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Submission + - Supercritical CO2 Generators Now In Production

cusco writes: https://kdwalmsley.substack.co...

Chinese engineers deployed the world's first commercially viable sCO2 power generators, at a steel mill in Guizhou.

The Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (sCO2) generator converts waste heat into electricity. Compared to traditional steam and thermal systems, the sCO2 design is more than 85% more efficient, and produces 50% more electricity. . .

SCO2 is supercritical carbon dioxide. CO2 that’s maintained in a state above critical temperature and pressure, which is over 31 degrees Celsius and 1070 psi. Once there, CO2 acts both as a liquid and as a gas, and in industrial applications, that becomes very useful. As a gas, there is less resistance, and as a liquid, it provides greater thrust. And, turning CO2 into supercritical CO2 is more energy efficient than turning water into steam. . .
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Not everyone is as optimistic. Long article which assumes the Chinese will be sloppy with implementation for some reason.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026...

Experience with hydrogen suggests that expecting seals to remain effectively perfect over many years of continuous high pressure operation is absurdly optimistic, and there is little reason to assume supercritical CO systems will escape a similar long term reality. . .

Comment Re:This isn't an article, it's an Opinion piece (Score 1) 77

many women choose fields that they feel directly help people or society even if the paychecks are skimpy. But this doesn't mean they are necessarily taking on lots of debt.

They probably are, because you need a fucking master's to be a social worker.

You only need the equivalent of a 2 year degree to be a nurse, but that's also a shitty job. The nurses I know were considering quitting because the hospitals weren't protecting them, and they were getting attacked by patients. So then if they want to do something else, it's back to school.

Comment Re:I Simply Don't Understand It (Score 3, Informative) 29

It's capitalism and greed enabled by idiot masses, simple as.

They keep making changes because people are stupid and "new" equates with "good".

Most people are too stupid and/or ignorant (mostly both) to understand that AI makes slop.

Even Mozilla hired a CEO it didn't need, to help it do more business? Which didn't happen, instead it turned out to turn off users and lead to a war about the ramifications of giving him money when we found out what he does with the way too much money he was handed. So then they got another one who is equally worthless and wants to AI all the things and also gets paid way too much.

Firefox was really, really good in its early days, when the mission was about being light and fast. But they started ignoring users and also long-standing bugs very early on and the enshittification has proceeded ever since.

Those skinny scroll bars piss me off at least as much as they do you, BTW. You can barely even fucking see them in Edge. In Firefox you can see them OK, but actually using them is a nightmare. The easy fix only works on Windows, too, you have to manually edit config files on Linux. It's hard to not see that as an attack on Linux.

Comment AI replaced it for me. 130%. (Score 1) 92

Stack Overflow was awesome, but now I have an API and documentation expert on _everything_ about software development sitting in a chatroom giving me expert answers and advice right when I ask for it. It's like Linus Torwalds and an army of software project leads are just sitting there waiting to answer when I come with my problem. I don't even search anymore, I ask the question, add layers and "if not, then how" and "how would you do this specific thing" and buddy AI spits out an essay on how to do it and how my function is meh and is called a "footgun" because it makes safe things hard and dangerous things easy and I'm like: "Ok, I've been doing software for almost 40 years now but I never heard of that anti-pattern but double-checking show's me that AI is spot on".

Given, the AI can talk total gibberish and I do need to double-check sometimes. AI is quite very human in that it sometimes doesn't even finish reading the details of my question and spits out code that ignores my singular variables and puts them in plural and I have to change that after the fact. Stuff like that.

But it's an entirely different league than searching Google and Stack Overflow and I suspect Stack Overflow is basically done for. Casualty #1 of AI I'd say. My productivity has 5xed at least, I can now start real world projects right away without having to do weeks of dives and spikes into new APIs and work on an entirely new level and I wouldn't want to go back.

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