be... Projektor.

The main reason nukes move slowly is that one of the by-products of the fission of U-235 is Xe-135, which is a reactor poison which reduces the number of available neutrons. During normal operations the control rods are positioned exactly to compensate Xe poisoning, but during transients this is not so easy. In short, Xe is a moving target, and if it is not at its steady-state value it may make the reactor prompt-critical (meaning "boom", or at the very least an emergency shutdown), which is why reactor cores do not move their operational points much, and when they do it's extra carefully.

Unless these SMRs have a different fuel than U-235, I don't see how they can escape from physics.

The French, who are especially interested in this topic since they have more nuclear than anyone else, developed some techniques to use reactors dynamically, but these can at most make one big step-change followed by 12-24 hours of steady-state. Since the objective for the French is to close some power plants in the weekends to limit production, this is good enough for them.

If a nuclear accident had occurred on a Navy vessel, do you expect that the Navy would have a) transparently published all information and allowed even Greenpeace to inspect the site, or b) swept everything under the rug?

You can't seriously expect the US military (any military) to disclose their safety record. If nothing else, it would be releasing sensitive information about the reliability of one of their most prized assets.

A "sterling safety record" is as suspicious as a used car with a shiny engine and a new set of pedals.

Hmm...100MW reactor is about the size of a submarine's reactor. Which have been used with no problems for, what, 50+ years now?

Setting aside that for reasons of power density these reactors use weapons-grade fuel rather than ordinarily enriched uranium and the related proliferation risk, you do realise that the military does not have to worry about budgets? If you are OK paying $1000 a MWh you can of course use a submarine reactor.

On top of that, a small reactor will require about the same number of personnel as a large one, a good number of whom highly educated and paid, which will increase the impact of operational costs.

Not many details in the article, but the key proposition in SMRs is to shift economies of scale from site to assembly line, i.e. from building a single multi-GW plant to many identical plants in the 100-MW class built in a central location and then shipped to the site. Of course this can make sense only if the assembly line produces dozens or hundreds of these SMRs, and even then there is no experience in how much these economies of scale are and how they compare to the previous onsite-scale approach.

The infamous Olkiluoto 3 reactor had a nameplate capacity about 4 times larger than NuScale's (1600 against 462 MW), but an initial estimate only about double the costs (3 G€ against 1.6 G$). Olkiluoto 3 became one of the best arguments against nuclear power, as its immense delays (it should already have passed Duke Nukem Forever's with 12 years and still counting) and ballooning budget (from 3 to 11 G€, and it's likely a conservative estimate) showed how little presumed market leaders such as Siemens and Framatome knew about the technology.

Now, the price tag on this reactor is double than the initial one for Olkiluoto 3, and Romania is a fairly corrupt country—very much like the one I was born in. I imagine Romanian are a lot like my own and are mostly aiming at securing 1.6 billions to steal, and then blame it on "cost overruns" to get more money from the taxpayers. If this plays out right, they may have a cornucopia of kickbacks for the next 20 years.

Of course, if Romanian politicians really cared for decarbonisation, they would invest in wind and solar, which are far cheaper than nuclear, far faster to deploy, and far easier to cost-control (which also makes them far more difficult to embezzle from). The usual complaint that renewables are not reliable does certainly not hold water in Romania, where 28% of energy production is hydro, which can easily compensate for oscillations in wind and solar.

The article talks of an alkaline fuel cell, but later specifies it is an alkaline membrane fuel cell. The difference is significant: (membraneless) AFC are intolerant to CO2, as it precipitates as carbonate in the liquid electrolyte they have instead of a membrane. They were cheap, but could not use atmospheric oxygen. Almost no one works with them now as there is no market.

AMFCs, on the other hand, are the new wave - they still have significant lifetime problems for their membrane, which does not live more than a few hundred hours because of the alkaline environment. However, this may eventually be solved; the alkaline environment itself is the main reason the cells can avoid expensive catalysts, since the high activity of OH- ions compensates for it. The more common PEM fuel cells run in a neutral environment have necessarily lower OH- activity (brush up your definition of pH from high school), and that means they both need platinum and can achieve lifetimes of dozens of thousands of hours.

So, it the article a big deal? Yes and no - it's nice that expensive catalysts can be avoided, but the main problem in AMFCs is membrane lifetime, not catalyst cost.

Delisting from ICANN would only lead Russia to develop their own DNS system, making it more difficult for ordinary Russians to read western media and giving Putin yet another surveillance tool. Surely not done in one day, but all that some of these sanctions are doing is highlighting how Russia is dependent on foreign infrastructure for no good reason. E.g. the Moscow metro ground to a halt because Apple Pay and Google Pay do not work in Russia anymore. Those services are not technologically especially difficult to replicate and a Russian alternative will be in place within days, with an enormous user base from day 1. Blocking bank transactions in the age of crypto will simply move customers to Bitcoin.

Sure, there are plenty sanctions that can work, but Russia is not some small backwater third-world country. If the west blocks some of their easily replaceable services, they will just lose a market and never recover it when things calm down.

Since ICANN came under fire several times before as an undue US influence on the Internet, they should be very aware that conditioning their service to political alignment with Washington will only serve as proof that they are not neutral.

To get an unambiguous result, are you suggesting that the experiment be repeated twice? Once with the patient infected, and once without?

You use the opinion of doctors previously treating the patient about whether it was reasonable to expect them to die at that time. They may get it right or wrong in each single specific case, but here we are looking for the big numbers, which are what we base our response on.

Most issues with self-driving cars are due to collisions and lane keeping, which are far less worrying in this scenario. Ships move a lot slower and are not restricted to a lane about the width of the vessel. Besides, this is a very short journey (less than 15 km), so there is much less than can go wrong.

Of course it can still run aground, run on some sailing boat or whatever, but it's still easier to handle than a single car in traffic.

I have worked recently on some research project with freight rail, and while it is not my field I think I absorbed some factoids.

When rail loses customers to road, these usually never come back, since trucks are "good enough", and do not require you to coordinate your schedule with a ton of other rail users. Using rail is somewhat inflexible as you are obviously bound to the tracks, and while it's a great way to move about bulk cargo like coal and containers, it is not very practical to ship iPhones and consumer goods all the way to the customer. The long-term decline of coal in the US is a major factor in freight rail decline.

With trucks, you can pit drivers against each other and keep costs low. They can be induced to skimp on safety rules such as mandatory rest. In rail, you have to deal with only one company without competition (except from said truck drivers), and that company is so large they don't really need you.

Still, the US have a very well-developed freight rail system, much more than in Europe. About 30% of all goods move on rail at some point. The reasons are mostly geographic as the country has long distances far from the sea, and to go from one coast to the other by sea you need to sail at least to Panama.

Amazon-style delivery may be a point - factories can deliver directly to consumer cutting out middlemen, and they then send a small package directly to the customer instead of loading a container of their products on a train on the way to a store half the country away.

I'm willing to bet all my bitcoins that you read the enegy consumption figure wrong - 285 MWh or 0.285 GWh is more like it. This fits well with this chart I found after 30 seconds of googling.

Besides, you can't consider the energy only; you need to factor in the capital cost of the equipment (and something going to consume 285 MWh of energy is not just a cluster of recycled desktops in a garage) and the the power tariffs (the kW as opposed to the kWh), since you won't be able to power this kind of rig over your home power supply; the average US home uses 11 MWh a year .

If you use that same 65 kWh to charge an EV, you get 300 km of range

This is an old, simplistic argument that gets thrown around all the time. You have to factor in the energy to make the batteries themselves, the cost of raw materials, and so on.

The most optimistic price targets for batteries are 100 $/kWh. With battery packs, it's going to be more (up to double for some types like NCA). Hydrogen compressed storage is already now at about 12 $/kWh (I have seen commercial quotes).

Fuel cells do not require any toxic chemicals, mostly steel for the plates, plastic for membranes, carbon for catalyst support and platinum for catalysis. Only the platinum needs recycling, and not because it's toxic, rather because it is valuable (like in catalytic exhausts). The rest can be basically melted, so recycling is easier.

Fuel cells can reach - assuming mass production - as low as 30-40 $/kW (DoE targets). Batteries can never get there because the raw material cost alone is higher than that, and with the increased rollout of BEVs there is no reason to believe raw materials will get any cheaper, even if gigafactories optimise their production.

Then, the heat generated by a fuel cell can be used on a car, e.g. for internal heating. A BEV will need to use its power to heat the car, either with a resistance or a heat pump, but fuel cells have this heat to begin with. So, the actual efficiency of fuel cells is higher than just electrical conversion.

Finally, hydrogen tanks are far lighter than batteries for the same energy, by about a full order of magnitude (including the tank itself). A heavier car uses more energy to move, so even if it has a high efficiency in storing that energy, it is using a lot of it moving the storage. There were experiments where a Toyota Mirai used only about 14% energy more than a Tesla S for the same distance because of all these factors (sorry no link - pretty sure about that number though).

Mirais hold 5 kg of hydrogen, which with state of the art electrolysis cost 260 kWh to produce. They also have a demonstrated 1000 km range. Tesla S have 100 kWh of batteries, and a range just below 500 km. The difference is therefore not that big.

hydrogen takes up a lot of space, so it's almost unusable for aviation

Hydrogen takes space, but energy consumption is dictated by weight and drag. It is fully possible to imagine new-generation planes with a central hold for hydrogen tanks and a flying-wing configuration.

In any case, synthetic fuels will always be more expensive than hydrogen for the simple reason that hydrogen is the feedstock they are made from, though they may remain the only alternative for today's plane design.

Uh, no, there is no official language on this site. Nor there is in the US for that sake. And if we don't write English, what are you going to do? Tú y qué pincho ejército?

If you were wondering, Italian IT textbooks use pippo, topolino and pluto the same way as foo, bar and baz in English.

The problem with the US is that it's leadership is unstable. Every 4 years it can swing from one extreme of foreign policy to the other.

In what dimension of hyperspace do you live? Because in mine, I see only two parties with essentially the same policies, who pretend to fight each other bitterly on petty political points, while never ever deviating on the policies that really matter: for all his talk of change, Obama continued Bush' wars, organised terror drone strikes, and essentially followed the party line. Even Trump did not significantly alter the US' general behaviour in the big picture.

The "party line" is not the Republicans' or the Democrats', it is given by those rich donors who fund both sides and to which US politicians answer to. That's why there will never be a proper health care system, or a dismantling of the useless and ridiculously expensive US military complex, whose wasteful operating costs could make the US zero-emission in a few short years and defeat the point of perennial involvement in the Middle East.