3 ms·
The one thing that's clear is that this makes tethers a more challenging engineering problem than a naive / uninformed view might have suggested. This is almos
by dredmorbius 2y ago
The one thing that's clear is that this makes tethers a more challenging engineering problem than a naive / uninformed view might have suggested.
This is almost always the situation in engineering applications. The simple approach based on first principles turns out to be massively influenced by second- and higher-order effects. See Admiral Hyman Rickover's "Paper Reactors" for a classic take on this:
<https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html>
- hinkley 2y agoReminds me of a futurist I read years ago who was sure super critical water oxidation would solve all of our pollution problems. Ceramics are a “Pick two” material. You can handle heat, pressure or corrosion. SCWO requires all three. Some clever team invented composite ceramics trying to fix the problem, but that was a decade or two ago and still it’s a niche solution used for truly pernicious toxins and that’s about it, so I’m guessing it either didn’t work long term or was made out of unobtanium.
- dredmorbius 2y agoWhat's the role of ceramics in SCWO? My only familiarity with that is a quick skim of the Wikipedia article, though that makes no mention of ceramics.