the nuclear bros are in my mentions and goddamn they're dumb as i remember
i'm trying to be positive on the tech but they really don't fuckin help
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@davidgerard The biggest issue facing nuclear power today is the people evangelising the loudest for it are people who can't be trusted with it on any level. Techbros managed to make economic and ecological catastrophes from a slow database, then sycophantic autocorrect, there is no way anyone could, or should trust them with a technology that could irradiate vast chunks of the western world through legalised corner cutting.
@davidgerard well considering that ai consumes a s* load of electricity, flooding capex and opex money for npp, there's certainly an entanglement between the two brotherhoods. In France we got this concrète exemple of the national and public company directly partnering with Softbank
@davidgerard
Just a few years ago I had someone talk about nuclear engines for space as though it obliviated the need for reaction mass completely, and I absolutely don't mean clever em or solar sail. So...
I am in abstract fairly pro nuclear energy, though I genuinely think it's funny that people lose sight of it (essentially) just being 'rock doesn't stop getting hot' and 'we really like steam a lot'.
@Oggie@woof.group @davidgerard@circumstances.run
If a power solution doesn't eventually turn out to be "fancy water heating" is it even real? /j
@daemonspudguy @Oggie new power source
new or steam again?
steam again
@davidgerard @daemonspudguy @Oggie yeah, and they will tell you it's not a steam engine because it uses water only as a carrier medium to turn the turbines...
That's a goddamn steam engine!
@davidgerard @daemonspudguy @Oggie
Heinlein had a short story about nuclear power as a derivative of solar power. The panels were 'simply' retuned to generate power from different parts of the EM spectrum (they weren't photovoltaic, they used something closer to piezoelectric crystals).
I was deeply disappointed when I got a bit older and learned how nuclear power plants really worked.
@david_chisnall @davidgerard @daemonspudguy @Oggie Sort of sounds like you're thinking of "Let There Be Light," but I don't remember it being "nuclear" at all. May I request clarification?
@phaedral @davidgerard @daemonspudguy @Oggie
It has been almost thirty years since I read this, but I think it was the first and second story in The Man Who Sold the Moon (might have been another book though).
The first story had the crystal panels that could be tuned to generate energy for particular wavelengths. Tuning them to visible light meant that you could generate energy from sunlight and the protagonists were able to undermine existing power companies and sell electricity-creation machines. The second story had them realise that you could also tune them to x-rays and gamma rays and so you could build simple nuclear power plants (nuclear decay or fission could generate electricity directly in the same way).
Once I read his second book involving a character who built a time machine so that he could go back in time and have sex with his mother, with a major subplot of how cool Eugenics is, I found it hard to go back to Heinlein.
@davidgerard Are the current nuke bros all about the fusion now or are they fission bros or are the both fusion and fission bros?
@dirtwizard666 fission generally
@davidgerard
Ah. I have family history with fission (dad & eldest brother were/are nuke-es, I used to work at a university nuclear engineering department), so those rise in my consciousness & are also pretty annoying right now.
But fission has the annoying property of pulling in otherwise measured & sane people to 'well-actually' the conversation into nonviable territory.
@dirtwizard666
@davidgerard Fascinating! I don't know if you've looked at the fusion hype bubble recently but it's getting pretty wild now. The superconducting magnet people are losing their minds, they've gone from building weird stuff only scientists care about to weird stuff that suddenly billionaires care a hundred and crazy percent about. I think the fusion hype bubble right now is *very* similar to quantum "computing". So it's kind of funny to me that nuke bros are still pumping fission, because it means they may have chosen to pass on a billionaire-backed hype bubble. Maybe that's being too charitable to them.
@davidgerard then don’t be. It’s really unnecessary at the end of the day.
@davidgerard They're grateful for all of the other grifts distracting attention from them.
