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SETI@home is in hibernation

setiathome.berkeley.edu

321–330 of 358 posts

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#321
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that nuclear power would have been great. However it's no deficiency of planning. It's down to public opinion and misguided regulation.

That's like a project manager blaming the missing of deadlines on "the opinion of certain people in the company and the bureaucracy within the company". Not sure if that would fly.

Not sure that analogy holds.

No heroics from any project manager would eg let 1980s Ford stop selling internal combustion engines and go all-in-one electric cars. So any deadlines would be missed.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing much of that delivery cost is due to the additional energy transmission and storage infrastructure needed to incorporate intermittent energy from solar/wind. Solar and wind are extremely expensive when all costs are taken into account. One study found that the "true cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh": [pdf] https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame..…

With articles like "Save North Dakota Oil and Gas!" I'm sceptical of that study. Wind and solar were 30% of Great Britain's electricity last year. The National Grid is a private company, so their costs are clear, 3% of the average bill.

The study advocates nuclear and hydroelectric as the means of getting to zero-carbon, so doesn't seem motivated by pro oil/gas bias.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. There are vast quantities of uranium in ocean water in concentrations that while low, still allow it to be extracted. More importantly, breeder reactors can harvest 100X more energy from uranium than currently deployed reactor types, and in the process eliminate all of the long…

All those options are significantly more expensive than what we've been building. I mean, we've built fast reactors, and thermal breeders with thorium, and had pilot efforts for U extraction from sea water. None of them could compete with LWRs with a once-through fuel cycle on conventionally mined uranium. Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality (that is, an actual nuclear explosion) in…

Thanks for the sobering information.

In any case, costs can be brought down significantly with 1. more reasonable regulations and 2. economies of scale, which just requires building more plants.

So if - due to massive expansion of nuclear power - we get to the point that uranium supplies are dwindling and causing the price of uranium ore to rise, we may still see breeder reactors with lower construction and operating costs than current generation reactors.

I suspect modularity in reactors, that enables a genuine global market to emerge in reactor manufacturing, would be instrumental in bringing down reactor construction costs.

>>Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality

I'm quite the layman in this subject, but my understanding is that there are fourth generation fast reactor models, with passive safety features, that effectively eliminate that possibility.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#324
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fucking hell crypto is such a colossal waste of resources

It really is but compared to keeping poorly insulated buildings at 70f in the winter or all the forced, unneeded commuting to work it is trivial.

Okay sure but those are vestiges of systems that developed during a huge population explosion, and that have huge retrofit costs.

We could turn off all crypto today and it would have no consequences except for people who would lose all their money now instead of in a couple of years when all crypto is worthless anyway.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

shit like slack and other electron abominations are not just 10-20% improvement going native. We are talking a simple chat application, irc glorified to load images and preview, and this somehow takes more memory and cpu than the total resources I had in 1995 times 100. these systems are so abominable, and people have just gotten used to it, hell, many users never even tried anything else, but saying 10-20% is just r…

Man I want a native TUI client for Teams.

This looks interesting: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those options are significantly more expensive than what we've been building. I mean, we've built fast reactors, and thermal breeders with thorium, and had pilot efforts for U extraction from sea water. None of them could compete with LWRs with a once-through fuel cycle on conventionally mined uranium. Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality (that is, an actual nuclear explosion) in…

Thanks for the sobering information. In any case, costs can be brought down significantly with 1. more reasonable regulations and 2. economies of scale, which just requires building more plants. So if - due to massive expansion of nuclear power - we get to the point that uranium supplies are dwindling and causing the price of uranium ore to rise, we may still see breeder reactors with lower construction and operating…

The claims that costs can be brought down with better regulations and economies of scale are often made, but the evidence for that is marginal.

For regulations: how does one identify "reasonable" regulations? How is this to be determined? The usual way this is done in other industries is by allowing accidents to happen, then add regulations that would have prevented them. I doubt that would be acceptable for nuclear: unlike (say) aviation accidents, the cost of an individual accident can be extremely large.

As for economies of scale, the evidence for that in nuclear is slight. Maybe S. Korea? But elsewhere costs seem to have increased with experience rather than decreasing. Nuclear involves large units that take a long time to build; there's not much room for anyone to gain much experience over their career. If anything, experience decay (as organizations and individuals age) seems to overwhelm experience growth.

> fast reactors

Fast reactors inherently have this problem, since a fast chain reaction occurs without a moderator. In a LWR, concentration of the fuel in an accident reduces reactivity, as the moderator is reduced. In a fast chain reaction, concentration of the fuel will increase reactivity. Putatively safe 4th generation reactors merely assert that such rearrangement cannot happen. If the analysis that led to that conclusion is found to be in error then anyone who has built such a reactor will be in deep trouble. Perhaps molten salt fast reactors will have sufficiently credible analysis, but those have their own issues (such as need for large amounts of isotopically separated chlorine in molten chloride reactors and exposure of the walls of the reactor to unshielded/unmoderated fast neutrons.)

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was less than 100 deaths from chernobyl, and only one person died directly from fukushima[1]. I suspect more people have died from falling off roofs while fitting or cleaning solar panels than that. You're correct that nobody builds rbmk reactors any more, but others of the design continued to operate safely for many years. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...

> There was less than 100 deaths from chernobyl There may well be tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. No, we can't state that these deaths absolutely occurred/will occur -- they are spread throughout large populations, mixed into the vast number of naturally occurring cancers -- but technology regulation is not like criminal prosecution where things must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Technologies are not…

Did you read the source I linked? It gives a good estimate.

    "2 workers died in the blast.

    28 workers and firemen died in the weeks that followed from acute radiation syndrome (ARS).

    19 ARS survivors had died later, by 2006; most from causes not related to radiation, but it’s not possible to rule all of them out (especially five that were cancer-related).

    15 people died from thyroid cancer due to milk contamination. These deaths were among children who were exposed to 131I from milk and food in the days after the disaster. This could increase to between 96 and 384 deaths, however, this figure is highly uncertain.

    There is currently no evidence of adverse health impacts in the general population across affected countries, or wider Europe."

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was less than 100 deaths from chernobyl There may well be tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. No, we can't state that these deaths absolutely occurred/will occur -- they are spread throughout large populations, mixed into the vast number of naturally occurring cancers -- but technology regulation is not like criminal prosecution where things must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Technologies are not…

Did you read the source I linked? It gives a good estimate. "2 workers died in the blast. 28 workers and firemen died in the weeks that followed from acute radiation syndrome (ARS). 19 ARS survivors had died later, by 2006; most from causes not related to radiation, but it’s not possible to rule all of them out (especially five that were cancer-related). 15 people died from thyroid cancer due to milk contamination. T…

Yes, and you totally ignored the cancers that could occur due to low levels of additional radiation in the population at large. You are simply presuming that such cancers cannot occur.

What you are doing here is demanding that the cancers actually be demonstrated, requiring that radiation be treated as innocuous until it can be conclusively shown it isn't. This is the mindset behind those ranting against the linear no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis.

But regulation doesn't work this way. Nuclear isn't something that must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#329
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, the costs of nuclear power are quite substantial AND they are front-loaded making it a bad investment. You will need to go through a lot of red tape and spend all the money right away to get some benefit later when it's built. Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials. Third, if you switch all…

>>Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. There are vast quantities of uranium in ocean water in concentrations that while low, still allow it to be extracted. More importantly, breeder reactors can harvest 100X more energy from uranium than currently deployed reactor types, and in the process eliminate all of the long…

I'm only including things that are viable. It seems it's just going to be cheaper to build out significant wind and solar, while keeping nuclear around for the times there's neither wind nor sun.

Re: SETI@home is in hibernation

#330
post #25

I don't specifically miss SETI@home as much as I miss the spirit of the internet back then, the "what will they think of next!?" The idea that all of us could together could crack RSA keys wasn't just a thought exercise, people signed up and did it. Now computers are so complex and task heavy and fraught with problems it seems like more hassle than it's worth. I liked when wondering "why is my machine so slow", that…

It was my machine that found the key in the very first RSA competition.
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