apendleton

قبل 4 أشهرdiscuss

Zipcodes are not great for reliably describing locations. They're collections of multiple postal delivery routes, and that's it. There's no guarantee that any given zipcode lies within a single city, or a single state, or that it lies within the boundaries of the US at all, or that it's contiguous, or that it's stationary (there are some for boats), or that any given location only has one, etc., etc. People think this is a good idea because their particular case happens to work well, but zip codes are rife with edge cases.

apendleton

قبل 8 أشهرdiscuss

I think they get to that a couple of paragraphs later:

> The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems: some of its statistical methods needed more work, some of its approaches were not optimal, some of its theorizing went too far given the evidence, and so on. Again, we have moved past hallucinations and errors to more subtle, and often human-like, concerns.

apendleton

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

> The reason for cost overruns is simply because NPPs are one-off products

But there's no fundamental reason they _have_ to be one-off products. They just historically have been for at least partly regulatorily motivated reasons: because each reactor's approval process starts afresh (or rather, did until quite-recent NRC reforms), there's little advantage in reuse, and because many compliance costs are both high and fixed, there's an incentive to build fewer huge reactors rather than more small ones, which makes factory construction difficult to achieve and economies of scale hard to realize.

apendleton

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

In terms of cost of materials to build a reactor, sure, that seems right. But most of the cost of fission is dealing with its regulatory burden, and fusion seems on track to largely avoid the worst of that. It seems conceivable that it ends up being cheaper for entirely political/bureaucratic reasons.

apendleton

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

Oh for sure, I'm not claiming that CFS (or Tokamak Energy or Type One or whoever else) will for sure succeed, or if they do, that they've already solved all the problems that will need solving to do so. My only assertion/prediction is that I think if they end up succeeding, when future historians look back and write the history of this energy revolution or whatnot, HTSC magnets will turn out to have been the key breakthrough that made it possible.

apendleton

قبل 9 أشهرdiscuss

> It would require a technological breakthrough that we have not yet imagined.

Maybe, but not necessarily. The necessary breakthrough might have been high-temperature superconducting magnets, in which case not only has it been imagined, but it has already occurred, and we're just waiting for the engineering atop that breakthrough to progress enough to demonstrate a working prototype (the magnets have been demonstrated but a complete reactor using them hasn't yet).

Or it might be that the attempts at building such a prototype don't pan out, and some other breakthrough is indeed needed. It'll probably be a couple of years until we know for sure, but at this point I don't think there's enough data to say one way or the other.

> And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear.

It depends how much storage you mean. If you're only worried about sub-24h load-shifting (like, enough to handle a day/night cycle on a sunny day), this is certainly true. If you care about having enough to cover for extended bad weather, or worse yet, for seasonal load-shifting (banking power in the summer to cover the winter), the economics of solar plus storage remain abysmal: the additional batteries you need cost just as much as the ones you needed for daily coverage, but get cycled way less and so are much harder to pay for. If the plan is to use solar and storage for _all generation_, though, that's the number that matters. Comparing LCoE of solar plus daily storage with the LCoE of fixed-firm or on-demand generation is apples-and-oranges.

I think solar plus storage absolutely has the potential to get there, but that too will likely require fundamental breakthroughs (probably in the form of much cheaper storage: perhaps something like Form Energy's iron-air batteries).

apendleton

قبل 10 أشهرdiscuss

It wasn't Airbus yet, so more like: Bombardier had to sale a controlling stake to Airbus to gain access to its Georgia production facilities.

apendleton

قبل سنتينdiscuss

If you're building a submarine, you don't have to call it a "future submarine" until it submerges; people understand that if you say "I'm currently building a submarine," it has yet to go under water, but the thing you're building is still a submarine. I think that's generally true of not-yet-built or not-yet-used things: it's understood that if it hasn't done the thing yet, you're describing what it's going to be/do.

apendleton

قبل سنتينdiscuss

If SAFs are to be economically viable at all, they'll almost certainly need to be able to run in existing, unmodified engines. So: all engines will be able to run on some amount of SAFs anywhere for 0% to 100%, as will this new engine. This statement has no information content whatsoever.

apendleton

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

It wouldn't have occurred to me to go into one of these stores to buy an actual book, but I will say I appreciated having a no-advanced-planning-needed way to get a $4 HDMI cable or rechargeable batteries, or whatever other things regular electronics stores usually mark way up because customers have no other choice. Maybe now that so much of this is available same-day for free from online-Amazon, that's less compelling?

apendleton

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

I assume they meant that they default to making things that come in imperial-unit sizes (e.g., quarter-inch nuts instead of 6mm ones or whatever). It's not really practical to mix and match.

apendleton

قبل 7 سنواتdiscuss

This is a blog post that seems to just be reporting on this tweet: https://twitter.com/justinschuh/status/1103087046661267456

which in turn is referencing this new release from this past Friday: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2019/03/stable-channel...

which seems to have been motivated by "CVE-2019-5786: Use-after-free in FileReader. Reported by Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group on 2019-02-27".

That CVE is still reserved/non-public on the Mitre NVD though.

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