What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance

Whoops: the dominant control reaction in B-10 is (n,alpha), not (n,gamma)! That's a common mistake. As you'll see, it's larger than most fission products across the board See https://imgur.com/6ODUcRx. There are a few Hafnium and Europium nuclides that can beat it but they're pretty expensive so most people stick to Boron control.

Regarding that paper on CANDUs, I'd like to see some lattice physics calcs supporting that. Has anyone run CASMO on it? I would be absolutely shocked if you took a core of 55 MWd/kg (avg) LWR spent fuel, put it straight in a CANDU with no separations (all FP inventory accounted for) and saw it push through an additional normal amount of burnup.

Today, most CANDU's use ~2% enriched feed, I believe.

PWRs are not unstable. They are in their most critical configuration during operation. If they heat up, the water density goes down. Neutrons fail to be moderated and the source of thermal neutrons back into the fuel goes down, and the chain reaction shuts down. This is a regulatory requirement (GDC 11 of the NRC). Unstable cores run away in power excursions when poked (see Chernobyl). Modern cores don't do that. They have negative MTC and Doppler.

I'm well aware of what inherent safety is. EBR-II, a sodium-cooled fast reactor, was the first to actually demonstrate passive shutdown and passive decay heat following unprotected loss of heat sink and unprotected loss of flow.

BTW I don't advocate for fast reactors to burn SNF. It's much more economical to just dispose of it and mine new uranium. I just was pointing out that some people messed up their attempts to burn SNF in thermal reactors.

Total includes scattering which isn't a loss mechanism. Best bet is to do a spectrum weighted 1-group macroscopic absorption XS (including all neutron loss mechanisms) in various reactors for a meaningful comparison. Most nuclear textbooks have these in the appendix. All I'm telling you is that boron is used for control in fast reactors. I think you asked how it was done a while back.

I kept reading about all these advantages of "slightly enriched uranium" in candus so I'm surprised they aren't using it anywhere! [1]

Autonomous control can theoretically be done with many kinds of reactors and fuels. Sodium reactors have vast pools of liquid metal with extraordinary thermal conductivity and heat capacity. Lead-cooled reactors are similar. So are salt-cooled FHRs, and pebble-bed gas reactors like x-energy. There are a few decades of regulatory catchup before that can happen. Arpa-e has a current project into operator assistance which is aiming to move to more autonomous control.

Don't forget about maintenance costs. Equipment and chemistry will cause maintenance of any reactor to be higher than an average diesel. Fluid fuel will have 50% of the periodic table in thermal gradients, plating out in heat exchangers and other cold surfaces. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Lead reactors have corrosion. Gas reactors have power cycle leaks. It's a worthy goal but we have lots of work before we get there. We don't have enough experience with fluid fuel yet to judge how maintenance of a commercial unit will pan out. It might be great, or it might prove difficult. Very worthy goal though!

[1] https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:20038082

Everyone should, mistermann.

Great article. Reminds me a lot of the book (highly recommended) 'The Square and the Power' about the role of network and breakdown of authority, and the last time this happened with the advent of the printing press. He was interviewed as part of the long now seminars: http://longnow.org/seminars/02018/nov/19/networks-and-power/

HN has been here for 120 years? I thought I was new to the game. I'm not sure ads work, or what data digital marketers use "digital marketer's job description consists of measuring and optimizing this" other than the demand price which is a real time price that fluctuates way more than the 500 index stock market which, to justify their prices is still something that is of high debate much less a more voltatile market. I would say there is an overall input and an output, and if the financial output is multiple times that of the input the digital marketers can say theyve done their job, but they have very little data to show the objective intermediaries of linear data measurements for the flow of this information, which is why big data kafka and spark shops currently pitch over $300k/yr to anyone who can make sense of this data to a digital marketer in any consumable format on a monthly not even a weekly basis, mind you.

I'm not debating the ethics, just the reality of what granularity of data they can actually sign their id signature hash next to and say they verify this data, as opposed it to it being a roll your own analytics shop to meet whatever objective analytics data you are looking to meet for that quarter. I think we have all learned from the news on both sides in recent years that you can spin a story or a set of data however you want to, so I am not nearly as concerned with the anecdotal motives of any particular digital advertiser in the first place as much as I am with how not only your response but the entire industry in general shuns the idea that there is any alternative to this whatsoever and justifies all movements to the counter as "the only way" or the only logical ways and evil as such. I understand saying something is evil and those are the only companies who pay me six figures, and so therefore its okay for me, is very easy for most engineers to say now, but it's not something I'm willing to say.

I think if you want to justify this statement in general, you should explain to everyone how bidder as a service works, how its not a monopolized industry when it comes to ad spaces on websites ranked by domain popularity (3 players in the market 2 of the CEOs from Google SEO team) and how it correlates with rationale decisions from a digital marketers perspective and have measureable outputs other than "the extremely volatile price of this adspot which varies every 6 seconds was worth it based on the outcome this time, based on how targeted this ad campaign was, which was targeted based only on harvesting user data the user would not be ok with if they knew we were using this data". Honestly, justify your case here....and make sure you include the consent forms included in the onboarding process of every 12 yr old who has to click yes to create a facebook profile and what the implications are for the default oks in this case are...