So much wrong and misleading in three short statements. Oh dear.

U-238 is bred up into Pu-239 in most fission reactors, a lot of that is fissioned in turn during the fuel cycle, some Pu-239 remains when the reactor is shut down for refuelling, inspection or maintenance. The extra fission is a small bonus energy-wise, maybe one or two percent of total output and exceeded by the energy from the radioactive decay of fission products which is several percent of the total energy production.

Depleted uranium, mostly U-238 is non-fissile. No reactor will operate with a fuel load of U-238.

The CANDU reactors at Bruce in Ontario and elsewhere are heavy-water reactors and CAN run with unenriched uranium (ca. 0.6% U-235). They cannot and do not run on depleted uranium (ca. 0.1% U-235 or less). In fact most if not all CANDUs use slightly enriched uranium since it is more cost-efficient to do so.

2G is supposed to go away here in Britain around 2031. There's a lot of remote instruments and devices which use 2G phone tech to transmit small amounts of data, things like water level meters in reservoirs, rural weather stations etc. that have replacement cycles measured in decades and no budget anyway. Upgrading these devices to 4G or 5G isn't going to happen in a hurry, hence the delay in shutting down the 2G networks.

The amount of radio spectrum bandwidth taken up by 2G isn't that much compared to 4G and 5G and it's possible it might be left as a legacy carrier service for longer than predicted, assuming the operators can be persuaded or paid to keep decades-old 2G towers, backhaul and equipment in service.

Look at the cost of Hinkley. How much grid storage could we have built with that much money?

Grid storage assumes there are significant surpluses of energy at times to store, presumably from renewables. Britain and nearly every other large nation runs deficits in renewables, mostly covered by burning gas and adding to global CO2 levels. There is usually no surplus to store hence there is no point to building more storage (Britain already has two large pumped-storage stations, one more is being considered but its utility is in doubt since we're burning lots of gas instead).

Nuclear power plants produce electricity without emitting large amounts of CO2. Storage does not generate any electricity in itself, indeed it wastes some electricity in the round-trip from input to output.

PWRs and BWRs are typically about 35% efficient - a reactor producing 1GW of electricity gross will be producing about 3GW of heat. They actually operate at quite a low temperature, relatively speaking (about 350 deg C) compared to a gas turbine generator burning natural gas (ca. 2000 deg C) hence the low efficiency figure.

There are more efficient power reactors in use today, like the British AGRs which use CO2 for cooling and heat transfer. They manage about 40% efficiency, operating at over 400 deg C. Some new designs like the helium-cooled Chinese HTR-PM pebble bed reactor is even more efficient at 700 deg C but they're still in the late prototype stage, not yet being rolled out for mass production.

The 1MW comment about SMRs is probably a typo for 1GW since most real reactors being built these days are designed to produce 1GW-plus of electrical power, although there are one or two builds that only will produce 300MW or 450MW when complete.

Small Modular Reactor designs are typically sub-100MW, sometimes a bit more but usually a lot less. The proposed Rolls-Royce "SMR" is theoretically capable of outputting 440MW. At that rating it's probably aimed at replacing Britain's existing AGRs which produce between 400MW and 500MW each.

I though that Uranium also came from Russia, but a quick search learned that it is found in Australia and Africa as well.

Cigar Lake and other locations in Canada have large reserves of uranium ore too. There is a lot of uranium in spent fuel that can be recovered after reprocessing but the cost is more than the current market price for mined uranium. Worst case, uranium can be extracted from seawater but the process cost is, again, higher than the world market price for mined uranium.

If you imagine gravity as the "rubber sheet" model, there are three big moving lumps on the rubber sheet, the Sun, the Earth and the Moon pulling it down. As they move they create the Lagrange points, gravitationally lower than the rest of the Solar System's rubber sheet but higher than the deep gravity wells of the three bodies.

There are of course many other large bodies in the Solar System but those three are the important ones in Earth's vicinity.

The JWST will "orbit" one of those lower rubber-sheet locations, the L2 point. As long as the centripetal force from its motion balances the tendency to "roll downhill" away from the L2 point it will stay in orbit there just as the Hubble telescope stays in orbit around Earth.

ESA provided the launch integration facilities as well as the launch itself on the Ariane V. The launcher plus the upper stage put the JWST into an almost perfect trajectory. This means the JWST's onboard fuel supply was conserved and it's believed that has added another ten fricking years to the expected operational lifespan of the telescope.

Canada provided one of the four main imaging instruments on the JWST plus part of the main bus guidance system. ESA has provided another instrument plus optical components of a third instrument as well as funding, although that's a small part of the final cost of the telescope project itself.

The reverse-origami operation required to unpack the JWST from its launch fairing straightjacket has succeeded, a significant and impressive achievement thanks to a lot of design, redesign, modelling, testing, testing and more testing. The folks involved must be congratulated, remembering that some of the team who worked on the JWST have passed away before they got to see this occur.

There is still one more critical step coming up though, the final rocket motor burn (MCC-2) which should put the JWST into its halo orbit around the L2 point. That should occur around the 19th or 20th of this month.

So you'd need a camera with an LED on it?

https://xkcd.com/2564/

Any camera, even on a boom wouldn't see anything. It's dark on the telescope side of the sunshield, really really dark. The brightest source of light the mirror will ever see again in its working lifetime will be Mars or maybe Jupiter.

The aft momentum flap is actually incredibly simple, a fold-out reflective panel that's just the right size and fixed at the right angle to provide a few extra milliNewtons of thrust from the solar wind to one side of the spacecraft to counteract the extra solar wind pressure on the other, larger side of the solar sunshield. That saves the spacecraft's attitude management system from having to expend energy via the reaction wheels to push back and keep the telescope stable, for the cost of a few grams of extra material.

Whoever designed this thing are Schmott Guys.

There's a reaction video on Youtube of the JWST launch, from an astrophysicist who's busy in the kitchen at home cooking her family's Xmas turkey while doomscrolling the live video of the launch on a tablet. It's simultaneously hilarious and nervewracking.

"Nominal, nominal, nominal!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There's an "aft momentum flap" on the end of one shield boom that counteracts solar pressure on the shield and negates the turning moment caused by the asymmetric pressure. It was deployed successfully a couple of days ago, spring-loaded like a lot of other things on the JWST.

Scotland has a large proportion (ca. 90%) of its adult population vaccinated and many (ca. 66%) have received mRNA booster doses over the past few months thanks to an ongoing re-vaccination program.

The Omicron variant was first detected on 20th November here at a "private event" (probably a big wedding) with a second spreader event, a pop concert in Glasgow on 22nd November. Since then the numbers of cases of COVID-19 reported in Scotland has increased by nearly 500% to date with the Omicron variant being identified as 80% of all new cases, mostly via via the "missing S-gene" fingerprint in PCR-RT tests.

The effect on healthcare in Scotland is that hospital bed occupancy of people with COVID-19 has slowly ticked up, from about 500 beds to 850 or so but ICU beds and ventilation bed usage has not risen noticeably. The number of deaths reported daily of people diagnosed with COVID-19 has remained roughly the same.

The way it's looking from my layman's perspective, this new variant spreads more easily so it's stretching the healthcare system's capacity as lots more people get sick each day. The effects on sufferers are milder with more infected people, especially those vaccinated and boosted, able to cope at home using OTC drugs and rest rather than requiring medical intervention. It is still a serious problem for people with compromised immune systems, pre-existing conditions etc. and it can still kill.