871–880 of 906 posts
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another example, you can still buy lead based solder, even at a local hardware store.
Is lead based solder not standard? (I've never soldered.)
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I totally missed the impact of the internet, you are absolutely correct. Something else that I just noticed buried in the paper is that it can be readily deposited onto a substrate (search for UNIVAC in the paper, page 4). That's an incredibly big deal.
For the idiots in the room (me), could you explain why that’s a big deal? Does that make the material more robust and therefore usable in harsher environments?
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Are you living in the fairy land? in the real world, Academic fraud is a thing.
Please explain the benefit of faking the result of this paper and destroying your reputation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruko_Obokata#STAP_cell_contr...
I don't really have an explanation other than they're simply crazy.
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All valid points but just below that comment someone asked if he/she was reading the new paper (apparently there's an older paper), he/she didn't respond/haven't responded yet.
They did now – https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/159g2k4/roomtemp... Either way we should hear from people trying to replicate it soon.
Anyone smarter than me know how this differs from this sham a few years ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777268 Also, I see a lot of people claiming superconductors could become household items. What are super conductors even made of? Are these materials accessible to normal people?
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> The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. That's not true. There are many designs (e.g. molten salt reactors) where the operator cannot do anything to cause the reactor to fail. The reason we're stuck with water reactors is mainly politics, and somewhat laziness.
Molten salt reactors manage to be expensive for perfectly normal engineering reasons though. The salt is highly corrosive, meaning you need tons and tons of extremely expensive piping that can withstand extremely high temperatures and extremely corrosive environments. There's a reason none of _those_ have been built either. No amount of red tape would make them unviably expensive if the end product was cheap enough t…
Let me introduce you to the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment[1].
What you probably meant is that none have been built commercially. That is true, but again as I mentioned, not because of their technical drawbacks but because of politics. In fact, the inventor of the light water reactor, Alvin Weinberg[2], was a strong proponent of the molten salt reactor over his own invention. So strong that he fired was from ORNL because he was claiming that light water reactors are inherently unsafe and that MSR is a better design.
Nixon ultimately sacked him because he (Nixon) chose to support LMFBR (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor) because it was being built in California, and in return he got political support that he needed. MSR ultimately lost due to pork-barrelling.
> This is easy to bypass, put something over the plug that won't melt.
I mean you're shifting goalposts here. The "operator" has a specific meaning - someone controlling the reactor from the control room. They don't have access to the freeze plug during normal reactor operation.
But even if they did do what you're suggesting, the pressures inside the MSR are so low (on the order of couple of bars) that the damage would be quite limited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_M._Weinberg
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> The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. That's not true. There are many designs (e.g. molten salt reactors) where the operator cannot do anything to cause the reactor to fail. The reason we're stuck with water reactors is mainly politics, and somewhat laziness.
Having a design is very far from having a working and commercially viable reactor.
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Those are two I see mentioned the most often (MRI and maglevs). To be honest though, those are great things to improve (especially the MRI), however, the amount of hype in this thread and on the internet tells me there must be more than just improved MRI and better trains....
If we can find one with the right material properties it makes long distance movement of power generation much more plausible and economical. Which would enable us to put a lot of solar power in the desert and move it around effectively to other places on Earth. Again, with the right material properties it could also produce efficient storage, and that also has huge implications for electrical generation.
If you lose 20% to the grid, then build a 20% bigger solar farm.
Solar farms actually help with reversing desertification by reducing water losses from direct exposure to sunlight.
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For the idiots in the room (me), could you explain why that’s a big deal? Does that make the material more robust and therefore usable in harsher environments?
We can deposit it on chips, there is lots of copper (relatively speaking) in a chip so this could improve efficiency. Of course the semiconductor (silicon) is intentionally resistive, so waste+heat wouldn't go away entirely.