You're assuming two things: a) that they exist, and b) that they require maintenance. Modern process design reduces manual switches and dials to be simple electronic sensors read remotely. Modern equipment is insanely reliable, and a steam raising facility is an incredibly simple process to get right from a reliability point of view. And for random faults, well that's what redundancy in design is for.

These aren't new problems by the way. We have been building things and been putting them in worse conditions for many years. Take for example from oil and gas well head control systems. They are located on the seabed in deep water. We're not just talking a sensor or two, no we're talking the entire system, sensors, valves, hydraulic motors, control system, multiple UPSes, packaged neatly and dumped a mile under the ocean surface. It's a lot of fun to design, and even more fun to see someone approach the first time, thing such as mean time to repair suddenly dominate reliability calculations when you need to schedule a submersible to go collect your safety system module at 1.5km depth. Yes I have done that, with a system that is identical to ones used in nuclear reactors (except when we design them in nuclear reactors we get a 1E certificate and slap a zero on the end of the purchase order for that piece of paper).

As for remotely accessing things being shenanigans, we've been doing that for many years already as well. All that "access" you are talking about is access during construction and design, not during operation. Fun fact I worked opposite a completely unmanned air separation facility. Not only remotely operated, but remotely operated from a completely different continent. The plant was in Australia and the control room in Indonesia. At my company we also have completely unmanned facilities in the ocean. (Again, MTTR and equipment reliability which is my bread and butter, gets interesting when we consider maintenance teams not being on site and having to provision a boat or helicopter to go fix something).

This just isn't new. Also no one here is talking about anything "big". In fact that is the biggest problem here. Not the remote operated bit, or the maintenance bit, but rather that these atom-bros are yet once again pushing tiny SMRs which don't exist yet. Forget pipes, crews, or any of that, they are talking about a reactor, steam, and rotating equipment package that is less than 1m across and about 8-10m high generating fuck all electricity. That's the big problem, not the maintenance, but the fact that this kind of tiny stuff remains in fantasy land and on concepts drawn on napkins.

No they do not. Many secondary parts of reactors may require this, but nuclear reactors cores and turbines have little maintenance overall. But even then I don't think that's where your understanding is wrong...

Yes there is. Reactor fleets being largely 40+ years old mean we are still operating them with the technology of the day, the designs of the day and the operational requirements of the day. Much like people run around old oil platforms reading gauges and dials as well.

That's however not at all related to what we are building these days and there's little to no walking around or checking anything. A large portion of modern process design is reducing the need to read anything. Sensors are cheap. Data recording is cheap. Everything is digital. For a project it now costs almost as little to install a wireless pressure gauge than it does a physical one (same for every other process measurement). For a greenfield construction the cost of wiring is borderline irrelevant too so even wired equipment costs little more.

It's a two edged sword, the problem of people no longer needing to do rounds thanks to modern designs that keep people away from equipment has lead to new an interesting products where companies produce gear that takes over what the rounds were previously for. Gas detectors, cameras, heck one company even has acoustic monitoring systems designed to "listen" to the plant since operators don't do that anymore.

The reality is in a modern facility there's very little for an operator to actually go out and read.

It's exactly what it means, it becomes a core codec that all of Windows programs can universally use, managed by the OS, native support. Just because it's it's not there by default doesn't mean it isn't native to the OS.

Or what do you claim it to be? Where do you draw the line? The kernel? Is nothing in the OS userland "native"?

So let's follow this theory, to what end? WebP was developed by Google. What do they get from its adoption? It's an open format, a free format, and has a public specification. That gives Google very little in the way of any benefit from pushing it. It offers them no advantage over any other image format. Likewise if the point was to push something developed by Google it's worth noting that Google was one of the core contributors to JPEG-XL. It's only marginally less Google than WebP is.

I suspect this was as simple and plain as expected. JPEG-XL didn't look like it was gaining any traction. It wasn't used, support was half-baked and experimental in Chrome, so they abandoned it. No surprise there, Google has killed things far more popular.

On the flip side what happened recently forced an issue, PDF's adoption of JPEG-XL. Google maintains an inbuilt PDF reader in Chrome, meaning they now *need* to actually add JPEG-XL support if they want to remain PDF compliant. It's no longer an optional addition of something no one uses, but now becomes a PDF standards issue.

That's just what human beings do. It's not really even that's going over budget it's that whenever these things are pitched they are under budgeted.

If we got upset every time anything went over budget we wouldn't have a country. We never would have made it out of the Northeast.

You need to build in extra lines and stops because there's a lot of in California people want to go. We aren't at the point yet where we are going to be building expressways. That kind of infrastructure comes later after you have a larger amount of rail installed. It isn't anything we can't or wouldn't do though in the absence of large car companies and airlines screwing everything up for the sake of their own profit.

There is absolutely nothing stupider than having an entire transportation system built around 3,000 lb+ personal vehicles that we all have to be personally responsible for both on and off the road. How many extra hours do we work to pay for these damn things? And if you're okay with that fine but fuck you for dragging me into it so that I have to pay for it too. I'm fucking sick and tired of paying for gearhead's fucking hobby.

Wouldn't be the first time I needed to change a default config to work around NSA / Five Eyes fuckery, won't be the last:

https://blog.stribik.technolog...

Actually this will be the easy part. They are talking about tiny modular reactors. It's not exactly complex to drill a 30" hole and it's not exactly complex to hook a gizmo to a winch capable of lowing something 1 mile. We actually have mining elevators that lift and lower workers continuously all day every day that are longer, deeper, and physically larger than this.

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.

No one is burying anything. They are lowering something under a water pressure column. The same way you get it down you get it up: winch and cable.

Is this oversimplified? Could be, but that is literally in their marketing materials discussing maintenance.

Honestly their bigger problem is cost. Combine the expense of nuclear, with the added expensive of horrendously small economies of scale building small reactors, and add the expense of a geological work and you've made the most expensive form of power generation even more expensive. This project is just as dumb as all SMR projects.

Maybe we're not all plodding along life wallowing in our own misery staring out the window and have business / pleasure that involves the *destination* rather than trip.

Road trips are great for taking road trips, they fucking suck for getting somewhere.

Define better. For all but travelling to opposite extremes of the country, high speed rail is usually faster for passengers and drops you right in the central business district. You can move far more people through high speed rail, far cleaner, with more comfort.

The entire world had flights long before high speed rail came into the picture, yet there's a reason why many major economies have invested in the latter (and why that investment has paid huge dividends).

Sam D is very good, and I think his analysis is broadly correct, but I would be wary of treating him as apolitical. He's a leading thinker for the centre-right, along with Sam Bowman (Sam Freedman completes the clever-Sam-centrist trifecta, but is on the left rather than right).

It had nothing to do with renewables they had a voltage surge and the hadn't prepared for it. They could have been running their entire grade off nuclear and they still would have had the outage.

It's a classic case of not spending the money to keep infrastructure of to date in order to prevent disasters. The basic problem is that nobody ever gets a pat on the back for stopping a disaster they get it for the cleanup afterwards...

Put another way nobody likes spending money on preventative maintenance.

Again though you have to compare it to alternatives. And the fact is wind and solar installations with batteries to make up for the gaps are infinitely cheaper than even well understood nuclear plant designs.

For something like 15 years now. There are plenty of dirt cheap battery solutions like those crazy sand batteries. You don't have to use rare Earth minerals to store energy there's plenty of other ways.

There really is no economic case to be made for nuclear power in America. The only reason we may see any new nuclear energy come online is people bringing up old plants that got shut down because AI has so much money right now.

Which isn't a good thing. I mean we're combining a weak regulatory environment with an old plant that was shut down because the cost of keeping it open was too high with a bubble economy heavily incentivized for low costs.

But even ignoring all that you're not going to see any new nuclear power come online.

I would be curious to get an honest answer from people why they are so obsessed with it. I really do think it's just that it was the cool thing when we were kids. Honestly solar punk isn't really all that cool.