It’s not a joke if you hit boron with a neutron it releases the energy in the form of an alpha particle which is just a helium atom.

So take some boron-10 put it in a neutron flux and you get helium. This is being done in nearly every nuclear power plant in the world every second

Helium may not be renewable but we can manufacture it from things like boron

But why wasn’t this compared to caffiene from sources like energy drinks? Then even as a control why wasn’t other stimulants like adderal asked about?

Claiming it’s caffiene by comparing to decaf coffee is dubious to me personally because what kind of people drink decaf? Usually people who were long time coffee drinkers who had to stop for some reason

So is coffee and tea neuroprotective or is caffiene sensitivity a risk factor for dementia?

Is caffiene neuroprotective or is it all stimulants?

The article itself ends in the classic we need to investigate more but that’s clearly not the conclusion most people who discuss this are going to be talking about for the next few months

Decaf coffee has less than 1mg/ floz

Black tea is generally over 5mg/floz

Are you basing this on how alert you feel or do you have some very weak tea and some super strong decaf?

https://www.freon.com/en/industries/refrigeration/residential-refrigeration

R134 was the “safe” refrigerant to replace R-12 because R12 is 11000x more potent of a ghg than co2

There are some new refrigeration units that use R600 but the vast majority of refrigerators are still R134

R600 being a highly flammable gas (it’s butane) has slowed its rollout a lot. Hence why a solid state non volatile refrigerant is still a cool development

Old school refrigerants were absolutely horrendous ghg even modern ones are pretty bad with R134 being 1430x worse of a ghg than CO2

If we can reduce that, that’s good! And metals like titanium are recyclable so yes initially extracting them is bad but the full lifecycle isn’t as terrible

They are claiming a weight of 400Wh/kg so the extra weight should be at least another 70lbs if it didn’t require any extra bracing which it probably does that while it may not be a lot for a 3000lb car it is sizeable for a 400lb bike

it’s a lot worse than other EV makers misleading claims, because 12mph is literally a joke of a speed to test at considering that’s slower than a cyclist on a non motorized bike and it is not even considering a fast speed to run at.

A still misleading but at least defendable claim would be if they did one at 25mph and called that their city range but 12mph is just an insulting claim

Adding the extra weight of the battery will reduce the range but more importantly going 12mph is not a way of rating a street legal vehicle… it’s like bragging about a laptop having a 30 day battery life when it’s in standby. Drag is a function of velocity squared which means that going at even 45mph you are experiencing 14x the drag and at 60mph it’s 25x the drag

Yes, you must be correct that’s why all the nuclear physicists and nuclear engineers think your idea is ridiculous yet a bunch of people with only a high school diploma think it sounds so smart…

Another great idea you should look into is the water powered car that all the experts that say it doesn’t work are just owned by big oil

Military reactor waste predominately goes to the Hanford site, you can actually see it on satellite imagery

Activated steel is actually super easy to deal with, it gives off gammas which are bad but because they don’t get that hot you can just bury it which is infinitely easier than risking spreading radioactive contamination in the stratosphere and having it rain down on people

The risk from launching nuclear waste in the sun is so much worse than the risk of burying it

We have so little high level nuclear waste it’s actually crazy to think about

Like all of the dry casks we made in the history of commercial nuclear power could fit on a single football field

Dig big hole bury waste, no step 3

I wrote a school report about iter back in middle school or high school when it was still in the design process and still occasionally check their job listings because I would love to work there and on fusion but we still don’t know if it will ever work like we hit the scientific breakeven with inertial confinement but the scaling on that is terrible and I don’t believe we hit even the scientific breakeven with magnetic confinement

Then we still need to harness the energy from that turn it into work, turn that into electricity and distribute it with enough excess to pay for the whole system which is still a lot of hurdles we need to climb

I heard it in the same vane that I heard that we would have a moon base by 2020 a mars base by 2025 and nuclear fusion in just 10 more years

They sell it, some of it is sold to advertisers but recently companies like palantir have been buying these large collections of data, de anonymizing it and then they can use it to develop profiles about people which they can then sell to the government

And that’s what they admit to doing

Once your data is out there it’s essentially impossible to get it back

You know rough dimensions you don’t have a robot going through and literally mapping every item on the floor, high traffic areas , details about amount of people that live there, possible pets, and then tying it to your IP and then selling that to advertisers.

The crazy thing isn’t that they do that it’s that you have to pay money for an item that then does that without your permission and if you attempt to stop it they brick your item that you paid hundreds of dollars for

I don’t know for certain if they sell your data (but they probably do) but you can use a wifi router and how it reflects in a room you can fully map a room with enough accuracy that you can tell what a person is typing on a keyboard which is kind of terrifying if you think about it

“The calculated growth factor of the NFD due to the increase in Keff does not exceed 1.27,”

I am not positive but I think they mean the increase of neutron flux density does not exceed 1.27 and the cause of the increase of neutron flux is to due to an increase in Keff. Because otherwise 1.27 is prompt criticality and that would be a very bad day

I could be mistaken but wasn’t the issue that when the rods were fully withdrawn the graphite was also partially withdrawn so when they scrammed the first thing that happened was an insertion of positive reactivity from the graphite which was enough positive reactivity to burn up all the xenon which then caused the reactor to go prompt critical?

Like the presence of the graphite wasn’t that bad but it combined with a lack of interlocks and improperly trained operators was the big problem and of course trying to start up at the peak of a xenon transient is never ideal

There is literally a law that prevented things like posting “this shutdown is caused by radical left democrats” on the banner of official governement websites

It has literally never been done before

You can make an argument for some amount of propaganda that lives in everything but nobody ever posted a picture of a bag of cocaine and used it to blame a previous president….

This is magnitudes above anything that was done before it’s like comparing casual trash talk to sucker punching

Using it to insert AI generated propaganda onto official government websites is a brand new thing that’s never been done before

It’s a pop science article… they usually don’t cover things like life cycle analysis. It is however a first of its kind plant that makes its net effects less important as it kind of works as a proof of concept. It’s a relatively small scale plant that if it does work, great, lets build more of them; if it doesn’t work, that sucks, can we modify them in any way to make them work.

It is taking two ingredients that usually have to take extra energy to be able to dispose of them and combining them together to make electricity. That is really cool, and there is no reason to be overly negative about it because it might be bad based on info that you don’t have