Europe’s heatwave is forcing nuclear power plants to shut down (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Europe’s heatwave is forcing nuclear power plants to shut down (2018)

#21

Post by daniel-cussen » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 8:46 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #16

daniel-cussen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quick fix for building new nuclear existed once and was called "The Manhattan Project" and involved about...half of the world's sickest geniuses coming together and putting that shit show on the road, and get that shit show going STRONG. It's like a lost art.

The physics is easy. Economical and on-time construction is the hard part.

No they're intertwined. Recall that von Neumann, the beautiful one, was intended by his father to follow in his banker footsteps. He wanted to be a mathematician "instead."

As if it were so different. The best physicists will also make economical designs, that was Fat Man, an economical bomb design these Yankees could actually build with their own smarts. Come on. It's money, energy is money, uranium is better than gold, golden bullet, you want plutonium, lead bullet. Ultimately literally lead.

Re: Europe’s heatwave is forcing nuclear power plants to shut down (2018)

#22

Post by epistasis » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 4:40 AM UTC

daniel-cussen wrote: post #21

epistasis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physics is easy. Economical and on-time construction is the hard part.

No they're intertwined. Recall that von Neumann, the beautiful one, was intended by his father to follow in his banker footsteps. He wanted to be a mathematician "instead." As if it were so different. The best physicists will also make economical designs, that was Fat Man, an economical bomb design these Yankees could actually build with their own smarts. Come on. It's money, energy is money, uranium is better than g…

I don't understand the point you're trying to make.

Nuclear physics has nothing to do with the construction logistics of massive construction projects that take a decade and requires miles upon miles upon miles of piping with high-precision welding. It's all about management of thousands of people, massive construction plans that can't fit into a single person's head, and execution.

You seem to be performing some sort of free association on elements and lots of hero worship of physicists. But in the end we need shovels in the ground, rebar in formation, high precision concrete pouring, and high precision welding that gets validated and checked and can last 40-60 years under extreme conditions.

The reality of nuclear power isn't some physics miracle, it's just a bunch of piping and steam and pushing construction accuracy far beyond what is usually needed, because the heat source is so toxic, even if it's kind of cheap. In the end nuclear is a cheap source of heat for boiling water, but engineering and construction to contain it is pretty damn excessive and expensive.

If any of these people you idolize were still alive today, I think they would be far more enamores with the quantum physics of solar. The physics of solar are just better all around.

Re: Europe’s heatwave is forcing nuclear power plants to shut down (2018)

#23

Post by daniel-cussen » Wed, Jul 27, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #22

daniel-cussen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they're intertwined. Recall that von Neumann, the beautiful one, was intended by his father to follow in his banker footsteps. He wanted to be a mathematician "instead." As if it were so different. The best physicists will also make economical designs, that was Fat Man, an economical bomb design these Yankees could actually build with their own smarts. Come on. It's money, energy is money, uranium is better than g…

I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Nuclear physics has nothing to do with the construction logistics of massive construction projects that take a decade and requires miles upon miles upon miles of piping with high-precision welding. It's all about management of thousands of people, massive construction plans that can't fit into a single person's head, and execution. You seem to be performing some sor…

> massive construction plans that can't fit into a single person's head

They fit great in von Neumann's head. You realize the first nuclear reactor took 18 months to build? Without accidents.

I think you are underestimating just how much brains the Manhattan Project had. Plutonium bomb wasn't even the state-of-the-art when it was dropped, it was just what von Neumann considered Yankees to be capable of pulling off.

The economics of the Manhattan Project were unbelievable. Crazy return on investment for tax dollars, just insanity, like I don't know, 1000-to-1 return in ten years. Nobody knows it exactly, in fact the problem "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?" comes from the Manhattan Project problem "How many kilotons of TNT did the Trinity Bomb produce?"

They ended WW2, biggest war in History. And you can't respect that?