This actually happened in August and September of 2023 and it’s great validation for High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (HTGR) at larger scales. I hope they have the guts to also do a full loss of coolant test. I’ve also heard the these two reactors have been turned off for quite a while due to issues with the primary heat exchangers, temperature fluctuations, and uneven cooling - characteristically disadvantages of pebble beds.
There’s of course 2 flavors of HTGR (prismatic and pebble bed), and people choose the pebble version for continuous refueling despite all the drawbacks [1]. But there’s a lot of reasons to do prismatic. Can’t wait to see China’s prismatic HTGR.
"GDP is only a measurement of how reliant a place or country is on the global economy. Self-sufficiency has a GDP of 0. Wasteful consooomerism has an extremely large GDP."
I have no idea who Luke Smith is but none of that article makes any sense. GDP is the measure of economic activity. A self-sufficient community would not have a GDP of 0 because they would still have transactions among themselves. Perfect self-sufficiency would actually generate a very high GDP number because of how diverse and specialized the community would have to be to take care of itself.
Outside of that everything in it is just a generic "companies are bad" "fiat currency is bad" "government is bad" spiel that has been said a billion times already.
Initially, he means that a single self-sufficient person contributes 0 to the GDP. Then it seems like he means people in this village don't trade with each other, but I'm not sure. If they trade without money, first of all that's very inefficient, secondly there's still a GDP of sorts but maybe he means it's not measured.
But he doesn't care about efficiency. He's not saying GDP is a poor indicator of economic growth. He's more saying that economic growth is bad, globalism is bad, and maybe hinting that *skims other article on site* an ancient, simple life according to Orthodox Christianity is the true path to happiness. And this is too off-topic for me to discuss, I'm just laying out what the dude is saying.
>Initially, he means that a single self-sufficient person contributes 0 to the GDP
There is probably an argument that for accounting purposes a person should bill themselves at market costs for self-work. E.g. mowing the lawn, changing one's own oil, doing one's taxes -- all are economic activities with a value associated which is 'lost' in a traditional GDP calculation.
Yeah, if it were possible to do that, it'd make sense. Best people can do is mentally bill themselves for their time and factor that into personal decisions.
> A self-sufficient community would not have a GDP of 0 because they would still have transactions among themselves. Perfect self-sufficiency would actually generate a very high GDP number because of how diverse and specialized the community would have to be to take care of itself.
And all this is assuming that the community uses money. A self sufficient community would have 0 GDP iff no money was exchanged.
I'd agree. Pedantically, though, this wouldn't be GDP by definition.
I do think you can substitute "sum of numerical value" for GDP in most non-technical contexts and have them make sense.
In this case it could be that an economy doesn't trade 'rationally', so summing numerical values doesn't make sense. E.g. I'll trade you 1 chicken -> 2 shoes, someone else will trade 1 shoe -> 2 chickens.
I guess there would still be some numerical measure, but it'd be more of a matrix than a single number.
Wasteful consumerism, if it's truly wasteful, will also lead to lower future GDP growth. It's not a bad long-term metric. But I won't care if the US president claims to have moved the GDP by X%, even across two terms. The market can stay irrational for a long time.
To use Luke's example, say buzzsaws introduce planned obsolescence. People buy more saws for no good reason, which is "good for the GDP." More fixed income goes to buzzsaws instead of eventually being spent on something more useful. The buzzsaw industry expands a bit, pulling people and resources from other endeavors. Society is collectively spending its effort producing then throwing away buzzsaws when it could have created future growth through technology etc, which the GDP would eventually measure.
I have a feeling that in hindsight, 30-40 years from now, this will seem like no brainer and that the period prior was heavily anti-meritocratic and counterproductive.
People just leave this critical detail to our intuitions for some reason.
I think we want something good and fair... What's the measure of "merit" that's good and fair?
People who are good at the SATs usually want SAT scores to matter. People who get good grades in high-school want high-school grades to matter. Not unreasonable... but that's still just people defining "merit" in a self-serving way.
I think we want to focus on outcomes...
Let's suppose the college experience and fact of an elite university degree confers significant advantages of reach and power to those who get it... and that there are 10x more people able to take advantage of those advantages than there are spots available.
I think the question is: of those 10x people, who are the 10% we want to give a spot to?
I think we want to give them to the people who are most likely to benefit all the rest of us (completely fine by me if they benefit themselves as well -- In fact, I think it will work best that way, by a large degree.)
So that's the "merit" I'm looking for.
(I think when left to intuition, people tend to image "merit" as something that would favor people like themselves and their families... usually, in effect, something quite narrow with a heavy self-serving bias.)
People want “merit” to be the determining factor… but they don’t want to express or discuss what merit actually is.
As someone has plenty of the characteristics commonly associated with merit, but who also has a strong sense of fairness, I’m awfully skeptical of the faith (and I used that word deliberately) people put in the concept. Why the hell do the talents I was born with or advantages I was given make me any more deserving of material wealth than anyone else?
That’s all I see anyone doing with “merit”… it’s used as a “drop the mic” concept that to justify self-serving criteria for conferring material advantages.
Personally, I think ability should confer obligations more than advantages. (A wildly radical concept, I know, in the morally retarded era we live in.)
This sort of thing is endemic to most parts of the world, and I doubt the rest of the world will come around in that period. The political forces that drive this will likely be as strong in fifty years, just as they were as strong fifty years ago.
Let's hope no NATO ally would be fool hardy enough to take this action.
I'm uncomfortable with light hearted talk about the US and NATO being involved in this. Clearly people speaking so cavalierly about that possibility do not understand the implications of such an act in the alliance system. The purpose of an alliance is not to surprise your partners. It's to ensure your partners are not surprised.
On a completely unrelated note: /s
Brazil, South Africa, Kenya and Ghana. Property markets had been a little crazy as they are everywhere. I didn't think there was much upside in these markets, but I'm starting to see that perhaps these might be good places for long term residential investment afterall?
Probably offer some moderate but steady returns as the insurance policies of the rats, and enormous returns as the most likely places the rats would run if things nosedive. Now I understand the USD4 million condos in Nairobi.
The US tapped the German prime Minister Angela Merkel's phone. Not not much of an alliance there. If it serves US interest all bets are off and it's time for everyone to realize that.
Doesn't pass the smell test (also we're talking about the entire EU having issues not just Germany).
Gigantic risk for the US and would eventually be found out which would destroy any semblance of relations with the EU and significantly strengthen Russia's hand.
US companies (and others) are going to sell LNG to Europe for huge profits anyway.
These pipelines weren't deliving gas anyway
The US would prefer energy markets to be stable and not have sky-high prices
Russia's invasion of Ukraine was one of the greatest foreign policy gifts in United States history and it significantly strengthened US alliances across the globe and put the entire west in lockstep with each other with regards to Russia and China. Placing that gift at risk is beyond foolish.
It doesn't pass the smell test for the simple reason that Germany and the EU were already ending dependency on Russian gas, because Russia has made it abundantly clear that any such dependency on Russia is a national security threat.
This wasn't done to coerce European countries. This was done to stir chaos and make it look like someone other than Russia committed sabotage.
Europe knows the US mistreats us, it is no secret. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was a UK submarine under US instructions for example. We know how the US spy on us, spy on private companies to favor their own, mess with our currencies, isolate us and exploit us. Uses us as cannon fodder. We remember all the times the US was caught spying on our leaders, deciding our elections, threatening invasion and abducting people. We have seen the news and read the cables. We remember when Obama told us they would not kill US citizens without a trial, only foreigners like ourselves. We know how foreign policy works. One day maybe we'll have the abnormality of leaders that work on the best interest of their people, maybe then the US will learn the world remembers. Nothing lasts forever.
Everything the US does to Europeans Europeans do back to them. Why do you think the spying allegations went away so quickly? Because German and French intelligence spy on the US as well, and so it's better for both parties if they just shut up about it. Everybody spies on everybody, that's the entire reason of existence for intelligence agencies that every country has.
Europe live's on the US's teat. Ukraine and Nato do not exist with the US. Without US LNG Europe would be begging Putin for gas, leaving Ukraine to rot. Without US defense spending Russia would have rolled through Ukraine and be on its way to Berlin again. Without the US in WW2 Europe would be speaking German or Russian. On and on.
Honestly, the timing doesn't make sense. I'd maybe the US blowing the pipelines a year ago when it looked as though NS2 might conceivably go online, but given how frosty relationships are right now between the EU and Russia, and given the scramble to wean Europe off Russian gas-dependency already is in progress, there just doesn't appear to be much of a point, not in the short term and not in the long term.
Why would Russia invade and annex Ukraine? The answer can be stupid people making stupid decisions, don't assume everything done by a nation-state is logical.
> Russia has good geopolitical reasons for invading Ukraine.
They had good reasons to maybe want to dominate their neighbor. What good reasons were there to risk everything over an all out land war, and what reasons remain for continuing a fight they are losing ?
"Gigantic risk for the US and would eventually be found out"
This is predicated on the assumption that the US intelligence community would leak it anytime soon (within the current presidency). That seems like a very poor assumption. If it's never proven they did it, there's no real risk because people who don't want to believe will invent other explanations. You see it happening in this thread already - it's not the country that literally said they had ways to ensure NS2 would never activate, no, it must be the country that built it. 4D chess!
"These pipelines weren't deliving gas anyway"
No, but that could have been changed very quickly if wanted. All three pipelines were pressurized. NS2 was all new equipment, ready and waiting to go.
"The US would prefer energy markets to be stable and not have sky-high prices"
The US has consistently and strongly opposed European dependence on Russian natgas under (at least) two different presidents. Neither of them seemed to care much about the question of what to replace it with. At any rate such an operation would be signed off by Biden and highly classified, so it's not like "the US" would have an opinion on what matters more anyway, just a senile old man.
1. I'm not saying the US did it.
2. I just want to remind you, that you're talking about a country literally renaming their national dish to "freedom fries" over France not wanting to join in a war, started under provably false pretenses.
French fries are not the National Dish of the USA, and it was done in the cafeterias in Congress (as well as a few other zealous restaurants). But to portray it as a country renaming their national dish is an over-exaggeration.
As a US Citizen. I laughed at "Freedom Fries" as did many I know.
The US is not homogeneous or even close.
As an example:
I remember warning people when visiting over seas: Trump is many things. Stupid is not one.
I stand by that statement. I don't agree with the man. But I will never mistake him for a total fool. Did he mis-calcuate. Thankfully, so far yes. But 2024+ will tell the truth on that, alas.
If the pipeline started operating, which it probably would in a few months with energy catastrophe in Europe - it would be total victory for Russia: natural gas revenues through the roof, end of war, etc etc. USA for some reason believes that Russian victory is against its interests.
On the other hand, this now means freezing europe and a lot of money for USA, against european peoples interests... especially for people who don't really care about ukraine, as they didn't care about afghanistan, syria, libya etc., and just want a nice life for themselves (so, most people).
Yeah sure... they're saying we have enough reserves, then in the same sentance, that we must limit the time we shower, that we must wear sweaters indoors, that we must not heat our houses above X degrees, and many of the companies are aalready shutting down due to gas prices.... and it's not even winter yet.
What do you expect the politicians to do? Say that we're fucked because they didn't want to negotiate? ...so we can protest and replace them before we're actually fucked? Or lie about being ready, until it's obvious we're not ready and we're fucked, and with a destroyed pipeline, we cannot even negotiate anymore.
We're talking about people who couldn't even get masks during covid.
The vast majority of weapons and support to Ukraine is coming from the US, Britain and Eastern European countries, not Western ones. Even if Germany and France started taking in gas from Russia it would only marginally affect the amount of support coming in for Ukraine and certainly wouldn't come even close to ending the war. The energy catastrophe is unlikely to happen too beyond what is already happening (ie companies having to shutdown due to high energy prices). See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-27/europe-is...
Europe already announced they weren't buying Russian oil, and Russia already announced they weren't going to sell it. The pipeline being functional, or no, seems inconsequential. The attack can serve propaganda purposes, however.
So what was the solution in the end? Cuz currently I only see everyone being afraid to even acknowledge that gas reserves are merely a buffer. I suspect this "figured out" might as well be yet another soothing post-truth.
Well for one they've filled storage reserves past the annual target: https://graphics.reuters.com/UKRAINE-CRISIS/EUROPE-GAS/zdvxo..., and will fill it up to the max. The reserve can be used for about 3 months. Anything else they need will be purchased expensively on demand. Demand will be cut where it can. Something like 10-15% less demand would make all the difference. Yes it'll be painful in the short term but they should have never hitched themselves to Russian energy in the first place. This is the cost they will pay.
Anyways, by next winter France's nukes should be back online and they'll have had 2 years to make structural changes to ween off Russian gas. Likely means more US LNG in the short term, and more green energy/tech in the long term. Only chance I see of them getting back to Russian energy is if Russia gets toppled by a democratic regime that wants to be westernized. I see this as very unlikely in the next 2 years.
German policy has always been that this pipeline is a stranded assert once russia shuts it down.
Keeping this as a lever and credible threat is vastly important for maintaining a somewhat secure supply of gasoline for east germany. When speaking about a energy catastrophe you really, really want this pipeline shut.
In fact germany has taken measures to make sure that the pipelines will not become operational again. Confiscating and removing compressors and reuse them for the planned LNG terminals.
If anybody profits from these explosions, it's germany.
And russian natural gas revenues hit ground and are now searching for oil themselfs, now.
In some respects, vulnerability to attack is a feature, not a flaw for promoting peace and collaboration instead of violence. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to piss neighbors off enough to lead to an invasion. If invasion occurs, everyone will be extra careful. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to be bombed to shit by other countries due to the reactor's radioactivity inventory potentially containing other countries as well as the country in question - ie. don't spoil the prize.
> In some respects, vulnerability to attack is a feature, not a flaw for promoting peace and collaboration instead of violence. A country with nuclear reactors is less likely to piss neighbors off enough to lead to an invasion.
That feels like saying "a woman who's not allowed to carry pepper spray is less likely to dress provocatively enough to lead to getting raped".
Meltdown accident: basically, reactor is turned off, however heat continues to be generated because of a thing called decay heat which is when isotopes generated by the fission reactions decay to more stable isotopes and release energy. It's about 7% of a fission reactor's power and continues for a few hours until it's negligible. 7% of a gigawatt reactor is like having a couple of jet engines going full blast inside the core. This heat has to be removed, and meltdowns happen when people fail to do so - basically pumps break, coolant leaks, or coolant is blocked from cooling down the core. Recent micro reactors get around this because they don't need active coolant or people to cool down the reactor - they just cool off by conduction or simple heat rejection systems. I read recently that fusion reactor will also generate decay heat from all the activated components and this is comparable to a fission reactor. The difference is there's a lot less radioactive crap in a fusion reactor - but the fusion reactor will still meltdown and they are expensive...
> I read recently that fusion reactor will also generate decay heat from all the activated components and this is comparable to a fission reactor.
I'd like to know where you read that as the entire idea is to build a reactor out of things that don't activate or are very hard to activate. i.e. things that thermalize or reflect neutrons.
Fission reactors produce tons of neutrons too (they kind of have to to work more so than fusion even) and that doesn't leave the containment vessel anywhere near as radioactive as the nuclear waste itself.
I used their data to find power density and compared it the micro modular fission (MMR) fission reactors.
“MMR has a lower decay heat power density than fusion systems like SPARC or ARC, DEMO, or ITER and orders of magnitude lower than other advanced fission reactors as show in the figure below. UNSC's MMR has the lowest decay heat power density at 0.075 W/cm3, less than DEMO's 0.083 W/cm3 in the blanket and divertor. A lower decay heat is more manageable by passive cooling systems, allowing the reactor to dissipate heat more easily and without damaging the reactor. The other aspect to consider is the maximum temperatures that can be safely maintained in the reactor. Gas-cooled reactors like the MMR have all-ceramic cores that can withstand much higher temperatures than a fusion's reactors metals, molten salts, and magnets. MMR's low power density is a paradigm shift in nuclear safety, more foundational than fusion, for it can be accomplished cost effectively today.”
Isn't ITER specifically not designed for that issue given it's not intended for long term operations? They even have the coil magnets directly in the neutron flux.
I don't think using ITER as an example here is relevant.
If there's truly no meltdown risk with micro reactors, I'm all for it.
In terms of fusion, I'd much rather make the tradeoff of increased cost in order to remove issues of vulnerability completely. I want to be able to not even have to think about / plan for dealing with a meltdown scenario.
A company I work with recently started design and development for space craft to catch Borisov or Omouamoua, the other extra solar object that recently passed by, using a nuclear decay heat source and Hall effect thrusters. It's pretty realistic and doable - no bleeding edge technologies. Very high power density, very high isp, very fast space craft. Apparently, they can achieve 100km/s + velocity delta for a very small payload: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2021_Phase_...
The same system could do a Mars visit and return to Earth for small payloads in 50 days.
This stuff needs to get funded! They are funded for initial studies and design with NASA, but I know they are looking for extra funding to pull off the mission faster without being tied to NASA's timelines and mercurial objectives.
The typical radioisotope generator is a Plutonium-238 source like the MMRTG on the Mars rovers. The Plutonium decays by alpha emission with a half life of 80+ years. The problem is there is a very limited supply of Plutonium-238 - we use the entire supply for Mars Rover - and it's very controlled material.
The CAB starts with a non-radioactive material like Cobalt-59 spheres placed in a ceramic matrix. It is then put into a nuclear reactor where it turns into Cobalt-60, which releases energy by beta and gamma emission with a half life of 5 years. This charging can be done every couple years to generate more Cobalt-60 inside the device. Such a power source is something like 40x as power dense as the Pu-238 source and since it's made of high temperature ceramics, it can go to very high temperatures which is very useful for space generators where you have to reject heat using blackbody radiators.
Thanks, so "charging" means activating stable cobalt to radioactive cobalt by neutron capture. This sounds very doable and is in line with what I expected for a project selected for the program.
I asked because of an experiment conducted by a german research institute at an accelerator in France. They modified nuclear states by using "shaped" x-ray pulses. I wondered if it were possible to store energy by making a nucleus undergo a transition to a meta-stable state (spontaneous emission is forbidden by a selection rule) but which could eventually be triggered by another pulse to extract energy again.
I hope my description of the process I imagine is not too far off, it has been a while since my nuclear physics course ;)
if it's what i think they are, they are essentially batteries with a radioactive source. It relies on the gradual decay of the source to create energy which is somehow harnessed and used as a power source. I have learnt here on HN that they last many years, are used on space projects such as the voyager probes, and more recently, the mars rover. They are impractical for other uses, such as powering your fridge and home. And their price is.... astronomical.
One thing that comes to mind is Hafnium 178m2, but (for understandable reasons) there's basically zero public information about the feasibility of charging and induced discharging of any nuclear isomer, let alone one so energy dense.
I wonder, has anyone seriously considered employing the Oberth effect as close to the Sun as possible? Combined with using solar power for propulsion energy, that could get interesting.
I could swear I have seen a video on building a test chamber with an intense light source to test a heat shield similar to the parker solar probe but with hydrogen or helium piped through it for a solar thermal thruster. But I can't find it now.
I appreciate the coolness factor. But, unless the payload can be enough to pull off a 1998 Bruce Willis, what's the immediate benefit? Or, would this be fundamental to some research?
Regarding Omouamoua, we just observed for the first time in human history, a cylinder or plate shaped object from another star flying through our solar system with questionable orbital velocities (we are not quite sure how to explain a small acceleration it had). A cylinder/plate is not a low energy geometry (things like to turn into spherical type objects over time), it's from another solar system, we don't know very much about it. How could you not want to visit it?
It's an opportunity to pull off a speed and distance record, visit something from another solar system, resolve big research questions about its shape, composition, origin and rule out any theories of its possible intelligent origin. They are also pursuing it to showcase the benefits of nuclear heat for space.
This is a more of an etymology issue than what you think, if you need to look up the word etymology, I'm referring to the the history of the words and not suggesting any changing meaning
Search for evidence of life outside the solar system. Unless you're planning a trip to another star system this is all we've got in our lifetimes.
Hitching a fast ride to the outer edges of the solar system since it's on a hyperbolic trajectory.
What is the asteroid made of? That shape of asteroid is not normal. Usually they're rubble piles, these were different. Is there formation methods we don't yet know? Were they fragments of a planet's destruction?
On an engineering level, we've never had to rendezvous with something on this trajectory before. Can we?
That is how progress works. Lots of things were researched or invented before progress in other areas (materials, economics, society, other scientific finds...) made these findings useful or even feasible. You never know when and why you will need this, the only thing you know - it will be used eventually. Maybe this will give some important clues into the future interstellar travel, maybe the tricks and technologies invented for this mission will be used elsewhere, maybe sample will give important clues into the origins and probability of life.
People often claim commerce and free markets are the driver of innovation. That's true, but they're not the only driver. Industry and national "moonshots" play off each other very well.
There’s of course 2 flavors of HTGR (prismatic and pebble bed), and people choose the pebble version for continuous refueling despite all the drawbacks [1]. But there’s a lot of reasons to do prismatic. Can’t wait to see China’s prismatic HTGR.
[1] https://lvenneri.com/blog/pebble-bed-nukegumball