profile of Liz Muller, founder of the of #Deep-Fission #nuclear #energy company, who apparently lives in Berkeley
on 02026-06-13Charlie #Stross’s account of his guided tour of the Torness Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR) #nuclear reactor complex. #energy
on 02026-06-12#nuclear #energy #history, Hyman Rickover’s 01953 memo about how “paper reactors” are simple, small, cheap, light, quickly built, flexible in purpose, and require very little development, while practical reactors are behind schedule, require an immense amount of development on apparently trivial components such as corrosion, expensive, slow to build, large, heavy, and complicated. “The original was published in The Journal of Reactor Science and Technology, Volume 3, No. 3 (which is classified) and reproduced many times, e.g. in Congressional testimony.”
on 02026-05-05the #Hiroshima #nuclear #weaponry museum
on 02025-11-05#history of #FDA #politics in #USA and #human-experimentation by the #DOE for #nuclear #weaponry
on 02025-11-05#video of #pmarca saying it’s “morning again” in #USA #politics due to #Trump, 74 minutes. I didn’t realize Al Gore sponsored the legislation that created NSFNET; I thought his advocacy started with the com-priv era.
He mentions the end of Chevron deference, which he argues means that executive agencies should abandon their quasi-legislative functions. He also questions the idea of “independent agencies” in the executive branch, like the FTC and NRC. The interviewer, the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson, argues that the CFPB's director not being fireable by the president is “unconstitutional on the face of it”, prefiguring the Slaughter verdict (I’m writing these notes in 02026).
Cites #Yarvin approvingly at 25'54" saying that we’re 80 years into FDR’s personal monarchy.
Also mentions #Elmu has been “living at” Mar-a-Lago.
Also mentions the #history of Nixon’s “Project Independence”, which I hadn’t heard of, to build 1000 #nuclear #energy power stations in the US, which turns out to be at best a very incomplete description of Project Independence.
Describes #Anduril’s original business plan as “We have to invest in this company, and his business plan is to hunt Mexicans at the southern border in 2016. And we’re just like, oh, God, we just basically have a heart attack.” So Andreessen Horowitz didn’t invest, and Trump didn’t want Anduril to do it, so they switched to military systems, which became accepted in Silicon Valley with the tragedy in #Ukraine.
Robinson claims that the US’s “only sustainable advantage over the Chinese is going to be technological innovation”, since they’re more numerous and richer, which doesn't make sense to me — how are they richer if they’re dumber, as he’s implying? Pmarca doesn’t disagree, citing the Pentagon’s new COO, Steve Feinberg, as someone who can make this happen.
At 56'40" he says the Ukrainian sea drones are built out of commercial jetskis.
At 60'40" pmarca makes the very reasonable points that productivity growth in the US has been low since about 01970, and that low growth creates zero-sum economics, which creates zero-sum politics, “where the only way for anybody to get anything is to take it away from somebody else.”
on 02025-01-29#news #video of #Milei this afternoon announcing his new #nuclear #energy plan for #Argentina, starting with the construction of an SMR, apparently unaware of the solar-energy revolution that’s taken place over the last year, along with the ridiculous fantasy of manufacturing SMRs for export. What an embarrassment. It’s useful to see what kind of patriotic rhetoric they use to sell this white elephant. The second speaker is Rafael Grossi, who was the Argentine ambassador to Austria before becoming the head (Director General) of the #IAEA. Rossi, hilariously, says nuclear energy “es una herramienta que la Argentina ha usado en los últimos 70 años con marcado éxito”, not daring to mention anything that suggests Huemul. He does eventually dare to mention nuclear weapons at 8'52”. Milei finally starts speaking at 10'16”. His list of technological revolutions: fire, the wheel, the loom, the steam locomotive, electric energy, and the internet; he says today artificial intelligence opens a new frontier in this Manifest Destiny that we share as a species, which will require more energy than conventional energy — but somehow completely forgets to mention solar and wind energy. #politics
on 02024-12-20#video #news: #Milei betting on #nuclear #energy. Doh! #politics
on 02024-12-17when they accidentally dropped a #nuclear bomb on #Albuquerque and it didn’t go off (in 01957 from a B-36); article with some #history of the Teller–Ulam “sparkplug” design
on 02024-12-12#Sky #news propaganda #video opposing #solar #photovoltaic #energy. Shows the nameplate of a house-sized Mitsubishi Hitachi hydrogen-cooled steam turbine generator (310RK09-776-1) producing 3-phase 20kV at 50Hz and what looks like 17984 amps, saying it produces 570–580MW, though my calculation gives 360MW from those numbers. Shows a real-time power price of [AU?]$235, presumably per MWh, attributing the high price to a cold snap in Victoria. Says 1200 tonnes of cheap brown coal per hour produces 1140 megawatts electric, which works out to 3.4MJ/kg, which would be about 15% efficiency, which seems improbably low. “[In the past] you were seeing wholesale prices around (...) $20–40/MWh”, says a guy who’s been working in the field for only 30 years; that also seems improbably low. “10 Australian coal-fired power stations closed in the last decade. There are 15 still running, but most are slated to close in the next decade.” 62% of electric generation on #Australia’s main grid is from fossil fuels, the other 38% from renewables. At 7'51”, it profiles Belinda Jones, a pensioner who’s paying AU$1073.31 per month (US$697/month) because she’s paying AU$0.191/kWh for 3410kWh (AU$651, becoming AU$716.63 after GST) and AU$0.216 for 2700kWh (AU$582, AU$640.10 after GST), from which subsidies are deducted. That implies her house is averaging 8400 watts! Possibly in part because she’s using resistive space heaters instead of heat pumps, but more likely it’s not actually a one-month bill — yes, in fact, at 9'13” we see it’s for 92 days, but she’s still averaging 2800 watts around the clock. (The average comes out to 11.4¢/kWh, which is very cheap by retail standards.) Also, we see at 9'22” that the previous bill was only AU$457.45. A different power bill shown at 45'04” shows someone paying $415 with time-of-day billing — also for 92 days. “Energy scarcity emerges everywhere #wind and solar become the dominant form of electrical generation.” Shows the #LNG export gas terminal at Gladston, the Petra Nova #carbon-capture pilot plant in Houston, and a US$21B #nuclear power plant in Georgia, the second to be built in the #USA in the last 30 years. #Microsoft has signed a deal to reopen #Three-Mile-Island. #politics Viper-7 reports paying 27.56-67.44c/kWh: Peak time (4:00pm to 7:59pm): 67.44c per kWh; Shoulder time (7:00am to 3:59pm, 8:00pm to 9:59pm): 29.65c per kWh; else 27.56c per kWh, including GST.
on 02024-11-27Press release from #China’s National #Energy Administration (国家能源局), saying, “the installed capacity of #solar power generation is approximately 790 million kilowatts, a year-on-year increase of 48.0%; the installed #wind power capacity is approximately 490 million kilowatts, a year-on-year increase of 20.3%.” (“太阳能发电装机容量约7.9亿千瓦，同比增长48.0%；风电装机容量约4.9亿千瓦，同比增长20.3%。”) They also increased thermal power capacity (火电, which apparently specifically means fossil fuels and excludes an almost insignificant #nuclear) by 3.8% to 142597 tens of thousands of kilowatts (万千瓦); if I have the units correct, that’s 14200 gigawatts total fossil generation capacity, increased by 54 gigawatts, vs. 256 new gigawatts solar. More than half of all installed renewable capacity is wind (486GW) and hydro (431GW) so the 22.1% capacity factor I calculated from the other press release is probably mostly due to hydro’s typical 90+% and wind’s typical 40+%, with solar still down in the teens. If we assume 15% for solar and 700 gigawatts as the average installed capacity over the year, we would have 105 gigawatts of generation on average, which would be about 10% of the 1.08TW total inferred from the earlier press release. At 48% per year exponential growth, in 49 months (02028) they’d get the majority of their electricity from solar, and in something like 6 years (02030) the majority of their energy. #photovoltaic
on 02024-11-26“Ucrania pide a EEUU misiles Tomahawk que puedan alcanzar a Moscú” #Ukraine #politics #news #video 2500km range, #nuclear capable
on 02024-11-22#news Russia launches first #ICBM used in war in history, but it launched it at Dnipro, #Ukraine (from Astrakhan) and without #nuclear weapons. #politics #history #Oreshnik
on 02024-11-21“Russia says #Ukraine attacked it using U.S. long-range missiles, signals it’s ready for #nuclear response” #news #politics
on 02024-11-20#nuclear #history: #Tsar-Bomba was conceived as real #weaponry. Also discusses #USA Gnomon and Sundial weapons
on 02024-11-16#Dr-Ben-Miles #video about #China building the first commercial #thorium molten-salt #nuclear #energy plant. Including an ad for the RadiaCode Geiger counter. Mislabels monazite as “monzanite” and accidentally refers to “thorium-323”. The reactors he’s describing are 233U breeders rather than energy amplifiers; not clear which type the new Chinese plant is. Also mentions other planned thorium reactor startups in maybe 02030 or 02035.
on 02024-09-10#USA declassifies the number of #nuclear warheads in its #weaponry arsenal: 3748 as of 02023. Plot of warhead count over time.
on 02024-07-27#nuclear #energy #safety and #statistics
on 02023-07-01naval #nuclear #energy is very costly compared to other ship power plants, just like non-naval nuclear energy
on 02022-09-30discussion of #energy starting from a 01953 book on #nuclear #energy
on 02021-05-29even in 2016 #nuclear #energy cost more than #photovoltaic to build, by an order of magnitude
on 02019-02-09probably #Westinghouse’s bankruptcy means #USA #nuclear #energy plants currently under construction won’t be finished
on 02017-03-30a #nuclear #energy plant was attacked via computer #security problems “two to three years ago” which caused “some disruption”
on 02016-10-10#nuclear #weaponry #history — bases around Tucson, #Arizona, now the Titan Missile Museum. Fairly unrealistically hagiographic article
on 02016-08-01