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:A thousand cuts (Score 2) 169
Comment Re:The last thing we want is more Russian reactors (Score 1) 169
Comment Re: Very Annoying (Score 1) 116
You're exaggerating or incorrect about a few things as drinkypoo mentioned but I am with you on not everything needing SSL. Static, low-risk content, where there's little harm possible from MitM (eg, some big media file especially where you're going to check md5sum anyway, text files with random jokes, collections of memes, tbh like half the pointless bs people post on social media), is probably fine to put on plain http. It's annoying that when I put stuff like that on http to save some cycles on a tiny server, nearly every web browser does "OOH BIG SCARY YOU'RE BEING HACKED OMG!!!! ALERT ALERT ALERT!!!".
To be fair, the people who understand how to manage risk probably can handle that browser interstitial without freaking out, but still.
And all of the cloud and SSL providers are now insistent that they know what's best for the web, requiring public expiration to get so short â" which just so happens to be a great way to sell more certificates and managed cloud services.
At least Let's Encrypt exists, but you have to wonder if that will always be the case...
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.
Comment Re:If they are thermally efficient enough (Score 0) 129
You could consider the effect of Dunning and Kruger (1999) as a "mental regression to the mean".
Comment Re:Does it matter? (Score 2) 75
Comment Re:Bitcoin does not need Washington to save it. (Score 4, Insightful) 82
Comment Re:Unpossible!11! (Score 4, Informative) 132
And yet it's Iran who can't get any oil out while other countries export millions of barrels a day.
They don't have to. They get $2 Million for each ship that crosses the Strait of Hormuz.
Is that also why they have more inflation per week that America has per year?
They had that inflation since more than a decade, and they did not crumble. Inflation is something a free market economy cares about, but a dictatorship does not have to.