WayeeCool [comrade/them] @ WayeeCool @hexbear.net

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46

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254

Joined

4 yr. ago

That was a problem with the reactor designs of the 1950s to 1990s. Over the past half century a lot of smart people have put a lot of thought into idiot proofing nuclear reactors to prevent another three mile, chernobyl, or fukushima. Reactor designers no longer make optimistic assumptions about the operator and assume they are a shortsighted idiot that cannot be trusted to do the right thing.

In modern reactors temperature coefficients tuned to automatically prevent meltdowns is something regulators care a lot about when approving designs. Rather than focusing on building safety mechanisms that the operator can trigger (ie control rods), a natural safety mechanism is built into the formulation of the fuel so if it gets too hot it is no longer capable of nuclear fission.

This is especially the case in small modular reactor (smr) designs meant to be used in commercial applications where no one actually trusts the operator to be responsible. The fuel is formulated to sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for the reactor automatically SCRAMing even if the operator does everything in their power to keep it running.

There is also a push for SMRs to use things like the thorium fuel cycle because it makes the reactor pointless for terrorists or other bad actors to target. The thorium fuel isn't useful for radiological attacks or bomb making, the only reason it even works as a fuel is because it can produce small amounts of uranium that are immediately reacted upon forming. This was the entire reason governments ignored these fuel cycles for decades, they didn't create waste that could be used for weapons making. As a result terrorists are better off getting a shovel and collecting natural uranium off the side of highways in the deserts of North Africa or North America.

https://nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/news-room/feature-articles/positive-void-coefficient-of-reactivity-CANDUs.cfm

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

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

that seems... convenient. how do they know?

Because there has been over 50 years of extensive research?

https://www.iaea.org/resources/databases/marine-radioactivity-information-system-maris

We actually take samples and monitor those sunken reactors: https://www.hi.no/en/hi/news/2019/july/researchers-discovered-leak-from-komsomolets.

Yeah. Annoying because nuclear powered container ships are the only realistic way to decarbonize transoceanic shipping. When you do the math, the biofuel and e-fuel plans western shipping firms have all presented are obviously not feasible. There isn't enough farmland on earth to produce enough feedstock for the required amount of biofuel and with e-fuels the economics don't work out due to how much electricity is needed per liter of fuel synthesized.

Obviously he is talking about how he is gonna safely land New York in the Hudson river

In California, Oregon, and Washington the state governments stripped cities of most of their powers related to zoning in regards to blocking conversions to mixed use residential. As long as there isn't heavy industry right next door (aren't crazy, no one wants Houston), mixed use residential zoning is hard for cities to deny.

Los Angeles has the problem (benzene, hydrocarbons, heavy metals) of all the oil wells, pipelines, refineries, crude oil storage, and other oil field infrastructure hidden behind facades all throughout the city. The city and county are an active oil field, something that should never have been approved when there is residential or light commercial literally 25ft away from camouflaged wells, pipelines, and crude oil storage tanks. Then again people over a century ago probably shouldn't have looked at the natural tar pits and thought to themselves "this is a great place to build a city".

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/09/oil-wells-in-la-nearby-residents-grapple-with-health-problems.html

New residential arguably is unethical in this situation, especially if it's lower income housing. Btw, this is the reason building new public schools has been almost impossible in Los Angeles and existing schools all have soil that if there were alternatives would mean shutting them down. Los Angeles and Houston are more alike than anyone likes to admit. Can't do the type of super fund site remediation (clean up) at the scale actually needed because it would mean tearing the city down to the bedrock to replace all the soil.

You got downvoted for snark and not because people disagreed with your initial points. Btw, you weren't downvoted by Hexbear users (we don't have downvotes, can't even see them).

Very telling that this poster acts like the human brain isn't plastic with different regions growing and shrinking with use or abuse.

The NASA experiments involving before and after brain imaging highlight just how dramatic these changes can be in the few months astronauts spend in space. Hell, a sedentary person taking up a sport and practicing daily within just a month will cause noticable changes in areas of the brain related to things like motor control.

I'm willing to bet rightwing culture, beliefs, and media consumption does a real number on parts of the brain related to processing fear. I wonder how much of what this research found can be attributed to nurture rather than nature. Take a sizeable sample of people then do before and after brain imaging while putting them through a few years of intensive right-wing indoctrination. For example prolonged isolation is already known to cause most people to become more than a bit paranoid and irritable.

Must mean the ships are just crewed and don't have an attached expeditionary force? I don't think Italy and the Netherlands have anything like Ghost Fleet Overlord. Afaik it's only the US Navy that has been going down that route.

Biggest issue is that this isn't like in 2010 when Somali pirates were attacking any target of opportunity. The houthis have played it smart by researching the background of ships passing through that area and only interdicting ones affiliated with Israel. For most nations, this isn't their problem because their commerical ships have been unmolested. Hard to get a wide ranging international coalition put together when it really isn't an international problem.

It's firms from mainly the US, UK, and Netherlands that all refused to cancel freight to and from Israel, which is why they are crying to their governments for military protection. The big cargo carriers based out of Asia all responded by canceling freight to and from Israel, which isn't a real problem for them because they make thousands of times more revenue from freight between Asia, Africa, and Europe. For example, the Chinese naval strike group in the area has been just chilling because the houthis have ignored Chinese owned shipping.

Even funnier is this guy was one of the hostages they killed:

Apologies. Didn't think about it. You didn't say anything wrong, I'm just too online and need to touch grass.

war trophy I assume... like taking enemy dogtags, personal items, or cutting off ears.

This is the US, a backwards uncivilized nation, so I suspect upper management will walk away from this mostly unscathed and even see bonuses for their profit maximizing actions. They can't blame their suppliers because they are supposed to be QA testing all of their inputs and their final product, it shouldn't require the FDA to raid the plant and do on-site testing for something like this to be discovered. In a civilized nation there would be arrests of company executives resulting in life sentences or capital punishment.

Remember how the FDA recently didn't find out about tainted baby formula until the CDC traced a string of infant deaths to an Abbot plant? How the executive branch had given Abbot a waiver that allowed them to self certify and even after multiple QA managers at the plant had filed whistle blower complaints nothing had been done. How the executives and board of Abbort didn't face criminal charges but got 20 million dollars in bonuses and the industry celebrated because that year they saw record profits due to the supply shortages it created enabling them to further price gouge the US public.

How when a similar tainted baby formula incident happened in China, the executives received life in prison and capital punishment.

This is a really good bit. I'm going to start claiming Gundam, Culture, 2312, and Interstellar ripped off the 2019 video game Outer Wilds because they have O'Neill cylinders.

But what if the space station was so big it has mountains, weather patterns, and large bodies of water in it? /s

Oh 100%. This shit has all the same issues of that bygone era. The company always wins and is just coming up with what can be presented as a solution without having to actually give up dominance. Some already better treated workers get screwed and the company becomes even stronger in regions they weren't forced by law to treat their workers well. The entire point is to prevent the government from stepping in and making systemic change with force of law or revolutionary actions like labor organizing happening among the workforce.

His long time best friend is the sci-fi author Neil Stephenson. He originally created Blue Origin as a shell company to pay his BFF a multi million dollar a year salary and get tax benefits doing it, which is why Neil Stephenson was Blue Origin's only employee for the companies first decade. Bezos used to name internal Amazon projects after things in Stephenson's books, which is why the codename for Kindle was Project Nell. If you ever read The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer you might remember that the protagonist was a girl named Nell and a device like the Kindle was what educated her to lead a people's revolution against the corporate monopolies that ran the world.

Jeff Bezos is fkn weird compared to the other current billionaires, all of which are obvious neoliberals/libertarians. I swear he legitimately thinks of himself as a Fordist or something.

One example that has stuck with me is back in the 2000s Jeff Bezos decided to be the billionaire money man bankrolling the push for same sex marriage when other billionaires, even gay ones like Peter Theil, were funding a rightwing culture war against it. I remember an interview back in the 2000s where he explained his motivation came from his personal secretary constantly missing work because unlike a marriage, civil union only covered finances and property. That her partner wasn't able to handle things like school meetings and doctors appointments that required guardianship of their kids. That the important thing marriage provided over civil union was the ability to have joint guardianship when raising children. That he discovered same sex marriage being illegal was resulting in loss of economic efficiency and social well-being problems in Amazon's workforce.

I can actually see how from his perspective the moves he made in creating Amazon have been a positive for society in a paternalistic sense. Amazon constantly tries to find social compromises in the way large companies in the first half of the 20th century would. They were the first to start a serious push to electrify their last mile delivery logistics vehicles and are the only carrier that currently has thousands of EV delivery vehicles. After a month of public criticism by members of US Congress over wages, Amazon increased their minimum wage nationwide to $15 an hour at a time when similar companies were fighting tooth and nail on neoliberal principle. I can even see how Amazon leadership might view Amazon Fresh as socially positive because they offer cheaper groceries via Amazon Brands than the major grocery stores in the US and deliver groceries like fresh produce to people in the food deserts that make up most of the US. So many of Amazon's moves are in response to national discussions about social issues plaguing the US. Ofc, they only seem to have these Fordist principles within the US and it's always business solutions that protect Amazon from society unraveling.

Amazon is literally copying moves related to healthcare made by Fordist industrialists with its ongoing expansion into becoming a fully integrated HMO. Amazon originally started building out its medical care division to provide healthcare for warehouse employees and then expanded to the general public. Kaiser Permeante, the oldest fully integrated medical insurer, pharmacy, doctors office, and hospital operator (fully integrated HMO) in the US was originally created by Kaiser Shipyards to provide quality low cost healthcare for employees, their families, and local communities. Amazon has been building something that is starting to look a lot like what Kaiser Shipyards did by becoming a massive fully integrated low cost pharmacy, primary care, and health insurance provider. They have so far bought up over 200 medical practices around the US. They created a pharmacy that is cheaper than the other major pharmacies in the US and when someone doesn't have insurance gives them a pennies on the dollar price.

Unfortunately it's already possible with commercially available lasers. Which is why the US military has been giving Lockheed and various commerical laser manufacturers money to convert existing 100KW - 1MW fiber lasers used in manufacturing to military weapon versions.

Few different people did the math after the US media stuff about Chinese space lasers and it is even possible with off the shelf commercial fiber lasers that easily fit within a medium sized satellite using photovoltaic solar power. Interesting watch if you can tolerate smug overeducated New Hampshire libertarian vibe: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-MVs37rxJL0

Yup. Lots of new toys they have developed but can't make use of. The current proposals for new power systems for infantry seem mostly based around universally compatible lithium ion battery packs and photovoltaic cells to recharge them in the field but that creates the issue of not being able to recharge during poor weather or nighttime. Being able to put in a request to have your photovoltaic cells energized by an orbital laser would fix that reliability issue.

There are also the winged and airship drones they developed that are supposed to stay above the battlefield indefinitely using solar panels. Being able to energize their photovoltaic panels during night or bad weather might make them more viable.

Although they do seem serious about the plans to beam power to forward operating bases that currently need constant deliveries from vulnerable fuel trucks to refill their generators. Being able to eliminate the fuel powered generators and instead give them photovoltaic panels that can be energized rain or shine, day or night— would eliminate a supply line vulnerability. The proposed Abrams main battletank replacement is hybrid electric for the same reason, on top of silent mode it means less fuel trucks needed and the ability to not use any fuel when idling or making maneuvers of only a few miles.

Can't wait for them to be off target and start actual bushfires. I keep thinking about all the claims that China was starting wildfires in the US using space lasers. Every accusation is a confession blah blah blah.