The reactors we use now can’t run on depleted fuel. It’s true that like 90% of the uranium is still present in deleted fuel but that’s not the problem. The problem is the build up of fission products. The fuel itself is essentially a ceramic pellet in a metal tube. As it gets “burned” some of the atoms in the fuel split into new smaller atoms. Specifically some that are “poisons” and some that are gases. The poisons absorb neutrons much more easily than the fuel atoms, stopping the chain reaction. And the gases create pressure inside the fuel pellet. If enough gases build up this can cause the pellet to crack, releasing them into the metal tube. Now you have one less barrier to releasing radioactive material and your pellet isn’t in the shape it’s supposed to be anymore making it harder to know how it will react.

So we can’t use them in current reactors, what about “low power” reactors? This is a problem of economics. Depleted fuel is hot, but not hot enough to quickly boil water and make steam. It’s like asking why don’t we power our house off all the free heat coming off a person all the time. The temperature difference and heat output is just too low to be useful in any but the smallest niche application.

So how do we deal with the depleted fuel? We reprocess it. Break down the fuel and dissolve it in acid so you can recover all the useful uranium to make new fuel. The leftover radioactive material can then be turned into glass and safely stored or you could feed it into a different type of reactor that “burns” the waste turning into something that only needs stored for 200 years instead of 20,000 years. All this has been well known and understood since the 80s but politics consistently gets in the way of actually doing anything.

I second your feelings on bazzite. Last year when I switched to Linux I spent a while researching the best distro for gaming and what I could find pointed to PopOS or Mint. Never even heard of bazzite.

I can only speak to PopOS as that’s what I chose when I switched last year. It’s been mostly fine but there have definitely been pain points. If you use a hard drive other than your os install drive then you need to go to the steam website to get the installer and not use the one in the built in app store. Getting mods working for games has been incredibly annoying anytime I have to use protontricks.

Non gaming related I’ve had numerous issues trying to manage permissions for my hard drives. Not sure if this is a Pop issue or general Linux issue.

It depends how they are designed. Same as regular uranium reactors. Thorium isn’t a reactor fuel after all, it’s what you use to breed more fuel. The actual fuel is still uranium. Thorium turns into uranium-233 then that is the fuel. Normal reactors use uranium-235. Both isotopes can be made to be passively safe.

Literally nothing you just said is correct.

Nonsensical or thoroughly debunked technobabble. The most annoying for me is faster than light communication via quantum entangled particles. Yes entangled particles will change each other’s state faster than light but this effect CANNOT be used to send information of any kind. At all. Ever. This has been known since engagement was first discovered but Hollywood is always like “I’m just going to ignore that second part.” I don’t even have anything against ftl comms or any other physics breaking things, just use an explanation that isn’t literally impossible and well known why it’s impossible for God’s sake.

There are a couple approaches that protection from radiation can take. You could pile up a few feet of dirt on top of your habitat. You could look for lava tubes to live in, which would be much bigger than earth due to the lower gravity. You could design your habitat to have an inner and outer shell that is filled with water, turning your water storage into radiation shielding. You could create an artificial magnetosphere by putting a satellite at the Lagrange point between Mars and the sun (estimates say 1GW of power going to a simple magnetic dipole could do this.) You could find a general cure for cancer and not worry about the radiation.

Radiation is scary but it’s not the instant death that popular media makes it out to be. Even if you did nothing to mitigate it and just lived your life on the surface of Mars it will only give you an increased risk of cancer over years of exposure. If you shipped in a bunch of 20-30 year olds and left them on the surface then they would probably be more likely than not to get cancer by the time they hit 80, but they wouldn’t just keel over and die after a couple years there.

Protection from radiation would only require a couple feet of dirt, not a mile of it.

Shooting two guns at the same time does in fact look cool. That’s not a myth. Hitting two targets with two guns at the same time is really hard though.

In addition to what has been said already, in many places the cost to upgrade the electrical service to the building to handle the amount of power that could be generated can be as much or more than all the other costs combined. So now the building operators are looking at millions in cost with a potentially 30 year payback period. It just doesn’t make sense at that point.

Are the predicted prices ever crazy far off from what they actually end up being like what happened in Texas last winter? Where am outage causes price to go from like 20c/khw to 2000c/khw over a one hour period?

How do you keep up with the current price? Does your thermostat have a setting where if the price is above X then turn off? Do you just come home to a freezing house and say “oh the electric is too expensive, guess I’ll grab some wood”?

Yes I’m sure. That rear light is always on while driving and gets much much brighter while braking.

Notice that the sound doesn’t start until he goes around the corner, then it stops, then starts again, then he hits. That’s not brake skid, that’s I’m going to fast around a corner skid.

https://x.com/bfreshwa/status/1803823968547217903

He titles it “skid marks are 50 feet.” But then never shows any evidence of skid marks.

This was driver error, not a malfunction. Multiple reasons for this. First, the brake always overrides the accelerator. If you hit both, the brake turns off the accelerator. If somehow the car still tries to accelerate while the brake is pressed then the brake is strong enough to overcome the motors and stop the vehicle. Second, he talked to a service center manager, not some higher up at Tesla. They don’t know everything and we don’t even know if his recollection of the conversation is accurate. Third, there is security camera footage from him showing him take off down the driveway towards his neighbor. In the footage the brake lights never turn on and he perfectly follows the very curved road. No skid marks are visible. If his back wheels actually locked up like he claimed he wouldn’t have been able to follow the road like that. Fourth, why did he hit the neighbor’s stuff instead of going into the big empty field on either side of his house? He clearly had steering control but didn’t try to avoid hitting things. Conclusion: he hit the wrong pedal and doubled down on it like many other people across every model of car has.

That is already a thing and it’s called concentrated solar power. Basically aim a shit load of mirrors at a target to heat it, run some working fluid through the target and use that to make steam to turn a turbine. There are a few power plants that use it but in general it has been more finicky and disruptive to the local environment than traditional PV panels would be.

Yep, the standards for energy efficiency in homes is just barely above being non-existent. We spent decades with cheap energy so no one cared if every house leaked like a sieve. Now that’s coming back to bite us.

I have an air source heat pump for my house and a heat pump water heater. Even in the dead of winter at 0F it kept my house just as warm as always and my water was hot. Heat pumps are not “shitty alternatives” any longer. Maybe in Alaska they would struggle but anywhere else and they work just fine.

If we want to honestly improve the climate then it is REQUIRED that we become carbon negative, not just net zero. And every little bit of emission that is prevented is a lot of power that isn’t needed later on to suck that carbon back out of the air.

You can complain that big companies aren’t doing enough to cut emissions and I agree, but that doesn’t mean we should wait till they clean up their act to start working on ours.

My understanding is that valve says publishers can’t sell their games steam keys cheaper on other platforms but can charge whatever they want if steam is not the one providing the download. Network infrastructure isn’t free and if steam is the one actually facilitating the download they get to take their share.