Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Submission + - China's new space reactor 'will be 100 times more powerful than Nasa's' (scmp.com)

Hmmmmmm writes: China is developing a powerful nuclear reactor for its moon and Mars missions, according to researchers involved in the project. The reactor can generate one megawatt of electric power, 100 times more powerful than a similar device Nasa plans to put on the surface of the moon by 2030. The project was launched with funding from the central government in 2019. Although technical details and the launch date were not revealed, the engineering design of a prototype machine was completed recently and some critical components have been built, two scientists who took part in the project confirmed.

In his last days in office, former United States president Donald Trump signed an executive order to accelerate the application of nuclear power in US civilian and military space programmes. Nasa recently opened a bid to private contractors to develop a 10-kilowatt nuclear fission device that could support a sustained human presence on the moon within a decade.

Russia has announced a plan to launch a huge spacecraft powered by TEM, a megawatt-sized nuclear reactor, before 2030. The nuclear energy would allow the spacecraft to operate for more than a decade in the Earth’s lower orbit while carrying out additional missions to the moon or beyond.
The European Space Agency has launched a similar project, Democritos, with a 200kW space reactor to be tested on the ground by 2023.

The first nuclear power device in orbit was SNAP-10A launched by the US in 1965. The device produced 500 watts of electric power for over a month before its permanent shutdown.

Comment Re:So basically no growth (Score 1) 75

That really is the key disconnect in conversation. The idea that every single morning, when you get into your car, it always - without question - has a full "tank" of fuel may be a foreign one, but it greatly obviates the need for any additional charging on a regular basis. Sure, 45 minutes at a charger on a road trip isn't as convenient as 5-10 minutes, but when it only happens twice a year and it also replaces all of the other unscheduled 5 minute stops, that's not a bad deal.

Comment Re:Wait, what GOP backed single-payer solution? (Score 1) 240

But its true. The Democrats pushed for single payer and the ACA was originally the bipartisan compromise bill, modeled closely after the Gingrich/Heritage plan. Then the Republican Party flipped and came out against it because of Mitch McConnell's vow (on camera no less) to fight against every Obama initiative regardless of what it was.

This is why the Republicans have been having such a hard time coming up with any alternative - its literally 95% their plan.

Comment Re:"It doesn't allow applications to do this" (Score 1) 45

If, however, you got those books for free in exchange for agreeing not to do exactly what you describe they could, in fact, come after you and exercise various legal remedies. Just because you can download something from the internet doesn't mean that it's in the public domain - otherwise you could also just reprint copyrighted books you downloaded from the Kindle site and sell them, which you absolutely cannot (legally) do, even if you add annotations to them.

Comment Re:Not a Ponzi scheme (Score 0) 103

Except that very few people who tout crypto are up-front about the power cost of maintaining (not mining) the network, which generally makes it completely unsustainable. With Bitcoin its running around 700kWh, and with the average commercial cost of electricity being 11c/kWh, that puts the transaction fee at $77. Right now that's being subsidized by users, like the uber driver who's making mad bank if you ignore the cost of gas, wear and tear, and depreciation. That won't - can't - last.

Comment Equality (Score 4, Insightful) 79

This seems fair. The proper punishment for the office in question should be exactly the same as if he'd looked up the information in a stack of paper files. The fact that he used a computer to do the research is irrelevant, and if the original violation doesn't carry stiff enough penalties then it should be adjusted for the future.

Comment Re:Not user tracked (Score 1) 24

Knowing an ad was seen by users, a count of individuals say, is not the same as tracking those users.

Yes. Its a very misleading headline - true, but those two actions are completely unrelated. Any other company could choose to increase or decrease the number of ads in their product too, at any time, regardless of how much personal information those ads are able to phone home with.

I guarantee that the author knows this as well, and is intentionally trying to mislead people.

Comment Re:Here's the math. (Score 1) 127

Out of that $0.30 they are (according to Epic's expert) spending $0.066 (22% of $0.30) on operating the App Store and the rest is theirs to keep or spend on something else. The remaining $0.234 (78% of $0.30) is theirs to keep or spend on something else.

In this instance, the "something else" also includes all the other app infrastructure. Think about near-realtime push notifications from free apps (like Facebook, for example). The "App Store" isn't close to the entirety of the "App Ecosystem".

Comment Re:Any links to the Open Source alternative? (Score 1) 141

Coming up with an algorithm that's simple, small, and manages to avoid "similar sounding words" being close to one another without having actual human-assigned locations is a really, really hard problem to solve.

For emergency use, the current W3W implementation is a massive, massive improvement over "I don't know, somewhere on I-10 east of San Antonio, there's a tree with a bird in it? And maybe a sign off in the distance I can't read?"

Slashdot Top Deals

The IBM 2250 is impressive ... if you compare it with a system selling for a tenth its price. -- D. Cohen

Working...