pfdietz

27 ms·

511.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
It requires chlorine isotope separation or else you make Cl-36, a beta emitter with a half-life of 300,000 years. Moltex got around this in their concept by only using chloride salts inside the fuel tubes; the surrounding sterile molten sal
512.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
> Solar and wind can’t sync the grid Grid-forming inverters, particularly with batteries, can totally do this job.
513.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
> The average female life expectancy is 81. This is a quibble that does not substantially alter the conclusion. > And the shots only matter during the window of your life where cervical cancer is remotely relevant, which is during a
514.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Tests are important anyway; I think the point is that if you adequately test your code for more difficult bugs, you'll get coverage of simple compiler-detectable bugs for free.
515.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
No, nuclear is terrible for covering seasonality, since unless it's used with high capacity factor the cost per kWh skyrockets.
516.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
In the short term, one would burn natural gas in turbines. The marginal cost of displacing this by using nuclear instead would lead to an enormous cost per unit of CO2 avoided, so high that most other uses of fossil fuels would be eliminat
517.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Micro reactors have micro markets. The diseconomies of scale kill it for general grid power.
518.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack Or
519.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
And the French cannot seem to replicate the putatively low price they paid for their first nuclear rollout.
520.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Ah yes, the ridiculous strawman engineering of saying batteries would be used for seasonal storage.
521.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Yeah, it's utter crap.
522.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
OK. If a life is worth $12M, that's $3300/week (assuming a 70 year lifespan). The shots cost $500-1000, a 3-6x ROI.
523.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
That 2.2 per 100,000 is deaths PER YEAR, not PER LIFETIME. The vaccine is protecting against death each year over the person's life, not just in one year.
524.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
And then later in the 1930s as world gold flowed into the US (in response to the rise of the Axis) the economy began to recover here. By the end of the war most gold was in the US.
525.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Wouldn't that leading example of dynamic language code that calls a nonexistent function be perfectly handled by tests that covered that call? Yes, if your tests have poor coverage they won't test code that isn't covered.
526.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Let me shoot right back and ask if you understand what I was saying. Yes, I understood what you are saying. I was making a crude argument, but the crude argument showed benefit something like 18-36x the cost. The points you are making wou
527.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
So use the current rate, which is 2.2 per 100,000. The argument is basically the same. The cost/benefit ratio is so good that your quibbles don't change the conclusion.
528.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
The vaccine presumably also protects those getting it when they are older, but the data doesn't show that yet. Still, if it does (as seems reasonable) then the benefit is even larger.
529.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
The estimated number of deaths from cervical cancer in the US in 2026 is 4,200. The death rate is 2.2 per 100,000 people down from 3.1 per 100,000 in 1992. If we multiply 3.1e-5 by 50 years that's about a 0.15% chance of dying of this
530.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
It's mathematically very similar.
531.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
This feels similar to how nuclear power is perceived, contrasting deaths per TWh and the long tail effect of a rare but serious accident.
532.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Yes, it could have. But coal didn't replace nuclear. These are different concepts.
533.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
> IT IS REPLACING. If you had nuclear plants that worked fine (highest CF globally probably after US), some even not reaching 40y (when most are extended to 60-80y) and you retire them instead of retiring coal, it means coal replaced nuc
534.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
It's more a thought experiment on perhaps how easily this could be done.
535.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Lasers would probably be more practical. Maybe a whole array of lasers w. telescopes? At (say) 500 km, a 20 cm aperture would have a spot size of maybe 50 cm. So let's take that telescope array, hook a kW laser to each one, and roa
536.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Not in general, but I think some people would be ok, and that's all that's needed for that question to be interesting.
537.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
I wonder if this process would work if the water were replaced with milk. Milk would degrade at high temperature, but this (at least in bulk) is at room temperature.
538.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Yes, that's where it was shamelessly stolen from. (Also: the passive voice was used.)
539.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Now get to work on Harappan.
540.
by pfdietz 4mo ago
Linear A/B testing?

More ›