Comment Re: DOWNTIME (Score 1) 95
When I had Comcast in the Bay Area, it randomly dropped one day because they installed the line to the house at a height that a semi driving through the neighborhood likely clipped the line. I was attempting to diagnose the issue from within the house, until I discovered the severed cable laying in the middle of the street.
Comment This has been around a while (Score 4, Interesting) 142
The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.
It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.
Comment Re:What if... (Score 1) 86
Comment Re:What if... (Score 3, Informative) 86
On the other hand, they have more surface which can catch stray neutrons for the same amount of power, because they are smaller, and you need more of them. That means more material gets contaminated and has to regularly get replaced because it degrades over time. If they operate at the same pressure, you need the same thickness of the walls, but with smaller diameter, you need more material per volume. They need the same amount of shielding per nuclear source to get the same protection level, but you need more of them, because you have more but smaller nuclear sources.
I've been to something which could be called an SMR. It was a scaled down nuclear reactor built in the 1970ies for studies and reactor experiments. It was 25 meters high, and it had a diameter of 6 meters. And its power output was 2 Watts. No. Not 2 kW or even 2 MW. 2 Watts. Enough to light a single LED lamp. Actually, it was designed to withstand 1000 Watts of power output, because that was the theoretical maximum the uranium-vinyl-pellets to feed the reactor could create when going critical. But even then... a 1 kW engine the size of a large grain silo.
Comment Re:Bezos doing atomics (Score 3, Informative) 86
And of course, it's not actually been built yet, so it's all theoretical at this stage.
This is the most important part. Right now, X-Energy is pure vaporware. And yes, I know, all reactor designs are essentially vaporware, because their task is to heat water to turn it into vapor. But this is vapor-vapor. The time line calls for 12 small reactors to be ready by 2039, each rated 80 MW. And the previous project, as mentioned, was already set up 2 years ago, and not a single foundation has been poured yet.
This is one of those incubator projects. Amazon is investing and probably betting on a 30% chance that this will ever bear fruit. Or a 10% chance. I don't know Amazon's calculation. But this project does not mean that any of those 16 reactors (4 previously, 12 now) will ever come into existence. But if they would, Amazon had an edge on powering data centers. So they think it's worth the risk.
Comment Re: It's hogwash -- they survived comets and worse (Score 0) 19
You don't know how to argue, or debate, or even answer comments, do you? Mindless passion is still mindless.
Comment Re: Rear guard action? (Score 0) 19
Try rebutting what I said. Can you do that for me? I'd appreciate it.
Comment Re:Rear guard action? (Score 0) 19
Corals have been regenerating themselves for several hundred million years. They don't need human help.
Comment It's hogwash -- they survived comets and worse (Score 0) 19
Corals have been around for several hundred million years. They survived the comet which killed off the dinosaurs. They survived ice ages and glaciations, the most recent being a 400-500 foot sea level rise just 10-15,000 years ago. They routinely bleach themselves while shifting populations of the critters which give them color.
We puny humans are no threat to corals.
Comment Re:A thousand cuts (Score 2) 169
Comment Re:The last thing we want is more Russian reactors (Score 1) 169
Comment Re: What about the open source contributions to da (Score 1) 26
Comment Re:What about the open source contributions to dat (Score 1) 26
Comment Re:Corpospeak... (Score 2) 26
Translation: We are looking at our options on how to extract as much money as possible from the users of this software.
Or: We eliminated the positions necessary to merge the changes coming from the outside, and we will support the customers in house, if there are any paying customers at all. After that, we will close the project for good.