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Comment "commercially viable" is presumptuous. (Score 1) 1

China doing something first, however, has never been a reliable indicator that the thing will prove durable, economic, or widely replicable. China is large enough to try almost everything. It routinely builds first of a kind systems precisely because it can afford to learn by doing, discarding what does not work and scaling what does. This approach is often described inside China as crossing the river by feeling for stones. It produces valuable learning, but it also produces many dead ends. The question raised by the supercritical CO deployment is not whether China is capable of building it, but whether the technology is likely to hold up under real operating conditions for long enough to justify broad adoption.

A more skeptical reading is warranted because Western advocates of specific technologies routinely point to China’s limited deployments as evidence that their preferred technologies are viable, when the scale of those deployments actually argues the opposite. China has built a single small modular reactor and a single experimental molten salt reactor, not fleets of them, despite having the capital, supply chains, and regulatory capacity to do so if they made economic sense.

Obviously, this is a trial run, an experiment, which means commercial viability has yet to be seen.

The challenge of keeping seals intact in supercritical CO power systems is closely analogous to the challenge of sealing high pressure hydrogen systems, even though the underlying physics differs. In both cases, the systems rely on containing a small, highly mobile molecule at very high pressure, often at elevated temperature, across rotating shafts, flanges, and joints that experience thermal and mechanical cycling.

CleanTechnica is correct to be skeptical. This type of project is reminiscent of Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment in the US, where we learned about problems with embrittlement due to the fuel used. MSRE was a good experiment to run but despite doing it, it didn't prove to be economically viable. CleanTechnica is merely pointing out this fact because physics is an unrelenting force. This has nothing to do with "being sloppy" and everything to do with, "well, how long will it hold?"

Comment Re:I bought an F150 Hybrid in 2025. (Score 1) 149

That said, in a dense urban area, I suspect 90% or greater of all pickup trucks are just expensive testicle extensions.

You only need to look at the overall population. 80% of people in the US live in urban areas.

But it's not really the majority. It feels like it is,

To even reach 50%, rural areas would need to have a truck ownership level that is 5x higher than urban areas.

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