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

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

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

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 not a livable space…

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

Nuclear reactions do involve neutrinos and antineutrinos but they aren’t super important for fission so I am assuming the decade long detector would be for something else

If you want useful public transit then it needs to connect population centers where people are. People are lazy and don’t want to walk more than 1/2 mile to a bus stop so if you have a population density of 1000/ sq mi that means any one bus stop is only going to be able to provide adequate coverage to 250 people. With so few people per stop it needs to make a lot of stops to be useful which then makes it slow which further lowers use. At that density it also doesn’t make logical sense to have designated bus lanes so they are stuck going slow in traffic as well. So now you have an expensive system that nobody uses because it sucks

If you have higher density then you can justify more lines which makes them actually useful and can add things like light rails which really make a difference

Bike transit is usually easier in those lower density areas but due to the low density getting between places is usually a bit further away so there are usually higher speed limit roads that aren’t as good for cyclists so more expensive barriers need to be constructed or they have to follow less direct paths which causes cycling to be slow

That’s amazing you guys have actual transit infrastructure, near me you can find that in towns and cities but as soon as you get to the cookie cutter suburban developments you need to take 45mph roads with little to no shoulder to get to any stores

The American style suburbs where you have just single family homes and the closest stores are 5 miles away?

The suburban sprawl makes building transit a lot harder but to fix that we need to increase density but then it’s hard to increase density when you need space for cars because you have no usable transit