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Comment There are cheaper ways to generate heat (Score 2, Informative) 35

In a fission nuclear plant, nuclear fuel is used to generate heat to boil water to run a steam turbine.

That's all well and good, but there's no reason the heat has to come from nuclear fission; any similarly reliable heat-source would do just as well. Perhaps there are cheaper and safer ways to obtain the required heat? You can do a whole lot of drilling with $80,000,000,000 dollars, especially since without any radioactive material to worry about, you don't have to spend all that money on security, failsafe backup systems, and long-term waste disposal anymore.

Submission + - Python Software Foundation refuses $1.5 million grant with anti DEI provision. (blogspot.com) 1

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program.

"We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

Comment Re:A reminder to prioritise asteroid defence/space (Score 1) 39

The first step to surviving somewhere else is locating a somewhere else that is better than trying to live on Earth after it has been hit by an asteroid. Unfortunately Mars fails this test. In fact we could get hit by an asteroid, have a nuclear war, have the worst possible global warming, and living would still be better on Earth than Mars.

Comment Re:Wind, Solar and Batteries are cheaper and clean (Score 1) 178

What the world would really like is something that performs like nuclear fission (lots of 24/7 reliable baseload power, deployable anywhere) but without the big upfront expense or the catastrophic risks (pollution, storage, proliferation) to manage.

Is there such a thing? Could there be? Nuclear fusion might be one answer, and they've made good progress, but it's still a bit iffy and even in the best-case scenario it won't be applied at scale for some years yet. Geothermal is seeing some interesting developments that might allow it to be deployed more broadly, so that's what I'm currently geeked over. Short of that, there's always good old-fashioned renewables+lots of storage, which can be made to work, but requires a lot of infrastructure.

Comment Re:WWIII (Score 2) 61

ICE actually has a ways to go. Some historical US deportations (and remember the population was smaller then):

1930s (Great Depression): A period of mass "repatriations" saw an estimated 1.8 million people of Mexican descent—including many U.S. citizens—rounded up and deported or pressured to leave voluntarily. These were often informal raids and not all were official deportations.

1954: Operation Wetback resulted in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of individuals, though historians estimate the number was closer to 300,000.

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