Clearly, this noble endeavor will not "rise" to its full potential until there are bindings for INTERCAL!

Lithium-Ion is optimized for portability. Manufacturing scale off the shelf is the only real advantage it brings. And familiarity for all the non-engineers, plus I guess Elon Musk ramming it down our throats.

Whoever figures out flow batteries or whatever is the right tool for the job and gets it to market is going to win in the long run, but nobody wants to give those folk the time of the day lately.

Eh, it's wrong either way. It cites both Centigrade and Fahrenheit. It can't be 4x both at once, with any sorta-reasonable amount of mind-warping.

Also, "four times hotter" is pretty tough to reconcile with any nonabsolute temperature scale. Maybe something funny with biological perception, but that's getting way nutty.

https://www.youtube.com/playli...
Derek rocks. https://youtu.be/YMPzDiraNnA

that mythical equality has been used to justify inequality.

I've seen some misunderstandings in several posts that warrant correction at the top level.

Dealing with relativistic speeds is an engineering problem, and not necessarily a difficult (at least when compared with other challenges of interstellar travel) one.
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-...

Deceleration with light sails is a solved problem, at least on paper. I'm not aware of any deployed examples.
http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/21...

Thermal decomposition is how this would work, unless electricity becomes so cheap (or Hydrogen valuable) that the economics of electrolysis work.

The heat might come from very high temperature steam from gas-cooled high temperature nuclear reactors. This high temperature steam could potentially have a lot of industrial applications eventually, replacing natural gas powered process heat and reducing CO2 emission and methane leaks.

As a added bonus, higher temperatures mean higher thermodynamic efficiency, resulting in more electricity per unit of fuel, and less waste heat to dump.

You know the next part. China is eating our lunch in innovation, but somehow Donald Trump isn't hot and bothered. Huh.

The Slashdot article

Not exactly. Reprocessing to extract Plutonium and unburnt fissile Uranium is absolutely a civilian thing, and still uses nasty nitric acid, although much of the waste at Hanford is from earlier processing that was a lot less efficient. France and Japan have done a lot of civilian reprocessing in recent times.

Most (in excess of ninety percent!) of the U-235 fuel in modern commercial light water reactors is not burnt, due to the accumulation of "neutron poison" reaction products that kill the reactions. A bit like alcohol killing/inhibiting the yeast in fermented products, requiring distillation to obtain higher alcohol concentrations.

There are approaches to getting better fuel economy, but most of these involve higher enrichment, fast spectrum reactors that have a lot of serious engineering problems, or reactor designs that are completely untested and can't address carbon emission concerns in the near term.

https://www.hanford.gov/page.c...
https://inis.iaea.org/collecti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.nuclear-power.net/...

Not even close. Maybe in property losses, but 18,000 people died; it's closer to four orders of magnitude by that metric. I tried looking up property losses, but what I ended up finding was total economic impact, which is too vaguely defined for this comparison.

Umm, don't count on it. Businesses making those kinds of bets get their management fired or they die. Maybe market forces will produce a substitute, but it will, at least at first, cost a lot more, and possibly perform not as well.

Market forces might just as easily push your wind turbines out and substitute something else more economical (which may or may not be as nice by some other metric), if materials science and availability of the resources don't cooperate!

Precision doesn't gain you anything when accuracy is the actual problem. Why thousandths of seconds are significant where the bulk activity of a human is concerned baffles me. At this level of precision, the outcome is basically arbitrary.

would you use battery technology adapted for transportation (high specific energy/power) for a stationary application? Flow batteries have been around for decades for just this sort of application. They load follow well, too. Not as sexy as Elon Musk, though, I guess. (Yuck!) He probably can deliver faster though, and might subsidize it a bit for the PR.

Is more R&D into advanced GenIV designs like MSR, VHTR, or small modular reactors, and a less punishing regulatory review process. We are abdicating our leadership to China, India, and Europe.

Still a serious bug, but if forward secrecy had been widely deployed, much, much less threat exposure would have occurred.

That's the lesson. Code audits are great, but they still miss stuff and are expensive. Take good practices more seriously, and you get a lot of bang for your investment in time/money/whatever.