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Comment Safety-- (Score 5, Informative) 120

The main safety issue with plug-in solar is that the solar panel must not feed power to the grid if there's an electrical outage. This is because repair crews for the utility company need to be sure that there isn't power coming in from the user side when they're repairing the producer side.

The Utah bill referenced (https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/HB0340.html) includes that explicitly:
(2)A portable solar generation device shall include a device or feature that prevents the system from energizing the building's electrical system during a power outage.

So, I'd think that as long as that is built into the system, and assuming it passes UL standards for consumer safety, I think the safety issue should not be a problem.

Comment not renewable [Re:Von der Leyen is an opportun...] (Score 1) 184

This is an attempt to assuage the French, who are miffed because their aging nuclear power plants, for which they don't have a contingency plan, don't pass as "renewable".

That is, of course, accurate. Nuclear power is a low carbon-dioxide emission energy source, but it is literally not renewable (since it mines uranium for fuel, and uranium does not renew itself.)

In principle, it could be hundreds or even thousands of years before the supply of uranium is a problem, if we used the uranium efficiently, but with today's reactors, with no fuel reprocessing and no breeder reactors, if we used nuclear for all the electrical generation in the world, we would run out in a few decades.

Comment Re:electricity only (in 10-15 years) (Score 1) 184

"fossil fuels still dominate energy consumption in sectors such as transport", you can build all the nuke plants you want but they still will not power ICE vehicles.

Totally, painfully wrong.

Totally, painfully right. As of today, yes, fossil fuels still dominate energy consumption in sectors such as transport.

One of the largest costs of creating alternate fuels that can be used as gasoline are hydrogen (for "hydrotreating") and power for the high temperatures required. Cheap ubiquitious base load power takes these types of alternate fuels from "expensive and experimental" to "commercially viable".

Maybe. That's speculation about the future. The comment you're replying to is the present-day reality.

Manufacture of synfuels is an energy-intensive process (and typically the carbon source is from fossil-fuel sources such as coal...but, the good news is, coal is not sourced from Russia). Not clear if it will ever be commercially viable, or ever be carbon-neutral.

I'd place my money on electric vehicles to reduce oil requirements, not synfuels.

Comment Making a plot (Score 4, Informative) 131

The AI large-language model doesn't know that the real world exists. It doesn't know that fiction is different from reality, because it doesn't actually know about reality.

It put together a large fictional world, in which fictional things happen to characters that did not, actually, turn out to be fictional.

Comment Re:Attack of the pronoun police /s (Score 1) 16

> OpenAI has fired an employee following an investigation into their activity ..

Since the employee was not identified, this looks like correct use of the English pronoun "they", which is the grammatically correct usage when the identity of the person is unknown.
"Someone left their wallet at the checkout."

Comment Re:If it's mission critical... (Score 1) 75

There's a reason every nuclear weapon on the planet requires two people to turn two separate keys at the same time, after validating two messages from two other humans.

Do you know that? It's a Hollywood cliche, sure, but there are nine countries with nuclear weapons on the planet, and they don't disclose their safety protocols.

Comment Re:surprised? (Score 4, Informative) 87

I don't want to comment on exactly what got cut or how, but it's not a surprise to me that an evaluation of a government department would find significant numbers of positions/employees that don't add enough value to justify staying employed. Actually I'm just surprised it's as low as about 20%.

You do know that the DOGE cuts didn't even look at what the cut employees did or whether they "added value." The cuts were done with a chainsaw,
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...

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