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Comment Re:Your tax dollars hard at work (Score 1) 72

1. You have a point. Current reactors are around 30% efficient because they have to have liquid water to cool the reactor, and there are limits to that even with very high pressures. Thus carnot cycle limitations apply. It basically means that a nuclear reactor has to produce 3GW thermal (GWt), to produce 1GWe, so it has to exhaust 2 GWt as waste. Increase the temperature to the point you get 50%, and suddenly you only need to generate 2GWt to produce 1GWe, cutting waste heat in half. A much easier problem to solve at that point.
2. As you identify, there's a limit to what you can dump into the Earth. It just transfers heat too slowly to be practical in most situations. It's actually a problem I ran into when looking at geothermal heat pumps up north, like North Dakota and Alaska. You can actually end up cooling the earth so much as to lose efficiency or effectiveness over time. You might actually want to run some solar thermal panels and pump heat into the system during the summer. Between it being one of the more expensive options and actually less effective than air cooling, it isn't on my standard list.
3. Salt vats would still be a form of air cooling. Better options might be to list waste heat scavenging for zone heating or other industrial purposes. For example, it could be used to help dry new lumber, paper, fabrics, and food (dehydration). Laundries could use it for hot water for washing. Greenhouse heating, and aquaculture.
4. Micro-reactors still require cooling as per the above, and aren't actually in production right now, sadly.
To be clear, I'm not fixated upon large WCRs. I was just looking at the water-cooling restraint many fixate upon.

Submission + - CERN can now produce antihydrogen atoms eight times faster than before (home.cern)

fahrbot-bot writes: CERN is reporting that a new cooling technique means that the ALPHA experiment at their Antimatter Factory can produce antihydrogen atoms, the simplest form of atomic antimatter, eight times faster than before – over 15,000 antihydrogen atoms in a matter of hours.

Producing and trapping antihydrogen is an extremely complicated process. Previous methods took 24 hours to trap just 2,000 atoms, limiting the scope of experiments at ALPHA. The Swansea-led team has changed that.

Using laser-cooled beryllium ions, the team has demonstrated that it is possible to cool positrons to less than 10 Kelvin (below –263C), significantly colder than the previous threshold of about 15 Kelvin. These cooler positrons dramatically boost the efficiency of antihydrogen production and trapping—allowing a record 15,000 atoms to be trapped in less than seven hours.

Alternate article in Phys.org.

Comment Also... breathing. (Score 5, Insightful) 204

The revised webpage says: "The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism. Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities."

Breathing can also cause Autism -- and definitely death. Fact: All people with Autism and/or who have died are/were habitual breathers. Claims to the contrary are not evidence based because studies have not ruled out the possibility that breathing can cause Autism and definitely death. ...

In related news: The inmates are running the asylum.

Comment Re:Case in point (Score 1) 182

“The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me,”

Where can you actually do that? That's not a thing. These people seriously think they have cortana over there. Apart from they dropped her already.

More to the point, many (most?) people probably don't even want to do that or care. For example, I don't need (or want) to have a conversation with a AI/LLM and don't need to generate images/videos or, more precisely, have AI generate them for me - and I can do my own coding.

Comment Just kids? (Score 1) 213

American Kids Can't Do Math Anymore

The current president has stated several times he / his administration will bring down the price of prescriptions 500%, 1000%, 1500% and people go, "Cool".

Noting that 100% mean free and +100% means they pay you. (Sorry, but the premise here means I had to include that.)

Comment Re: Trucks booked as sold? (Score 1) 73

China's geology is really bad for petroleum production. A bad lot in the luck of the draw.

They are building a monster pipeline and rail system across Mongolia and Siberia to Russian reserves but it's a decadal project.

Electric transportation is a smart option for their situation. Their necessity has become their Mother of Invention and they are dominating the world in electric power systems innovation.

Comment "a full school year behind " (Score 1) 213

If we're graduating Seniors with Junior level math skills that's hardly "Can't do Math."

I suspect even that claim is wrong and we're also teaching the wrong math for an informed electorate. In undergrad we need people sharp in probability and statistics more than matrix algebra. So they can be numerate against politicians' bullshit. I guess we should ask politicians to work on that.

Comment Re: Alternate headline (Score 0) 72

Some of us are neither Republicans nor Democrats but would support a strong 10th Amendment with strict observance of Article I limitations.

But nearly all the Democrats and Republicans want to selectively choose which parts of the Constitution to ignore. There is no will for Rule of Law.

The Congressmen get elected on the principle of stealing money from one person to give it to five. That's a guaranteed win in a Universal Suffrage system with no strong moral foundation.

The trick is they inflate the money supply to actually do it so everybody pays. The five "winners" suffer the most in real numbers.

I'd rather see a stable Constitutional order but it's fantasy to believe that's achievable. We'll see fiscal collapse, likely War and a Draft, and chaos instead. All because oligarchs and the poor want "free stuff". And it's hard to blame the poor when everything they want is unachievable for them because the markets are all rigged against them.

The Gini Coefficient is too damn high, so don't get between them and the guillotines.

Comment Re:This commentary is really depressing (Score 1) 15

The BCG vaccine has also been found to be effective against bladder cancer. One of the two manufacturers bailed out of the market about a decade ago, limiting supply for both TB and bladder cancer.

They just opened a new manufacturing facility in Durham this past Spring to make much more. Not sure if it's producing yet, but it was a four-year build.

TB affects so few Americans that you can't even get BCG for TB prevention if you want it. Hopefully high-risk folks will be able to elect to get it soon.

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