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Misleading title. The way this is phrased, it sounds like a reactor meltdown occurred (!) and is now under scrutiny. In reality, it's just an energy startup's
by tjohns 10y ago
Misleading title. The way this is phrased, it sounds like a reactor meltdown occurred (!) and is now under scrutiny.
In reality, it's just an energy startup's exaggerated performance claims that "melted down" (were proven incorrect) when examined by the community.
- astrodust 10y agoIf your reactor normally runs in a molten state, melt-down becomes a whole other thing, doesn't it?
- nordsieck 10y ago"Melt down" has traditionally meant that the fuel has overheated and breached the primary containment vessel. I don't see how that definition would not apply here. Just because the primary coolant loop uses molten salt instead of water shouldn't much matter.
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- astrodust 10y agoIt also implied that the fuel that should be solid is now molten and, as these things tend to go, well on its way into the ground. A molten salt engine is going to be molten when everything's fine!
- vacri 10y agoAre you a native speaker of English? If so, how would a Molten Salt Reactor make any claims?
- tgb 10y agoThe title is a garden path sentence trying to be too clever with using "melt down" in the context of nuclear reactors. I had to read the first few sentences to have any idea what it was talking about. You don't need to question people's language skills for this. Regardless, it's easy to take "Molten Salt Reactor" as the name of a company, just as if you saw a title saying "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant claims meltdown".
- vacri 10y agoI'm just tired of people on HN complaining about misleading titles like if they were something that kicked your dog. If you are a native speaker that was familiar enough with nuclear power to know what a 'molten salt reactor' might be (the journal is 'powermag', after all), then for you to read that title as "omg! there might be a meltdown" is just being lazy. Please don't demand the dumbing-down of content for everyone else because you want to be spoon-fed.
- mileycyrusXOXO 10y agoYour hostile tone is not lending any credibility to your argument. I'm a native English speaker. In retrospect, I see how the title is supposed to read - but that is not how I initially read it - and it took me several times to actually realize that 'claims' was not the verb.
- tgb 10y agoI really find your tone unnecessarily aggressive. There's nothing dumbed-down about titles that read clearly on the first scan.
- vacri 10y agoTwo centuries of journalistic tradition disagree with you. Newspapers have always dones this, hence my comment on the native speaker. If you're a native speaker, you will have grown up with this kind of pun happening around you all the time. And yes, my tone might be a bit aggressive, but people making trivial complaints about titles has been on the rise at HN recently. I've been hanging around here for years, and it's never been a problem before. You then talk about (horror!) having to read the first two sentences of the article to realise that it's not in fact a nuclear meltdown, though really you should have realised there wasn't a nuclear meltdown when it mentioned students a dozen words in. Besides, reading it the way you're suggesting would mean that the supposed nuclear meltdown was caused by the scrutiny, which is just nonsensical. This is what frustrates me into making these comments; that people prefer to be spoon-fed content rather than use their brain a little.
- Dylan16807 10y agoThe organization would in charge of it would be making the claims. What a strange question for someone implying expertise in the language to ask.
- vacri 10y agoThat's like saying "Bus stop claims transport strike under scrutiny" or "Jail cell claims long sentence under scrutiny" are natural-sounding sentences.
- Dylan16807 10y agoThat only sounds weird because you made it so narrow. Bus stops and jail cells don't have their own staffs. But an entire jail or museum or whatnot most definitely can "say" things. Here are some headlines: http://www.ajc.com/news/local/dekalb-jail-says-the-biggest-mental-health-provider-the-county/qQ4eeyHSJOw7k7yyfEdevJ/ http://www.ajc.com/news/local/dekalb-jail-says-the-biggest-m... http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95243 http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95243 https://www.artforum.com/news/id=24315 https://www.artforum.com/news/id=24315
- vacri 10y agoReactors don't have staff either - and unlike bus stops or jail cells, they don't even have any kind of human in them when they're functioning. The equivalent to your jail or museum is a power plant, not a reactor. Yes, reactors have caretakers, but so do jail cells (and bus stops, in nicer places).
- Dylan16807 10y agoMany people would point at the entire facility and call it a 'reactor'. Anyway you're getting really picky now. I've demonstrated that inanimate locations can "say" things by the standards of headline-writers, so I'm done. It was flat-out wrong to imply such a thing is a non-fluent mistake. Also you should stop conflating "has a pun" and "is a garden-path sentence" in your other line of conversation, thanks. You're mostly arguing for the former there, other people are arguing against the latter, and they are totally orthogonal.
- tristanj 10y ago"meltdown" and "melt down" have different meanings in English. Skimming the title and seeing the words "melt down" is fairly clear about context. I found the title fairly straightforward, the title isn't very surprising as newspapers like to make plays on words like this.
- NikolaNovak 10y agoNot native English speaker, but current title ("Molten salt reactor claims melt down under scrutiny") is fairly clear that claims melt down, not the reactor. Apologies if the title has been changed since initial comments. Otherwise, probably the case of "mentally read beginning and end of sentence" :). [and yes, journalists seem to have love of puns and 'puns' that others can only groan at... my favourite in IT is of course The Register, which can raise a stink in the room just by listing the headlines;-]
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- tristanj 10y agoCorrect, we both interpret the title the same way as there's only one proper interpretation of the title. It's not unusual for writers to make punny titles like this.