Wyoming's Public Service Commission has approved some interesting tariffs for large data center service. The data centers are required to make their backup generation facilities dispatchable under control of the utility most of the time. During periods of high demand, if the backup generators are the cheapest source of additional power, the utility gets to make the decision about running those generators.

The same arrangement probably can't be used in places where an ISO operates the grid through a pure market system.

Most of the biggest battery companies also sell utility scale installations. Tesla has said in public filings recently that they are selling MegaPacks faster than they can build them. My small local power authority -- peak summer demand around 750 MW -- has ordered a 400 MWh battery system. The batteries are being built by a Korean company that is already constructing a big US factory. The power authority would probably accept some delivery delay if they didn't have to pay the tariffs.

I've kept a copy of vile on every Windows box I've been forced to use. Any installation hassle was worth the effort to keep my fingers from having to learn a new editor.

I've always believed the headline writers were thinking they couldn't present some outlandish claim as fact, but rephrasing it as a question let them off that hook. So not "Peking U makes fastest transistor", which as several commenters have pointed out would require some knowledge and an actual explanation, but rather, "Did Peking U make fastest transistor?" From there, Betteridge's Law is just a corollary.

Just from a technology perspective, are there any of the bleeding-edge chip processes that yield radiation-hardened parts, or parts that take the kind of vibration that goes with launch to orbit? TTBOMK, and I'd love to hear from experts, the military is still sticking with 28nm parts for weapon systems. Can anyone even build a competitive AI or cloud data center with 28nm parts these days?

Their out-of-state customers paid the penalties and bought their way out of the contracts some years back. Montana's legislature figured out that for in-state utilities alone, Colstrip's power was painfully more expensive than other generators. The tech bros building -- supposedly building -- all the AI server farms have shown no interest in anything except no-carbon power. They want renewables, and exotic geothermal, and shiny new nuclear. It's one thing to say Colstrip can continue to operate without new emission controls. It's another thing entirely to find customers for the power.

The US has a long line of engineers that want to work in the country even with Trump as President.

I think the issue with the Trump administration is not whether those engineers want to work in the US, but whether they legally can work here. At this point, it looks like green cards and other visas that allow the holder to work are going to be much more difficult to get.

Vogtle 3 and 4 didn't turn out seven years late because of regulation, other than an insistence that they be built to spec. All permits were issued in a timely fashion. The reactors were late because of construction screw-ups. The reinforcing rod structure was built badly out of spec; most of a year was lost to an engineering study to find a work-around. When the concrete floor was poured, it was supposed to be level; there was an almost six inch slope. Again, large amounts of time lost to engineering a work-around. Welds on the large forgings were improperly done in the factory and had to be redone in the field (including moving in the necessary x-ray inspection gear). Special-alloy piping that couldn't be exposed to outside weather sat outside for 18 months while no one noticed, so things sat still while replacements were obtained. A year was lost when cost overruns put Westinghouse in bankruptcy and the courts had to sort out who was paid, how, and the organization under which the project would move forward.

The UAMPS small modular reactor project was permitted in record time. It was canceled after some years because the projected cost of the electricity kept increasing, and reached the point where it was too expensive for the utilities who were to be the customers to justify.

I sometimes wonder how much Library Genesis and derivatives affect the market for the trade paperbacks.

Anecdotally, the US publishing industry leaks like a sieve. A friend published a textbook. It was never sold as an e-book, but within six weeks of release, a bit-perfect copy of the PDF that went from the publisher to the printer appeared at LibGen. Really bit perfect: all of the high-res images for the covers, the font files for the obscure fonts she chose, and so forth were included.

If the system can take proper advantage of it, there's an advantage to incorporating a phase change into the process.

Downtown Denver's district heating system has run continuously from 1879. They began operating a district cooling system based on freezing water to ice at night and melting it during the day in 1996.

That's what they're supposed to learn from ITER. ITER is supposed to be followed by DEMO, an actual working power plant.

The energetic neutrons also heat the walls, which heat is (in ITER/DEMO) used to boil water and the steam used to drive a turbine to generate electricity. In theory, you could use other working fluids to transport the heat, but I haven't seen any serious proposals for that. Assume a sufficiently long life for the reactor -- say 50-60 years -- and the amount of mildly radioactive alloys isn't that big a problem, nor for that long.

Fission reactors are used the same way. The old Fort St. Vrain commercial fission reactor used helium as a working fluid.

In the business world, not until there's software that is bug-for-bug compatible with Excel.

Yeah, early 2030s, and they haven't achieved first plasma yet. Heck, Gates/Buffett are saying early 2030s for their sodium-cooled fission reactor.