Palo Verde NGS 48 km / 30 miles west of Phoenix and just west of its suburb Buckeye in Arizona had, until Vogtle in Georgia came online, the largest 60 cycle generators and reactors in the USA (Chalk Bluff in Ontario is bigger in total though). These are 3 units of Combustion Engineering (now Westinghouse) AP-1000's pressurized water reactors (PWRs) which work like auto ICE engine cooling but at MUCH higher pressure to prevent boiling. LOTS of safety systems are there to prevent any kind of Chernobyl / TMI / Fukushima incident. Each unit is rated 4.5GW thermal and 1.5GW electric though there is an efficiency loss between winter and summer (basic Carnot loss) of around 100MW.

As I said in my post yesterday, these are shut down for refuelling and maintenance every 18 months, April & November. They don't shut down in hot (Phoenix all time high is 50C or 122F and we are expecting 48C / 118F on Thursday) or cold weather (though it rarely goes below freezing anymore). But the BIG shocker is that, being in the desert far from water, these power plants (and adjacent combined cycle gas plants) all run on waste water (sewer plant effluent) from the Phoenix metro area just like golf courses etc. All the water is evaporated on-site (called Zero Liquid Discharge).

I took the "tour" like 15 years ago but it didn't involve an actual tour of anything except the control room training room (an on-site full mock up--each unit is identical and physically separate from each other with nothing in common except power lines out and water in) and a information session & Q&A that showed Wikipedia was very wrong on a lot of points.

The new Texas units will have obviously have some enhancements though it's still a PWR and while I feel strongly (as all of you) that water doesn't belong in the fission reactor core, these things have proven themselves as pretty damn safe. Also, FWIW, PVNGS' ops license got renewed for another 20 years for a total age of 60 years before the license is up for review again (assuming nothing really bad happens).

Can confirm here in Arizona as well: Palo Verde has 3 units and one is shut down in April and another in November with downtime lasting up to a month depending on maintenence requirements. That is, unless something bad happens, each unit runs continuously for 18 months between refueling (which only takes a week--they have a pool next to the pressure vessel for spent fuel so no need to wait too long for short-lived isotopes to cool down) & maintenance.

Fun fact: there are pads for 3 more units (6 total) but only the original 3 were built; this can be seen easily in satellite photos. I don't know yet whether some of the new SMRs the local utilities say they'll buy / build will be placed there. If not, I'm guessing at least 1 bigger SMR will likely be located at the Sun City West gigantic substation or even closer to critical users TSMC, Intel, and perhaps some of the bigger data centers built on farm land with more open land nearby.

Just found this on Reddit so replying to myself; seems to confirm my hunch:

https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/s...

I'm not going to bother looking for links including previous stories here on /. that you can find on your own easily, but just a reminder that Samsung Electronics and Foundry ops are in a huge hole financially as so most previous customers have bailed for TSMC, so basically Elon is likely getting fab & ASIC engineering for a lot cheaper than competitors in exchange for the "investment". This also keeps the Texas fab afloat so the Chips Act money keeps coming.

"A few years ago" is 11.5 years--December 2013!

Seems like yesterday to me, too, despite Spectre / Meltdown being half that time ago!

I *STILL* use Slackware as my main non-phone distro as it works on anything (within reason), no SystemD, etc; if I need something SPECIAL then I download that distro (especially multimedia). So of course I wondered what the status would be in Slackware and a quick search yielded this from LQ:

There are 2 non-exclusive answers to this question (maybe more):

1. The classified research is WAY further along but being done by someone else. This jives with a similar story from Chinese researchers who did the same thing with similar materials. That is, it's now a race.

2. Maybe a decade? Unlike fusion, we can look back to how IC manufacturing (fabs) evolved from when they were invented. This particular thing uses vapor deposition, which is a mature tech in both fabs and elsewhere.

Separately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Thank $DIETY that I use SystemD-free Slackware!

*ducks & pulls down asbestos suit hood*

Valley Fever has entered the chat, and it'll follow you north just like Africanized Killer Bees!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And this is bad because...?

Seriously, it's an ACTION movie! By your definition, Beastie Boys "Sabotage" is a horrible music video, as just one example.

Having watch MI-8 they really went all out showing Cruise doing his own stunts and the use of the best miniature cameras is what allows it. If you're a true nerd, you NEED to check out how they made these "2" movies (MI-7&8 were shot at the same time and are essentially 1 movie like Kill Bill, Matrix 2-3, etc), which is arguably more entertaining than the movie itself.

These sheets won't conduct massive amounts of current but that's not the point. These are huge new discoveries with ENTIRELY NEW PHYSICS! How can you not get excited about that?!?

Practically, this could be used to build new computer & sensor tech, for example; superconducting 1-atom graphene sheets would massively drive up performance and (more importantly) down power use & waste heat! All we need is to figure out how to make fabs for mass production.

FWIW, I have a feeling that somewhere this tech IS being used in some majorly classified projects that are 10+ years ahead of what's being done commercially: the kind of thing you don't want China or even NATO allies to know exists much less copy!

Been thinking about this for a LONG time! From Wikipedia:

LNG typically contains more than 90% methane. It also contains small amounts of ethane, propane, butane, some heavier alkanes, and nitrogen. The purification process can be designed to give almost 100% methane.

Boiling point for pure CH4 is 161.5 C (258.7 F; 111.6 K) which a LNG liquefaction train is designed to achieve (why the other stuff needs to be removed).

From Wikipedia list of High Temp Superconductors:

No one has commercialized these mercury-containing HTS formulas but if it were possible or something else was found that works above LNG's 111K BP, then you would be able to use DC power lines inside LNG pipes that were allowed to boil. Another option is doing like the medical MRI machines and using LN2 inside to cool a regular BSSCO HTS wire with LNG surrounding it on the outside.

I have not been able to find anyone that has done the calculations to see the efficiency of this system versus regular (V)HVDC or HVAC but I've always thought it's worth looking in to. The fact this doesn't exist seems to tell me the calculations don't work out.

No, you're definitely NOT there! Everyone knows you're just imaginary! (FWIW, so am I)