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Comment Re:It doesn't work at scale (Score 1) 33

Fortunately, we have you -- a knowledgeable human, who can propose the right points!

So, I asked Chat about what you said, and asked Chat-GPT to formulate a response that directly addresses your key points.
Let me know if it reads like randomly extruded text, or if it has relevance to your understanding and argument:

---
The Campi Flegrei project you’re describing was a natural hydrothermal system, not an engineered superhot-rock (SHR) system, and that distinction matters for both the chemistry and the physics.

A hydrothermal reservoir taps naturally circulating volcanic brine. Its fluid chemistry is whatever the rock has been stewing in for centuries: arsenic, boron, mercury, dissolved metals, HS, etc. The industry learned long ago that natural brines often destroy turbines, foul condensers, and require scrubbing that wipes out the thermodynamic efficiency. Those problems are real, and your experience confirms them.

Superhot-rock geothermal is a different class of project. It does not rely on natural brines, natural permeability, or natural aquifers. SHR / modern EGS systems:

Bring their own working fluid (usually treated water in a closed or semi-closed loop),

Create engineered fracture networks rather than using natural ones,

Operate in a supercritical regime (>374C, high pressure) where heat transport is dominated by convective sweep rather than slow conduction, and

Are sited where mantle heat flux is extremely high (e.g., Newberry), not just where water has accumulated in shallow formations.

The key point is that the problems you encountered at Campi Flegrei — toxic brine chemistry, turbine contamination, and power losses from scrubbing — are specific to hydrothermal geology, not to engineered SHR systems. SHR avoids most of that simply because it doesn’t use the volcanic soup; it uses injected water circulating through a designed heat-exchange zone.

Your numbers actually underline the potential: you were getting ~50 MW per well from a shallow (~350–400C) hydrothermal system with awful chemistry. Modern SHR aims for rock in the 400–500C+ range, with supercritical water carrying far more enthalpy per kilogram and without the brine-chemistry penalty.

Whether SHR proves economical at scale is still an open engineering question. But the Campi Flegrei outcome doesn’t generalize to SHR any more than the problems of early natural-steam geothermal plants generalized to modern binary-cycle systems.

Does this distinction make sense from your point of view?

Comment Disappointing but not surprising (Score 1) 1

AI slop documentaries are becoming mainstream now, sadly. I can only imagine what History channel is like these days, not having watched any of that in years.

I'm not surprised Curiosity Stream has jumped on the AI gravy train. I hope a lot of their creators will withhold permission to sell their work for AIs to copy, but I don't know under what terms their creators publish on that platform. I had thought it different and better in how creators were treated than on youtube but perhaps not.

Comment Re:Maintenance? (Score 1) 109

That's because the project's value is political, not economic. Yes, generating power by digging a mile-deep hole, filling it with water, and running nuclear reactor at the bottom of it is likely to be crazy expensive and have all kinds of environmental challenges.

But what you have to understand is that the American political system is a zero-sum game and Democrats put their chips on solar, wind, and other renewables. Republicans put theirs on coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.

Solar and Wind have proved to be the winning bet over petro-products and that has happened fast enough that a lot of voters remember Republican opposition to those power sources. No political movement tolerates being unambiguously wrong about something so the American right is desperate for an argument on the energy front that allows them to validate the arguments they've been making over the past 50 years.

Nuclear is that argument. But to do nuclear you've gotta be able to convince people that they don't need to be afraid of a nuclear plant in their community. That's a heavy lift and what this technology really provides is a new argument beyond getting the general public to trust a bunch of nuclear and civil engineers when they say it's perfectly safe. Your average voter may not understand how a modern nuclear containment unit works. But "it's buried under a mile of rock" has a simple elegance to it.

Comment Re:WhatsApp? (Score 1) 83

Those exist, but divide the view count by number of comments. It will show for the most part thousands of views per comment. That means most people aren't using the social part. I've yet to ever write a youtube comment, but I use it daily. So if you asked me if I use YouTube you'd get a yes, but it's not social media for me. If you limit it to those who read/write comments it would be fair, but I'm not sure they did that.

Comment Re: Legacy Media BEFORE the war. "Ukraine are Nazi (Score 0) 137

Believing the Nazi's were defined by solely by their anti-semitism leads people to think Ukraine can't be Nazi since it has a leader of Jewish ancestry.

Ukraine can't be Nazi because it is not operated along Nazi ideals, and because the majority of the population is not made up of Nazis, not because of who sits in the big chair. Having Nazis in it doesn't make it Nazi. Nazis went all over the place, and there are descendants of Nazis who may still hold Nazi ideals all over the place. Ukraine has a neo-Nazi problem, but so does the USA. Do you call the USA a Nazi country? It sure does look a lot closer than Ukraine right now.

Comment Re:Such BS (Score 0) 109

No one every points out the "them" here doesn't exist.

Probably they are tired of people's stupid fucking responses. This is approximately the first time I've pointed that out without getting downmodded, and it's not too late for that to happen either. Only one of these proposed reactors has received type approval and then NuScale decided not to build one because it wouldn't be profitable even if someone else split the costs with them. My only question is, are the people I see frothing for SMRs invested in the scams, or just so dazzled by promises of shiny shit that they will attack anyone who points out the emperor's lack of clothing? I suppose that this can only be answered on a case by case basis, but I'm having trouble imagining a credible third option.

Comment Re:uh (Score 1) 23

Native means comes with the system. If you have to download it separately, it isn't native. It used to mean built in and operating without translation layers, but modern software is generally built with layers on layers from the get-go so that's no longer a meaningful distinction.

Windows' support for basic VGA mode does not constitute meaningful support for GPUs which have not been released because you can use almost none of the functionality. So sure, it "supports" them... but only well enough to download a driver for actual support. Anything supported for more than the most trivial mode actually is supported with a driver more complex than Standard VGA already included in the system.

"Linux" does not have printing support, it has support for the technologies needed to connect to a printer. "<x distribution> Linux" has printing support.

Comment Re:just squeeze more juice from your customers (Score 2, Insightful) 47

Comment Re:just squeeze more juice from your customers (Score 2) 47

Sooner or later, we'll end up at the point where trying to maintain the ways of the past is a fruitless fight. Teachers' jobs are no longer going to be "to teach" - that that's inevitably getting taken over by AI (for economic reasons, but also because it's a one-on-one interaction with the student, with them having no fear of asking questions, and that at least at a pre-university level, it probably knows the material a lot better than the average teacher, who these days is often an ignorant gym coach or whatnot). Their jobs will be *to evaluate frequently* (how well does the student know things when they don't have access to AI tools?). The future of teachers - nostalgia aside - is as daily exam administrators, to make sure that students are actually doing their studies. Even if said exams were written by and will be graded by AI.

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