Posts by Filippo

I suspect that one power plant can and will fit more than one truck-sized reactor. I'm thinking ten or twenty or more.

Power-per-square-meter is unlikely to be as good as a giant reactor, of course, but it wouldn't be that bad, and the logistics would be a whole lot easier.

> It would take some sort of legislative pixie dust premised on the manufacture of a national security issue if one wasn't near to hand already.

Exactly! If it becomes really important, the legislative pixies will start crapping dust by the truckload. Some governments already ignore patents on things like e.g. vaccines, and power generation is potentially more important than that. Put it plainly, patents can withstand a lot of pressure, but not infinite pressure. I'm 100% sure that the Chinese understand this very well, and will not demand unreasonable licensing terms. Either we'll come up with alternative designs, or the Chinese will make some money, but that's about it. We won't be left without the tech; that just doesn't work.

The truck-sized thing will be in the middle of a building. I guess you would make it fairly sturdy and/or put the reactor underground.

You can't make it invulnerable, of course, but note that we still haven't had a major nuclear accident at Zaporizhzhia, despite everything that's going on over there (fingers crossed!), and a MSR power plant would be intrinsically much safer than that.

From what I understand, the MSR wouldn't be more dangerous than any number of industrial plants that deal with highly toxic materials. We've got plenty of those lying around, and we don't stay awake at night thinking about them. The MSR is probably safer than most of those, actually; the salt is not gaseous and actually pretty heavy; it won't get around much.

There was an article going around a few weeks ago, maybe a few months now, that stated that SMRs ("Small Modular Reactor", not "Molten Salt Reactor", although I guess one can also be the other) produce large amounts of waste (per unit of power, compared to LWRs).

I am not a nuclear engineer, and I have absolutely no idea of whether that article was correct, or exactly to which reactor types it applied, or what exactly it defined as "waste".

The shipping container is for the reactor. It would be housed in a building. The turbines will be in the adjacent building. Also, there will be an office. A maintenance area. Parking lot. Etc. All the things that make up an actual power plant.

Nobody said that you'll have a 40' shipping container sitting somewhere with a power line coming out of it. It is, however, very good that the most complicated and delicate part of a power plant fits in a shipping container.

> But the interesting challenge will be that the corrosion problems have been solved and the solutions patented - by the Chinese.

I wouldn't worry too much. They're patents. They are only protected by the rule of law. If it gets to the point where we really need to make MSRs with that tech, and the Chinese really won't license them, we'll just ignore the patents, handwave some excuse, and use the tech anyway.

If I understand correctly, the reactor is truck-sized. When it is actually operating, it will have to be hooked to cooling and turbines and whatnot, i.e. it will be in the middle of a fairly big building. I also suspect that if it has been operating, then it will need cooling before it can be moved. Overall, not very easy to steal.

Re: Torn

Apparently, the Chinese company owns the IP, and is definitely exploiting it.

True, but the article is about Google. The entire stated purpose of Google is to provide the user with the information they want.

If Google provides the user with information they do not want, and indeed they specifically want to avoid, and puts said unwanted information among the top results, it's failing at its stated purpose in the most extreme fashion (perhaps in service of their actual purpose, i.e. raking in advertising money, or perhaps not).

I mean, if Google decided to suddenly put wrong answers on top of my search results for computer problems, you can be damn sure I'd be highly irritated about it, and you can be damn sure The Register would publish several articles about it, and you can be damn sure that any comments on the lines of "well, it's not illegal to state that to fix that virus you have to delete all .exe files from system32, and you can always click on the link and read the whole thread to see that it's the wrong answer, it's your choice" would be sharply downvoted.

So, we have a website whose purpose is specifically to provide people with ethical advice.

And the ethical bar it's attempting to clear is located at the dizzying height of "it isn't illegal".

I'm not sure whether that is hilarious or sad or both.

I mean, that's a bit like a cooking blog opening up with "It's not poisonous!" - oh, good, great, but it doesn't make me want to try their recipes, you know?

If the only argument you have in support of your position is an off-the-chart extremization, then you don't have much of a position.

I'm not saying that taking-to-the-extreme doesn't have a place in a healthy discussion, and slippery slopes do exist, but if that's literally the only support your thesis have... eh, sorry, it's not enough.

Basically, we have a gray area around a few months in a woman's uterus. That is what everybody is talking about. The gray area does not extend beyond that.

Now, instead of trying to get clarity inside the gray area, you are attempting to make it much bigger, make it extend all the way to adult life. We're all trying to help each other see what we see, so that between everyone maybe we can some day figure out what's in the gray area, and here you are throwing a rhetorical smoke bomb. It doesn't prove anything one way or the other, and it makes the entire discussion more difficult.

Just don't, okay? Find an argument that's actually helpful. If you can't find one, I suggest you think about why you can't find one. There might be something interesting down that path.

> I am always fascinated that the phrase "reproductive rights" always means non-reproduction: abortion, contraception and sterilsation.

> Have you ever seen it mean any kind of fertility help?

Why would you say that? There are plenty of fights going on around the right to access reproductive techniques that are forbidden to you. I'm thinking homosexual couples, singles, people with genetic disorders, and more. There are lots of places where if you can't reproduce just by sticking a penis in a vagina, then you can't reproduce at all even though technical fixes may exist, and people who challenge that.

There's quite a lot of heated discussion even within feminism on things such as third-party pregnancy, for example. And then there's the issue of the sheer cost of reproductive aid, even for heterosexual couples. That's also a discussion.

Abortion gets more spotlight, especially now because of contingent events in the USA. But it's by no means the only discussion going on about reproductive rights.

> Feminism remains hopelessly wed to the idea that woman are oppressed and will have their lives ruined by having babies and they need lots of help to stop it.

That's not true. The vast majority of feminists feel that women are oppressed by lack of agency on reproduction. Not by too much or too little reproduction. That means that women should be able to get an abortion if they are pregnant and don't want to be pregnant, as well as getting reproductive aid if they are not pregnant and they want to be pregnant. At the very least, the State should not legislate to restrict their agency in either way (and it would be even nicer if it actively enabled agency).

You hear more about abortion because in many places it's much more difficult to get an abortion, than to get fertility therapy, and people tend to fight for things they don't already have. But that's by no means the only problem feminists care about.

Part of enabling agency is that you should get clarifying advice so you can be helped making the decision that best reflects your own values, and not confusing or adversarial advice designed to encourage a decision that reflects someone else's values. That's why falsely posing as an abortion clinic is highly problematic. There's zero chance that advice given through deception is helpful.

Re: Thought about using nuclear?

> However, let's not forget something: EU emits around 7% of the CO2 emitted worldwide. Even if the EU disappeared, it would be offset in a few years by the rise of CO2 emission by other countries.

True, but if we got really serious about nuclear in the EU, the resulting industry and R&D boom in the field (not to mention putting a break to the nuclear fear cycle) would also make it far more attractive worldwide.

We could build nuclear plants, and then we could both not shiver in medieval hovels, and also prevent Norfolk from flooding. Even with very pessimistic estimates on costs, waste and accidents, it's still the least-bad alternative. As I said elsewhere, I can't live on irradiated ground, but I also can't live underwater (and/or with no heating in winter).

Re: Thought about using nuclear?

That article has enough snark that it cannot convince anyone who isn't convinced already. Also, I can't help noticing a whiff of conspiracy theory, and its comments well reflect that.

All of that said, it isn't wrong. We should have gone nuclear twenty years ago, and, having failed at that, we should go nuclear right now. All politicians in the big parties know this; most of them are not stupid.

Unfortunately, not only public opinion doesn't like nuclear much, but there are small-but-significant numbers of people who hate it beyond any reason, and who would happily vote against all their other interests in order to stop anyone who intends to build nukes. This makes being openly pro-nuke extremely difficult, if you want to actually get elected to anything, because as soon as you bring it up, your opponent can attack you on it with a decent profit, and most really important elections are played on razor-thin margins.

Even just making a media campaign about it would be tough. And, of course, the reluctance of politicians to speak up in favor of nuclear just makes the anti-nuclear message that much stronger, making the nukebad meme essentially self-sustaining.

I honestly don't see any way to get out of this situation. Eventually, the sheer amount of suffering caused by this policy will be enough to force reality down everybody's throat. But it's sad that it would all be entirely avoidable.

Personally, I'm going to build a PV+battery system on my roof, as big as I can afford it. It's fucking stupid that I have to do this, but I need to at least be able to run a PC in order to work, and I don't know what else I can do to protect myself. The ROI only barely makes sense because of the government incentives and the high cost of energy - but once I factor in the loss of work I'd have to eat from regular blackouts, it's a no brainer. Any hour I can run my PC off the battery is money. My only regret is that I should have built it sooner, but I honestly didn't think that we'd actually get to the point where blackouts are a thing.

Re: I have no problem with this.

> I also discovered that not speeding doesn't make much difference to journey times and is a lot more relaxing.

This. Well, it would be a lot more relaxing if not for people tailgating you while flashing and/or honking.

I've recently visited Norway, and I was positively astonished, both at how it is actually possible to have an entire country of people who respect safety distance at all times and never overtake unsafely, and at how much more enjoyable driving becomes under those conditions.

Re: enough is enough

> And why is El Reg channelling the Daily Heil?

How so? The article is reporting on the strike, and it's giving most of its space to the workers' reasons, often using the group's own words. It's not attempting to misquote, distort or otherwise counter them, as right-wing reporting often does. What's wrong? Is it because the campaign is labeled "left-wing"? It's not an insult, you know.

Both "socialism" and "capitalism" are terms that have become so overloaded as to be essentially meaningless.

Depending on who's talking, "socialism" can usually mean anything from the USSR to Sweden. But it can sometimes get stretched even further, covering anything from utopian perfect-government states that never existed, to pretty much the whole world except a few semi-anarchic places like Somalia, again depending on what point is being made.

Similarly, "capitalism" can encompass anything from basically the whole world except a few extreme dictatorships like North Korea, all the way to utopian small-government states that never existed.

Because of this, I would be very wary of discussions based around these terms, unless a whole lot of additional clarification is deployed.

Re: A strange set of priorities

Attempting to paint my opinions as invalid because I'm not actively freezing to death is one of the oldest logical fallacies. I am not starving or freezing to death, and that does not invalidate anything I say.

> Just knowing that the climate is changing - and how dramatically - isn't going to be enough to save us.

Wait, are you telling me that, since we don't have a fix right now, we might as well not even know that there is a problem? I hope you realize that awareness of a problem is a precondition for any possible solution?

Moving on, though, there's an article, on this very site, on a bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange paying millions in bonuses to its staff - cryptocurrency, a sector that's burning through more resources than space programs, and that produces literally nothing for it. And yet, you are not there, you're here.

It seems to me that your opposition to space science is stemming from an ideological position, rather than anything rational.

> we're pumping money into exploration where the net benefits to people overall are actually quite negligible.

We're also pumping money into the tenth Fast & Furious movie, and yet you're here and not there. Why?