Posts by John Smith 19

Nvidia bets on Gates-backed nuclear startup to keep its AI ambitions from melting down

For those wh want to see some ways to build cheaper NPP

The NRC commissioned Stone and Webster to look at how to build GW size PWRs cheaper and faster. Results here

And then Three Mile Island showed how a $1Bn asset could be turned into a $2Bn cleanup job.

BTW despite the huge advances in networking techniques and data multiplexing the amount of cable in a new PWR is actually greater than the figures in this report.

And it's recommendations don't take into account the discovery (by large scale ship builders) of the "1:3:8" rule that something that takes 1 hr of factory time will take 3 in an assembly and work area near the ship (or other large structure) and 8 hours working inside said structure, due to getting stuff to the work area, delays, different teams wanting access at the same time, etc.

Top tip. if a countries nuclear regulator allows it pre-cast, reinforced concrete looks a real winner, as does precision blasting for foundations (estimated to save months of time which means a lot of work can start months sooner).

*Lots* of "feeatures". Not much on "benefits"

So "Fast spectrum" IE no moderator like water, heavy water or graphite.

That means the neutrons slam into the RPV walls with 10-100x the energy they do with thermal spectrum reactors ( which the vast majority of reactors that have been built, including the MSR and pebble types are)

"Sodium cooling" which the US, UK and France have experience of needs 3 loops between the sodium and the steam generator because radiactive sodium is a hard (19MeV+) Gamma ray emitter, and reacts violently with water. The slightest leak will admit air which will form sodium oxide, which is a highly effective abrasive, clogging valves, wearing away pipe walls etc.

Nuclear fuel prices are normally proportional to the enrichment level unless you've got a country with a load of bomb grade uranium they want to blend down.

Once that's gone the price for new fuel, starting from natural U at 0.7% U235,stripping about 0.4% of that out will need about 45-50Kg per Kg of new fuel (law of diminishing returns, stripping it down to 0% U235 is almost always prohibitively expensive, even for the US DoE), along with an enrichment site that can handle those levels (most are only safe up to 5%. Above that the whole layout of their plant has to be re-designed for criticality safety). Iran could handle it, but they may be going out of business soon.

Otherwise most of this design sounds kind of stupid and expensive. This corner of the nuclear power reactor solution space has been explored before and there's a good reason work on it ended.

Those reasons have not changed.

Iran could probably handle it.

OTOH the molten salt thermal storage loop is a good idea.

In the UK it could deliver the scale of and dispatchability that would upend the UK gas and electricity markets and end the UK's having the highest electricity prices in 28 countries, including all of the G7.

One day someone will sit down and answer the question "How do you build a nuclear power reactor for $4/W so it competes head on with fossil fuel stations and generates steam at their levels of efficiency (IE 540-600c, this thing is supposed to manage 350c. That's high by PWR standards but p**spoor by gas cooled reactor standards), allows on load refuelling, fissioning of Trans Uranic elements (Pu is a TRU but the others as well) and delivers a complete nuclear power solution inside the grounds of the NPP?

Today is not that day and this design won't get anywhere near that price.

"something like 500 degrees F"

IOW they can't match the thermal efficiency of a FPP of the late 1950's let alone one of the late 2010's.

"with pure, pressurized water"

Not really.

It's laced with "Chemical shim" because the control rods cannot control the design accurately enough. The SoA in "Chemical shim" is isotopically pure Boron, B10 at $10/gram at around 2000pm start of cycle ramping down to 10s of ppm at the end as the reactivity drops. a tank that's 5m in dia and about 15m long holds a lot of water.

That's basically borric acid. which is real good at eating through SA508 (but not it's SS internal cladding, which was all that was keeping most of the water in at one NPP).

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

"Translation: Nobody knows how to solve this."

to the contrary. Multiple possible options exist in reports written by various aerospace contractors.

But no one has put the serious money on the table to have them built. Musk knows nothing goes tills something goes and until they get to and back from Earth orbit that is a complete waste of time opening up those reports and starting to reverse engineer what's in them.

But the Mars atmosphere is a major PITA,. It's pressure is 1/140 of Earth sea level, and there's a fair bit of dust in it as others have noted.

BTW convection continues as long as the pressure is above about 10miliTorr, or 10micrometres of Hg. So Mars has about 500x the atmosphere to continue convection, making it dammed cold on the surface at night, as well as having very little radiation shielding due to both a very thin atmosphere and no real magnetic field. On Mars you'd need to be under 3m of soil to get the rad shielding enjoyed by people waling around on the Earth's surface.

"Who wants to go to MARS (Mainly A Real Shithole) anyway?"

Actually Plenty of people would like to go to Mars, for a while.

The problem is finding reasons for them to stay once they get there.

It's the distinction between a holiday resort and a settlement.*

*I don't use the words Colony or Colonists (or technically "Colonials"). The Worlds Richest African American might have no problems with such language, but a lot of his former countrymen would.

""Starship Trump" add some gold coloured fittings inside"

You've got a pretty good handle on the way the FOCF "thinks"

The ARM business model applied to nuclear and the LS reactor.

Some design rules

Key tools are Anticipation and Imagination

To design for a 60 yr life, Decontamination & Decommissioning, start from the end, and work from the inside out.

IOW 1) Start from the design of the fuel package and how you take apart the finished NPP with minimal waste in a way that allows for maximum recycling of materials.

60yrs is a) 2/3 Pi x 10^9 Secs, 526K hrs or (from the US NRC) 500k PWR operating hours.

A few jet engines have managed 40K hrs while being entirely maintained on the wing of their aircraft.

Tilting pad bearing designs in hydroelectric power plants have lasted 50+ years.

So expect to operate, maintain and repair major sections of the plant over it's life. IOW design in access paths, clear lines of sight, hoists and monorails to move vessels about from day one (The "Digital twin" of the plant will be a vital part of the this process).

Gamma and neutron radiation are very bad for organic lubricants and all forms of insulation including the oxide layer in MOS transistors.

IOW keep all electrics and electrical sensors out of the core, and AFAP out of containment. Acoustic (sound waves can be in the 100s of MHz), optical, microwave and even mechanical are viable sensor options, which shaft, metal belt and compressed gas are all possible drive systems (NASA built a 1000Hp compressed air drive for testing high speed propellers in the late 70s/early 80's), with microwave heating for sintering fuel pellets.

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8"

Oh yeah, the Burnstown lift sketch.

Quality.

"human languages are not precise, grammer is weird"

Let me give some perspective.

Roughly speaking a large computer language C++ is about 270 grammar rules (yes I did count them, C had about 70)

Partial human grammars 20 000+

But using those "Functional" words that LLP seem sooo unimpressive with (but which make up 50-75% of all English web text) might be a plan.

Just some thoughts.

"Understanding"

Such a slippery word.

But I think we can all agree no AI product has it in any real sense?*

Still amazes me some of the best of this work was done at the end of the 60's originally out of Edinburgh.

Roughly 100 words make up 50% of the English Web.

Now if someone started working on the basis that those matter quite a lot and make the framework the verbs, adjectives and nouns fit into.....

*Some chums at Scottish Power were massively unimpressed when they tried a system to confirm customer ID's with NLU. Seems no one considered that a company called "Scottish Power," might have quite a large customer base in Scotland and Northern England. With "interesting" regional accents the system just could not cope with. Gave them a very good laugh.

Japan set to join the re-usable rocket club after Honda sticks a landing

What it is....

Is big enough to test the control systems which are a key part of making this work.

Change the parameters in the relevant tables* and hey presto, 6m test vehicle becomes 60m first stage.

Of course as SX have shown without grid fins this won't have near enough control authority.

Still it's Honda's money, so their choice.

*Bit like re-mapping the engine tables on a cars EMU, but with a bit more of an effect.

Trump administration set to waive TikTok sell-or-die deadline for a third time

Im not sure the FOCF ticks *every* American cliche for crooked polticians...

But he sure does try.

TACO does look like a pretty good rule of thumb for his behaviour.

A coward in every way.

Northern Ireland government confirms it did not ask Fujitsu to continue bidding for project

It was a f**king ACCOUNTS package FFS

How many of these have been implemented since the 1950's?

Mine will be the one with a copy of "Programming Pearls" in the side pocket*

*Which has a number of stories about implementing software, including at least one on an Accounting package implemented by IIRC FE Brooks.

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

"Design of fusion reactors..,need careful attention to neutron activation "

Yes, I've learned quite a lot about remote servicing concepts seeing how ITER is planning to be maintained (without cooking the staff doing the maintaining).

Even with good low activation materials quite a lot of it will be radio-actively "toasty"*

*Water Extended Polyester is basically polyester casting resin "Bulked up" with water. It's 70% water, 30% plastic, a short time use temperature of 800c and the consistency of plaster of Paris. But the gamma rays....

"Reaction Engines"

If any government had put that level in they'd have the Hypersonic Test Vehicle flying by now.

Instead they went into receivership.

Excellent engineers. Not very good entrepreneurs

"Tritium is very rare"

Not if you've got CANDU reactors.

They produce so much of the stuff the operators don't know what to do with it

Google outfoxed by crafty squatters in $1B London HQ's rooftop garden

is an apex predator…

I see what you did there.

Very nicely played.

Not "Urban"

but possibly urbane?

That's mine with the DVD of "Mongrels" in the side pocket.

RIP: Bill Atkinson, co-creator of Apple Lisa and Mac

A good man. The next generation of good men will be as good, but different

Starting with the idea that some won't be men at all.

Just a thought.

Musk and Trump take slap fight public as bromance ends

" wonder if Musk is watching "White House Down" "

Lol.

Surely you know that the idea that SA is like Miami for the international mercenary community is just fake news produced by the Woke-Extreme-Left-MSM ?

OTOH some say Britain is a world leading centre if you're looking for proper thugs*.

*Or depending on their role you might call it "Proactive healthcare"

Re: If it wasn't real it would make the start of a good joke

Remeber the old line about "When you're poor, you're crazy, but when you're rich you're eccentric"

"man of the people"

Eh, don't you mean "Man of the PayPal," given the somewhat opaque finances of the "Party" he's the CEO of?

"It was also used as a laxative suppository."

Wow

Definitely a WTF moment right there.

Oh good, Another trophy downvoter.

I've noted there seem to be about 3 voters who are truly persistent.

Fanbois of the FOCF? Leon? Bots? Trolls (paid or unpaid)? General SEL (left or right pond)?

Not sure.

Look for the ones whose downvotes greatly outnumber their upvotes perhaps?

They'd likely be angry at the world for, well, being the world.

"Musk is an immigrant who has been naturalised."

Although in hindsight some might say he should have been euthanised instead.

AI kept 15-year-old zombie vuln alive, but its time is drawing near

"automated pipeline that can detect, exploit, and patch this vulnerability "

No doubt shortly followed by Blackhat code that can exploit instead.

WTF aren't those CVE entries taught as part (most?) of the syllabus on developer training courses?

Ukrainians smuggle drones hidden in cabins on trucks to strike Russian airfields

"Definitely some kind of bot."

That's my bet.

The mixture of loooong text chunks and reflexive boiler plate points that way.

Option b is the sort of monomaniacal SEL who is completely convinced of their own moral authority.

In the former case you'd wonder who is behind the bot?

In the latter you might ask what made them this way?

If you cared. Which I don't.

He said Ukraine government is Nazi, while President is jewish

In Ukraine I'd agree with you.

But I first heard the expression "Jewish Fascist" watching a rerun of an old "40 Minutes" documentary from th 90's.

It was said by a Kibbutznik on his military services in the West Bank about the behaviour of the Jewish squatters on the West Bank.

The cutting off of food, water and fuel supplies into Gaza is exactly equivalent to the same behaviour by the Nazis to the Warsaw Ghetto and meets the UN definition of genocide, not to mention the 40:1 Palestinian : Israeli kill ratio.

All because Netanyahu decided to play divide-and-rule games with desperate people sitting on top of half a trillion dollars of oil and gas (according to the UN).

Not exactly "The moral high ground," is it?

"the fact that Ukraine and Russia are at war "

And let us recall this was not some sort of simmering border dispute like India-Pakistan or India-China but an unprovoked attack by Russia in 2014 which the West collectively failed to give a strong response too.

This emboldened Dobbie in his Make-The-Soviet-Union-Whole-Again project.

The people of Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, as well as Poland and Romania all know where this is going. So does Orban, but he's quite a Dobbie fanbois.

Western democracies spend coin now, or lives later.

Make a choice and let your local politicians know it.

""

Don't call them drone operators.

Call them Bear hunters

Tesla FSD ignores school bus lights and hits 'child' dummy in staged demo

"Couldn't work out where the water had gone."

The reverse happened to Julius Caesar.

Only in his case the tide took the ships with it.

Ooops.

"casualty per 100000 people: Close to 4:1 "

Indeed without that qualification our US Vultures (Buzzards?) could have played the "But the US is soooo much bigger than Germany/Britain/France/Andorra) that it's just not a fair comparison.

I suspect a lot of the US still think of seatbelts as "Optional." Often the last thing going through their heads (apart from the wind shield of course).

Tariff woes equal US smartphone price hikes, shrinking sales

The FOCF's fantasy,

what you might call the "Re-manufacturing of America" has literally no idea of how long it takes to set up a mfg factory (as opposed to an assembly site) or the supply chain to service it and how much Apple have invested in China to do so.

The answers are a)A long time and b)Lots (one estimate > the entire CHIPS act.

BTW the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930 was designed to do exactly the same thing for US farmers

So it's not the Dumbass-in-Chief (and apparently his sole advisor in this Peter Navarro) doesn't have an example of exactly what was likely to happen. Any bo**cks about "He's playing 4/5/Nth dimensional chess" should start by showing wheather the FOCF can play the regular kind first. I know of no such example.

Put TACO's on the menu with the FOCF

Because you know he will.

"Mine's the one with an "I'm shorting the $" lapel badge."

You are Crispin Odey and I claim my 5 Euros.

Elect a thief

Get robbed.

Hilary Clinton may have called the enablers of the FOCF the "deplorables" but it was the "Gullibles," as in his voters that made this sh**show possible.

I wonder how all those "MAGA's on Medicaid*" will cope without it?

Guess they are going to find out.

*As Steve Bannon pointed out.

Nvidia scores its first DOE win since 2022 with Doudna supercomputer

Interesting naming choice

DoE supers tend to work on problems of "National Defense" IE designing nukes.

More recently their systems have been used for such things as drug design and genetic therapies.

From mega-death to mega-life.

The naming celebrates that.

Strange times.

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

"and know in advance when your little Orange Chaos Monkey is going to make an announcement,"

Exactly.

I like to think of this as a "Trump and pump." The FOCF drops it, other buy, then he back-peddles and up the go again.

Rinse and repeat ad-nauseam.

"Stephen Miller,"... "described the ruling as a “judicial coup”."

As always with this gang of crooks every accusation is a confession.

As for the least favourite African American IMHO he can f**k right off, although he's swerved a Congress confirmation hearing that might have asked various questions about <cough> conflicts of interest <cough>.

MIT boffins claim liquid sodium battery could one day power aircraft while sucking up CO2

This all sounds quite familiar

And it is.

Say hello to the Beta Aluminide Fuel Cell.

The heat problem is not that serious. Multilayer vacuum insulation was developed for Sodium-sulphur batteries* that run around 500c in the 80's and 90's

*The original beta aluminide cell.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

" I genuinely can't wait until the whole house of cards comes crumbling down."

Understandable, but I wonder how many people will be killed or maimed until people get that GI --> GO?

Sadly I think it could be quite a lot.

Turns out using 100% of your AI brain all the time isn’t most efficient way to run a model

You call it "Mixture of Experts"

I call it a Blackboard system.

Originally developed to compete in the DARPA challenge to do connected speech recognition in the early 70's but didn't win. The winner ("Harpy")essentially hard-wired the entire grammar into one big network, essentially every possible sentence you could produce in the grammar and applied multiple compression techniques to compress common segments.* The BB system ("Ear Say") ran overnight (as did Harpy) chomping on a few minutes of recorded questions and answers. Today this sort of processing power could be delivered in a phone in real time. No network access needed.

BTW Despite the task domain being about as "Hard" AI as you can get neither system was written in Lisp, but the Stanford developed "Sail" language (the techniques used to ensure compatible portability between Sail implementations AKA "Mainsail" make fascinating reading for language implementation nerds)

Mines the one with the oversize pockets with a copy of Blackboard Systems in it

*Sound familiar?

UK 'extremely dependent' on US for space security

"And who bought the IP in the fire sale?"

A very good question.

"weird name for his hair piece"

Seems pretty accurate to me.

Expensive yet strangely useless.

Bain launches datacenter biz for Euros worried about climate change and Trump

" every bit as evil as their namesake in Batman."

Close.

Now if they'd been called Bane Capital they could well be described as "The bane of all mankind."

Mine's the black cape with assorted internal pockets.

Remeber the issues with MS and email in Ireland?

Those haven't gone a way.

24 years after 11/9/01 (or 9/11 for our American vultures) THE PATRIOT Act is still in force and still as dangerous to our data and privacy as ever.

Datacenter biz wants to turn heat and carbon waste into biomass for sale

Well, it's a start

And let's face it we have to start somewhere.

Enjoy the long weekend.

I know I will.

Trump signs TAKE IT DOWN law meant to stop revenge porn

"That is both sides of the uniparty though. "

Says yet another (or just the same?) ballless AC. *

*Who might well not even be an American.

"Democracy in the US is in coma and the prognosis is poor."

Says the troll without the balls to even put their own handle on their post.

BTW I cannot fu**ing believe the Democrats failed to contest Mike Johnson's district.

Known for

Crafting the brief (but publically denying it) claiming the FOCF won the 2020 election which soooo many Republicans signed on for.

Having a $218 000PA salary but claiming he has no bank account (a mandatory reporting requirement for members of Congress)

Probably authoring the template anti-abortion law (No rape or incest exceptions) that multiple red states just happened to have passed.

Worked for the right wing non-profit that funded the Roe-V-Wade case and ROAR-for-gay-couples cases (among many others).

Having a wife who ran a pray-the-gay away conversion therapy "clinic."

"Adopted" a black teenage son, who is now dropped from the family website, but was very convenient for playing the "I'm not a racist, I've got a black son of my own" routine.

Said Moses spoke to him when he was deciding to run for Speaker of the House. Spoiler alert. Moses said he should.

Sounds like a sanctimonious SEL to me. Even if the opponent didn't win it give law makers that even like the state of LA people didn't sign up (or rather didn't think they were signing up) for this lunacy.