No, if you're small or medium sized business and you have a stupid business plan, then you go out of business.

If you're big business and you have a stupid business plan, then you hire the government to make everyone else suffer until you make money.

Are you from the US? This is the same business model as RIAA, MPAA, the entire financial industry, blah blah blah. Not exactly anything new.

Get big, purchase the govt as hired guns, become a parasitical tax on the population.

I can't be bothered to figure out the exact quantity of refrigerant needed in a GW class cooling plant, I'm sure its a lot, but when you're dealing with a gigagallon cooling system my gut level guess is if the leak takes more than a couple hours to vent then nobody ecologically speaking notices.

Hmm. So if my car pushes a couple KW of heat around with a couple pounds of freon, I'm guessing a total system venting incident would drop something like mega-Kg of ammonia into giga-gallons of water if it took a day to leak out... so you're looking a a gram-level quantity of NH3 in a Kg quantity of H2O.

The big question is why you'd wanna vent that, or physically how you'd open all the loop simultaneously. I bet a tactical nuke could do it, but that leads to other MUCH more pressing issues.

The best way to "clean up" an ammonia spill is dissolve it in water... you don't get to do that at a refrigerated food warehouse, but a cooling tower at a nuke plant has a lot of water laying around.

It'll be OK unless they almost intentionally screw it up.

You haven't? Listen carefully for explanations about how we'll have to rapidly reduce the human population to save the endangered housefly or prevent the sea level from raising a centimeter.

LOL read the article. Cultural rules vs legal rules. You'll be mightly lonely, and probably poor, if you insist on only following the legal rules.
That applies to other areas of life too. Cultural rule says you live in the USA, you buy your kids gifts for dec 25 and do all that Santa and pine tree and rudolf the reindeer stuff and christmas lights hanging from raingutters. Christians also do extra things like attend church, but whatever that's been marginalized pretty far. Yes, there is no law that says you must display a decorated pine tree in your house in December. Does not mean that a sociological study article explaining the Santa Claus story is irrelevant solely because its not part of the US constitution. Does mean life gets hard if you chose to live life in a way that rubs your neighbors wrong.

ptorrone am I accurately summarizing the article as "Don't be a jerk"?

I would advise that people who don't get it wrt social interaction in open hardware ecosystem are probably going to continue to "not get" that social interaction thing therefore respond unfavorably to having it pointed out to them. Its funny to read for those who already get it, but I donno how to get people who don't get it, to get it.

I've got another good unrelated question, what is the prevailing theory on why the Venn diagram of ham radio experimenters and "makers" is approximately zero people despite having pretty much the same tools, ethic, motivations, attitudes, etc? I've never seen a good explanation of that. Maybe I should write an article for Make magazine about that.

standard /. car analogy for AT&T mgmt:

1. The new Ford Focus seems to be selling well.
2. I know, lets manufacturer fewer of them!
3. .....
4. Profit!

And whenever you ask the cowards who the 9/10th are supposed to be, the cowards always dodge the question and imply its gonna be someone else who gets the axe. No, not us of course because we are the elite enlightened ones. No not you guys, we need your support to carry out our genocide. Um, the 9/10th will be, uh, um, someone else.. Probably brown people.

And the delta T of a nuke is much lower and the cycles have historically been simpler (less stuff to contaminate or break)... lower thermal efficiency means if you want 1 GWe at the substation, then a nuke needs like 3 GWt but a hot hot hot coal plant might only need to dump 2 GWt (well, to get 50% eff on a coal plant you need something bonkers like a liquid mercury combined cycle, but that's how they rolled a century or so ago...)

So two plants, one nuke one coal/whatever at the same nameplate capacity, the nuke will output about 50% more thermal heat energy to make the identical amount of electricity.

Unless your condenser coils hang in air, not back into the same water you're trying to cool.

Lets see... COP of 4 is relatively unambitious for ammonia refrigerant, if I remember correctly. So you dump 1/4 GW into some ammonia compressors, hang the condensers in the air so they dump out around one GW or so, then around a GW or so of heat gets sucked out via the evap coils in the water.

It is technically possible, but it is probably cheaper to move the plant somewhere that is nicer to live and operate, and install some HVDC power lines. Really, there is no point in installing anything other than solar geo and wind anywhere out west... water is to valuable for drinking and growing plants. Out east we have more water than we know what to do with... Ring the great lakes with plants, no problemo, and the Mississippi river too.

That means one organism per 2.5 * 365 = about 912 gallons. That can't be distinct algae cells unless its nearly sterile water. Then again my 40 gallon tropical fish freshwater tank has around 10 fish, admittedly that is a pretty high loading but doable, at around 4 gallons per fish. They are probably talking about fish and are probably counting everything from hatched egg on up.

You'd think at those numbers, a nuke would be surrounded by a sea of floating bloated bodies, but when I toured one I didn't see that. Weird. Maybe after a couple decades everything nearby was already long since dead?