Comment offtopic my balls (Score 1) 57
Suck them both.
Suck them both.
Notice they said absolutely nothing about using it to target keyword ads at you, build profiles about you to target you with ads
Of course they didn't say that. They've always been open about doing that for unpaid consumer accounts, it's how they can provide the service for free. If you don't want your the ads, or for your data to be used, you can get that, starting at at $7 per month.
As well as the reactors, they've also got to get the heat-exchangers, turbines and generators down there too
Do they, or could that stuff be on the surface? Pump cold water down, get hot steam back up, run it through a heat exchanger/condenser, cycle it back down again. Or maybe something other than water. You'd lose some heat to the shaft walls, but that could be acceptable.
Well false, and covered.
Firstly no, nuclear plants do not require daily maintenance. In fact the core / steam loops are largely maintenance free outside of planned shutdowns years in advance. Maintenance is usually only carried out every 24 months.
As to how, it's not exactly rocket surgery. This proposal just lowers two components to the bottom of a hole in a water column, just shut it down, cool it off (like you would do with a normal one), and then all you've got is the extra hour or so it takes to winch the thing up to the surface. It's not in any way buried or sealed down there.
I'm not talking maintenance of the actual reactor. I'm talking dials, valves, switches, even light bulbs, sensors, data collectors, etc. etc. And yes, that kind of stuff is on the daily "to fix" list. These are big complicated machines. You don't drop it in the ground and forget about it. They said they were going to run them remotely, which is really what I call shenanigans. Sure, you can put a couple of PCs anywhere in the world and "remotely control" any reactor, but you need access to all the piping, wiring, etc. and that means a big crew down under the ground.with the reactor.
I think all the maintenance-required parts you're talking about are where the heat is transformed into electricity, plus the safety-related monitoring of the core. With this design, it seems like all of the turbines, etc. will be at the surface, where they can be easily maintained, while the safety-related stuff just isn't an issue. Rather than designing a core that can be controlled and ramped up and down, with this system you'd designed the core to just operate at a continuous steady state for its operational lifetime until the fuel is used up, at which point you just fill in the hole.
You might make the core self-moderating so that if it gets too hot it will ramp down the fission so you don't have to worry about stoppage in the flow of water resulting in a meltdown or similar, but that would only be to reduced the likelihood of the core damaging itself before the end of its useful lifetime, not because there is any safety concern with a meltdown that occurs kilometers underground.
All of the stuff other than the weights is basically just scaffolding, though. Necessary, but the stuff that makes it "intelligent" is all in the weights.
"buildings won't be moved and created just because of your romantic notions. Juvenile delusions."
You just replied to a well known bot some clown has created by training a LLM on rsilvergun's posts. And you did it by saying something really stupid. Nice work there, sport.
I am not allowed to install software on my work machine and there's an approval process. IT can have a real text editor but I can't.
Granted this is partly a problem with my employer but it wasn't a problem until Microsoft ruined software I was using daily.
And why do they keep giving them?
At this point it's natural to conclude that B1zX is run by literal Nazis.
Some bitch came along and down modded my last three comments again. What a shock. It's too bad slashdot is now anti fact and anti science.
But the cost of building this installation sounds like it would be prohibitive unless you're using slave labor and letting a lot of those slaves die.
How would you even use slaves in drilling a kilometers-deep borehole?
I just tried my standard "draw me an ASCII middle finger" and it flat-out refused to generate it for me!
Yep, the guardrails are also improving.
So how long before it can start to rewrite its own code to "improve" itself?
I'm only half joking.
Well, the LLMs don't really consist of "code" per se, but I think the AI labs are already using them to work on improving their own design. How far are they from being able to do this without human oversight and supervision? I have no idea.
Exactly. And hot water is an excellent solvent. When it flashes to steam, where does the solute go?
In this case, it stays deep in the ground, where it came from.
high temperature steam containing minerals and salts is highly corrosive to plumbing, valves and turbines
The dry rock method described in the article significantly reduces this problem, because it doesn't rely on groundwater steam that has had millennia to dissolve high mineral loads. Instead, it injects low-mineral surface water into pressure-created cracks. That water does pick up some minerals from the rocks, of course, but the result is far less corrosive than natural groundwater. In addition, super-hot rocks flash all of the water to steam, and H20 in gaseous form cannot carry any dissolved minerals (this is how distillation works), so as long as they can find ways to keep the steam from pushing liquid water up into the generation equipment, there are no salts or minerals to cause problems. This is actually easier with higher temperatures, because no pockets are cool enough to avoid flashing to steam.
I'm not saying that the problem you cite isn't relevant to hot rock geothermal, but the difficulties are hugely reduced.
What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. -- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875