51–60 of 127 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Truth. The ones I'm designing are generally like 38% efficient and 300 MWe scale so pardon my slightly unconventional sizing. It's definitely a lot. But nothing naturally-circulating sodium metal through 4 redundant NaK-air dump heat exchangers can't handle.
NaK-air? Doesn't NaK catch fire in the presence of air?
The author is not alone. Over a decade ago, there was a theater piece called "Charlie Victor Romeo" that consisted solely of actors re-enacting cockpit voice recordings of aircraft that crashed. http://charlievictorromeo.com/
Oh man. My PhD work is focused on helping people communicate clearly about the measurements they are making and how to interpret them and where the pitfalls are in a research setting. Every time I read about something like this I wonder if I can use what I am working on to help people automatically detect when the assumptions of their measurement model could be violated. For example, if you can explicitly model the f…
Is any of your work available to read online?
What I still don't understand is why the pressure regulators and over pressure valves on the house gas meters didn't kick in? Were the homes involved so old that the meter protections failed or weren't there in the first place? It seems that ultimately you've got to have failsafes at the homes themselves. Without such failsafes, what would stop a bad actor from purposely over pressurizing a residential branch?
What I still don't understand is why the pressure regulators and over pressure valves on the house gas meters didn't kick in? Were the homes involved so old that the meter protections failed or weren't there in the first place? It seems that ultimately you've got to have failsafes at the homes themselves. Without such failsafes, what would stop a bad actor from purposely over pressurizing a residential branch?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN, the place where an article using an analogy of nuclear reactors probably means that an actual nuclear reactor designer will comment on state-of-the-art nuclear reactors.
And still get pedantically corrected on a minor point! What a place this is!
I realise this is beside the point of the article, but gas distribution seems like an obsolete and dangerous technology to me. For cooking, induction, for heating, heat pumps.
Induction stoves are unpleasant and ineffective to cook on, not to mention inefficient. And if you want to use a wok, well, you can't. They are definitely better in appealing to first time buyers who may not know or care about their shortcomings. They look great and are easy to clean. But if you are into cooking, gas wins.
"All of these events feel like unnecessary disasters—if we were just a little smarter, we could have avoided them—but the fires in Lawrence are particularly tormenting in this respect. With an aircraft 35,000 feet over the ocean, you can’t simply press Pause when things don’t go right. Likewise a nuclear reactor has no safe-harbor state; even after you shut down the fission chain reaction, the core of the reactor gen…
Number of deaths isn't the only metric of severity. For example, there is also the number of people who lost their homes (evacuated and not able to return for many years), which for Fukashima was apparently 150,000. [1] Since nuclear power plants are so expensive to build, even just the loss of plant itself is in the billions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/10/after-fiv...
To put it in perspective, the prediction for the number of climate refugees vary, but papers seem to put the number somewhere between 150 and 300 million by 2050.[1]
That's about one Fukushima every five to eleven days, starting from now and continuing until 2050.
Think about it.
[1] https://orbi.uliege.be//bitstream/2268/136972/1/11-1188-mr7-... (Table 1, page 5) - Disclaimer: this was the first link from Googling "climate refugee prediction".
Oh man. My PhD work is focused on helping people communicate clearly about the measurements they are making and how to interpret them and where the pitfalls are in a research setting. Every time I read about something like this I wonder if I can use what I am working on to help people automatically detect when the assumptions of their measurement model could be violated. For example, if you can explicitly model the f…
I'm curious: within which field are you doing this PhD? I could see you as a computer scientist, systems designer, political theorist, perhaps an economist or philosopher. Is any of your work available to read online?