
CANDU
See title
194 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2008
Google may not be taking on Microsoft Office directly, but is instead going with a longer term plan. For years, my kids have been required by their school to use Google Docs and Drive for their school work. The school also used to issue Chromebooks. The next generation will be quite ready to use Google office apps in the next few years.
One big problem with diamond semiconductors is finding good dopants to get the good electronic performance. The dopant has to squeeze into the very strong lattice of the diamond crystal. I think the timeline for commercialization is optimistic. SiC took a full two decades to mature, diamond is even more difficult.
Railroad Valley is really the middle of nowhere. Leave Tonopah headed east, 50 miles beyond the turnoff for Area 51. Count the cars you see for the next 100 miles, chances are you will only reach the teens.
Railroad Valley also has possibly the only oil deposits in Nevada. The field is at the north end of the playa.
NASA tends to have an allergy to the security necessary for this kind of project. The disconnect with the DOE is evidence of this. For half a billion dollars, they should have been able to come up with something. Maybe the should have let the Navy run it, as they already have a nuclear power proof.
A research project like this needs serious hands on technical management. This appears to have been run like a postdoc program. It appears there were few if any milestones or deliverables.
Also had a lot of bunnies on the lawn to count walking into the workplace. That is until the bobcat showed up. A little unnerving to see the bobcat lurking under the rosebushes on the way in. It was quite unafraid of humans. Probably not life threatening, but could do a lot of damage if it decided it didn't want you there.
Quite likely the bright spark(y) was trying to wire things so a second light switch could also turn off the lights, like in a stairwell. However it looks like he switched the opposite phase onto the neutral. Why this would affect the wall sockets is another collosal blunder. Somewhere there was an open neutral. As long as there was a ground things would work sorta ok. A ground fault interrupter would pop immediately, so likely there wasn't one.
Not only did you save the University thousands of dollars, but maybe some lives.
Government can be like that. Ours had an overhead fire sprinkler system. The system inlet was set up so that if water started flowing, some of the water would be diverted to power an alarm bell on the outside of the building and trip the fire alarm circuit.
For 20 years the system sat. Finally a new inspector from the government fire department came around an noticed it. "Hey, where's the annual inspection tag for this?" Cue an explanation that it hadn't been touched in twenty years.
A test was scheduled and they found the diversion valve had failed. Much scrambling around to replace a very old and obsolete valve. Regular yearly inspections were scheduled. The following year, the building was demolished.
So the IEA thinks expensive energy is a good thing since it makes green energy more competitive. This is entirely bass ackwards. Green energy should be more competitive so it displaces fossil fuels.
More expensive energy impoverishes poor people. From heating to cooking to the food itself. Most fertilizer is produced from fossil fuels. More people will die from cold and hunger in the net zero world than from any warming. I believe the folks at the IEA think that is just dandy.
Icon for the thing that might kill more than the IEA's policies.
It is interesting what IBM is doing. They sold off their foundry business to Global Foundries when they decided it was uneconomic. Then they got bent out of shape when Global Foundries decided that developing nodes smaller than 14nm was uneconomic. Now they are having a go with the Japanese. Which is interesting, because the Japanese had decided that keeping up with node reduction was uneconomic. Something tells me they will be buying from TSMC in the near future.
That generative AI uses previous artists' work to make images does not appear to be any different than any human art student. They study the Masters' techniques, styles and composition to produce their own art. The fact that there is a genre such as Anime shows that some amount of intellectual property has been copied from one place to another. But if a computer does it, it is different for reasons.
There is a relatively cheap way of deorbiting these debris. It involves a high power ground based laser. The problem is that it is also a first class anti satellite weapon. It could even take down a Musk sized satellite constellation. The first one built will ignite an arms race.