This was never an actual reactor design. Ford imagined a future where nuclear power could, maybe somehow, be miniaturized. It was a vision.
Even as early as 1956, textbooks said [1]: "The fantastic possibility has been envisaged of including in an automobile enough fissionable material, about the size of a pea, to last the life of the vehicle. In order to realize why this is not within the bounds of reality, it is necessary to understand something about the fission process."
I have freshrss on a VPS and use the web interface as my client on computers and my phone. Is FocusReader a big upgrade over the native web experience?
A lot of the corporate IT workforce is heavily invested in Microsoft systems. It creates somewhat of a co-dependency.
I only run Linux at home. My mom also runs Linux, though she doesn't really know a lot about it. If I could I would have run only Linux at my previous corporate jobs. But the IT people balk: how will windows defender work in Linux? At one point they did install windows defender on Linux and it ground a fine machine basically to a halt.
> But the IT people balk: how will windows defender work in Linux?
They don't think that at all. They probably know more about Linux than you do because I guarantee half the systems they manage are already running it.
What they think about are the applications that the people who actually make the decisions at your companies refuse to migrate away from. They know the cost of hiring Linux sysadmins vs Windows sysadmins. They think about everyone in every other company and how much harder they are to hire when suddenly none of them know how to use their office computer when they're hired. They think about the half dozen or so business critical applications which genuinely don't have Linux equivalents. None of the executives, nobody in HR, nobody in accounting or business. Nobody in sales. Let alone... nobody in the actual non-tech industry that most businesses operate in.
And it's not the college graduates they're worried about. It's the people with 5, 10, or 15 years experience who will just not want to work at a company where they have to compromise and use non-standard software.
It's still not economically viable for any corporation outside of exactly a small tech industry start-up to switch away from Microsoft, and it has nothing to do with the cost of operating system licenses or support.
In my example they literally demanded to run Windows Defender on a Linux server that I requested. There was no Linux experience on the IT team whatsoever.
Well, that's the thing. That's not as stupid as you're trying to make it sound.
There IS Microsoft Defender on Linux because there's multiple products that Microsoft calls Defender. There's the product that ships in Windows for the consumer market, which is just the basic antivirus product that you probably think they're talking about. However, Microsoft's full endpoint protection software is also branded Defender, and there is a Linux version.
And while you might think that it's silly to run that on Linux, (a) your business is probably already licensed for it so will be cheap to add a client, (b) it's what their infrastructure is already using so it's minimal setup, and (c) having security software everywhere is critical simply for saving thousands of dollars in insurance costs. The software nearly pays for itself in reduced premiums at any company of any size even if it does nothing. With how catastrophic ransomware attacks and data breaches are, insurance companies now require annual environmental surveys for evaluating risks.
So you're trying to make this IT team sound stupid, but as someone in the industry I can't even tell from what you said if they are.
I'm not trying to say they were stupid. I'm explaining my lived experience where I needed a lightweight linux server for an internal app and it worked great until a 100% Windows-based IT team policy required that Defender be installed on it, after which it became extremely slow and crashed regularly due to Defender-related issues in the logs.
Damn. I was hoping that confidential compute could allow nuclear reactor design work (export controlled, not classified) to go into the public cloud and avoid the govcloud high premium costs. But this kind of takes the wind out of the idea.
Both those design types were operational in the 1960s in the US but have been shut down due to lack of performance and industrial interest. New interest has started today, but let's not claim the new ones are some kind of new improved tech that evolved out of our workhorse water cooled/moderated plants.
What do you mean? Modern in situ uranium mining is one of the lowest impact mining of resources we have. It's not perfectly clean, but it's pretty darn good.
Ok, well by this definition, all human development activity is unclean. This is a perfectly valid point of view but is pretty distinct from the modern definition of clean.
The problem in my mind with a "clean is clean" litmus test is that it eliminates the word "clean"'s ability to differentiate between sustainable and unsustainable human development.
Using systematic metrics to annoint something as clean so it can get clean energy credits so that people can invest in activities considered cleaner is valuable and useful even if none of the options are 100% perfectly in impactful to the natural world.
OK, but then by that logic, solar and and wind shouldn't be categorized as clean energy either. Clearly it's a matter of degrees and meant as a useful segmentation for taxation, etc.
I will save you the trouble because I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago. These numbers have been thoroughly debunked [1]. They are simply wrong, likely out of laziness more than malice.
But the people that spread this around do it out of malice to dupe people and influence opinions. You've been duped.
> I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago.
That turns out not to be the case.
Even if it were the case: an official study by the DOE was "thoroughly debunked", in your esteemed opinion, because some random Australian twitter user claims to have talked to a friend.
This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.
I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them.
If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.
There is some regulatory burden for sure. But the NRC has been very conducive to standardization, and approved construction and operation licenses of like 20 brand new latest generation water-cooled reactors in the first nuclear Renaissance (2006). It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
The NRC has also been generous with advanced reactor licenses, granting construction licenses for the Kairos Hermes 1 and 2 molten salt cooled test reactors recently. And one for the Abilene Christian university's molten salt fueled reactor too!
A lot of the tech world got it in their heads that nuclear regs are the main issue in nuclear when in reality it is still megaprojects construction management. The small advanced reactors are likely to be very expensive per kWh
> It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.
It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.
And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.
> I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.
I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.
And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.
I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.
I have ideas of a plan to help in nuclear, which is to make open source reactor company quality assurance and engineering procedures that establish clear compliance with regs but also incorporate all sorts of efficiency lessons learned
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