The correct use of the word is to describe someone who "reveals information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe or fraudulent".

It is not a fitting description for a crackpot who says - without evidence- that they heard about aliens.

"at a time when nuclear power is seeing an uptick in interest"

It isn't though. Nowhere in the world is investing in nuclear energy at rates even _remotely_ close to renewables and no nation predicts it will make up more than a small percentage of their overall energy mix this century.

"at a time when nuclear power is seeing an uptick in interest"

No it isn't. Contemporary studies do not suggest this and in fact suggest quite the opposite. That nuclear is so slow and expensive that investment in it would actually slow down our march toward carbon neutrality.

They might have wanted to get some facts from proper energy researchers and no just taken the word of a Uranium company on face value.

I wish people would stop using terms like "limitless". In doing so it fosters a culture of waste. There is no such thing as "limitless", especially when it comes to energy, and nuclear fusion is no different.

Like today's fission reactors, fusion reactors are thermal energy systems requiring the use of a heat exchanger - the simplest being heating water to drive a steam turbine.

This is not exactly super efficient and means ~50% (roughly speaking - this isn't a lecture on Carnot) of the energy generated has to be dumped out into the atmosphere as waste heat.

Imagine we derive just one-third of our energy needs from fusion (~200 exajoules). That means near 60 million gigawatt-hours of energy has to be dumped into our oceans and atmosphere as waste heat each year. Or about 150,000 times more than today's global nuclear fission plant output.

That cannot happen without consequences for the environment and we need be careful to consider those effects. Slapping our hands together as if the job was done and rolling out hundreds of plants with the false assumption that it's "limitless" will bite us just as such assumptions always have in the past.

The issue in Germany lies very specifically with natural gas supply for heating. A problem not solved by new nuclear plants. Especially as they wouldn't even come online until 2030 (at best) and at the cost of tens of billions.

The solution to the specific heating problem is to electrify heating systems. Moving from gas boilers to electric, using heat-pumps, and enhancing insulation. Simple stuff but it still takes a few years to deploy and Russia is shutting off gas today so we need short term solutions.

The only sensible short term measure is to divert gas burned in natural gas plants to home heating and keep existing electric plants operating to cover any deficit it might cause in electricity production. And of course reduce consumption. Measures Germany is already tackling.

Nuclear reactors play no role in solving this problem and they don't even help the general electricity supply.

Germany added 2-3x more renewable energy than was lost due to shuttering a few old nuclear plants. Germany is adding renewables at a rate of 6-7GW/year. Germany has electricity. They are exporting the stuff to France as they suffer outages in nuclear plants due to everything from corrosion to drying rivers. Any suggestion that Germany has an energy problem because of a slow phase out of old nuclear plants is a display of pure ignorance.

Now I can take Samsung off the list of TVs I'd potentially buy which makes things easier.

Grohnde (1984), Gundremmingen C (1967) and Brokdorf (1986), are old and due for closure (or in some cases long overdue). Construction of these plants began 50-60 years ago and some already have a history of accidents. (Unit A at Gundremmingen killed two workers and suffered major faults.)

These units each cost tens of millions in maintenance every year, and are just not cost effective for the operators.

Their combined output of ~4 GW is easily replaced by the 5 GW of new renewable energy capacity coming online. And the pace of new renewables is still rising.

Nuclear only accounts for ~12% of electricity generation and taking some of that offline (because the plants were designed a generation ago) is not drastically altering the mix and is easily compensated for with new renewables.

Germany's energy prices are high due to taxes and levies, not because a few old nuclear plants are being phased out.

Also, at this rate Germany will not "rely on generation from costly gas and coal for another 20 years". Renewables jumped from 6% of generation in 2000 to 50% today, and will make up the bulk of generation this decade as official targets are for 80% by 2030. And official targets tend to be pessimistic.

The other aspect people tend to miss in this conversation is demand, which has been dropping since 2010 and is projected to drop significantly (25%) by 2050.

Relatively small losses in nuclear generated electricity generation over time are more than compensated for by the much larger, rapid increases in new renewable capacity. All of which is further balanced out by dropping demand.

The temporary problem this winter is partially due to a demand bounce, but mostly thanks to rising gas/oil prices. The solution to which is keep adding renewables and reducing reliance on gas - it is not to keep a few potentially dangerous and very expensive ancient nuclear plants around.

"Elon Musk — a man whose "green electric car company" is only profitable thanks to the carbon credits it sells to manufacturers" If you're going to start out with gross mischaracterizations it'll be hard to win people over. Especially when you're attacking an area completely separate to the one you're trying to address. "$6.04 billion of revenue of which $428 million (1/14th) was from credit sales." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/2... (of course you can't get those credits in the first place unless you're actually producing and selling cars.) He goes on, "The unconstrained problem of navigating busy cities with unquantifiable human activities is insoluble with ML." Ok at this point we can choose to believe engineers who have made very impressive progress in a short time, or, a sci-fi author.

Current server products give you 4 GPUs into 1U or 8GPUs into 4U (depends on the storage and CPU requirements). That's pretty good but when people optimize for this it could also increase. Those GPUs tend to have more memory. Given average VRAM usage you could have five or six gamers on a GPU before memory is a problem. The other big issue is compute but there are tricks there too. Not all gamers are in areas of high complexity all the time and not all gamers are running at the same resolution all the time and not all games require the same frame rates. Different service levels would give different quality settings I assume. You might be able to have two 4K gamers on a GPU or 8 1080p gamers on it. With clever load balancing you could mix and match much like we do with virtual machines that have very different usage patterns. We also have clever techniques like variable rate shading and 'radeon chill' that reduces overall load allowing more simultaneous users. And in the future things will get even more clever with distributing load over multiple GPUs for even more fine grained control. I can envisage 100,000+ simultaneous users supported in only a moderate 200 rack installation. A large data center might have 1,000 to 2,000 racks.

It is a way to lock you into a subscription model but there are also reasons not to hate it. 1. Roughly speaking there's about a billion gaming consoles on the planet. More if you include handheld. That's a lot of hardware being produced that ultimately spends a lot of time unused. Consolidating it into managed clusters which can also be used for other things during off-peak is highly efficient. Less e-waste and that's not a bad thing. 2. People would be able to play really high-end games on commodity hardware. No more $3-4,000 gaming PCs or even a need for higher end consoles. Anybody with a browser, screen, and internet connection can have a similar experience. Sure there will be the HD, 4K, 8K services at different price points but there will be more than just Google's service so competition I hope will keep prices in line. It's computationally much more expensive than Netflix but shouldn't cost an order of magnitude more. 3. Graphical and feature upgrades happen magically. Your display hardware becomes obsolete at a much slower rate. You'll one day want an 8K screen upgrade but everything else from ray-tracing to advanced AI can just happen in the background without a new top of the line GPU being required. 4. Patching just happens. 5. No install times. 6. Almost no load times either conceivably. 7. Developers would be free to use very powerful backend services. Not being limited to a single system they could run graphics on one cluster, AI on another, physical simulations on another. Microsoft and Cloudgine showed a demo of something like this in 2015 with Crackdown 3. They showed off an entirely destructible landscape with multiple players possible because that expensive computation was running in their cloud service. 8. That brings us to new features. That demo was pretty cool but imagine a GTA online style game where the entire world and events within can be permanent rather than just localized and respawning. It opens up new storytelling abilities. Entirely new modes of play. Far more immersive and advanced world simulations would be possible. 9. And as you say you're instantly cross-platform and you're also portable. Ultimately it's going to be convenience that wins.

I'd rather talk to somebody who might know something about it.