publius

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@publius

Just your run-of-the-mill space colonist.

Dictum 1: Mutual aid is the organizing principle of human society
Dictum 2: The purpose of economic activity is to meet human needs
Dictum 3: Nothing much is gained by going against human nature
Links and stuff: http://publius.ntfn.org/

Public Key

npub1wtxe3gaa80jaq03xnxre2k98zz22t8q8576m4cgtxt8fk5rjyekqwlsr28

NIP-05 Address

publius_at_mastodon.sdf.org@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs89nvc5w7nhews8cnfnpu4tzn3p999nsr60dd6uy9n9n5m2pezvmqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnt3rjxew

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1wtxe3gaa80jaq03xnxre2k98zz22t8q8576m4cgtxt8fk5rjyekqwlsr28

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Last Notes

2026-03-27 18:15:30 UTC

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I genuinely get angry any time I see "fossil fuels with carbon capture and sequestration" listed alongside nuclear as a near-term solution to baseload power needs. Nobody knows how much it will cost, and there's no way to dispose of the waste!

2026-03-25 09:51:29 UTC

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It occurs to me that the Netherlands is a country reasonably well-suited, in terms of its pattern of settlement, to district-heating schemes. A great deal of that space-heating demand could be satisfied from combined-heat-and-power, thus economizing substantially on fuel. Which raises the question of why this has not been done.

2026-03-25 09:45:07 UTC

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As a person very susceptible to chill, I find that a few tens of watts of electric heat in the right place can help more than a much larger amount of space heating. Electric blanket, electric mattress-pad, I have a thing like an electric waistcoat that wraps around the torso, and even a kind of electric footwarmer. The main problem is that they all assume you will stay in one place!
If the electric torso-warmer had a long cord, and the outlets were near the ceiling…

2026-03-21 14:07:30 UTC

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This is actually a point that bears leaning on much harder.
People talk about solar and wind being cheaper and quicker to install than nuclear. This ignores the fact that, in traditional central–station power systems, transmission and distribution account for about 60% of the cost of delivering the kWh to the consumer, and generation 40%. Renewables require MUCH larger T&D investments, say 2—3×. Their effective fixed costs, and the cost of the kWh, are thus much higher.

2026-01-17 20:13:07 UTC

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https://man-and-atom.tumblr.com/post/806019525558632448/thanks-to-emil-jacobs-for-this-one-the-context-is

2026-01-17 16:57:44 UTC

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Would you be so cruel to the poor, downtrodden antinuclearites, as to deprive them of the opportunity to tell everyone that we don't need nuclear to replace fossil fuels, because renewables are so much cheaper and quicker to deploy that they are 20 to 100 times as cost–effective?

2026-01-15 17:53:13 UTC

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Ludicrous. People say that nuclear is slow to deploy… how much of that is the technology, and how much is deliberate slow-walking?

2026-01-15 15:42:40 UTC

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Not that he's going to take any action to change anything!

2026-01-15 15:41:14 UTC

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I've had some contact with @npub13lc…5624 — there is some activity going on, trying to shift the attitude of the party, but it is very much an uphill struggle. Anti-nuclearism has been more or less both the founding myth and the unifying theme of the Green political movement, after all.
https://greensfornuclear.uk/

2026-01-14 04:32:30 UTC

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My take :
https://man-and-atom.tumblr.com/post/805687246447607808/survey-finds-47-of-home-solar-systems-failing

2026-01-13 16:11:58 UTC

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I mean, that's certainly a goal of mine, but it requires three different kinds of work : (a) transcribing the spoken language, best done by a native speaker ; (b) timing the spoken language track ; and (c) translating to the desired target language, eg, English.
I contacted someone I saw on the Fediverse who said they could undertake (a) and (b) for French, but their response was that they weren't doing that anymore!

2026-01-13 15:35:17 UTC

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This batch is one French, circa 1980, explaining breeder reactors, and one US, circa 1970, Dr Seaborg introducing the chemistry of the trans-uranium elements. I should have them on-line within a week or so.
Next batch will be another French, about PWR operation, and a British short from a reel of samples of educational films. I still have one more Russian education film, an Italian newsreel, and a few other odd bits to be transferred.
https://toobnix.org/c/man_and_atom

2026-01-13 15:28:18 UTC

Spoke to the film transfer house. The films I sent in December had been mislaid, but I will soon have them back.

2026-01-07 15:03:07 UTC

For at least a generation now, there has been a stereotype of the "unhelpful neckbeard guy" who, whenever anyone has a problem with Windows, answers "switch to Linux" as though that were a solution to their problem, and moves on.
It turns out he was right all along.
As of NOW, Microsoft Office is a "Copilot App". And that means that you can't do scientific or engineering data reduction in Excel anymore, because the formulae and data you enter may be replaced by Markov-chain nonsense.

2026-01-04 16:52:18 UTC

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I am happy to mail some of these stickers to anybody who wants them enough to give me their mailing address.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/837/859/266/481/415/original/a36c8b2d56db0615.jpg

2025-12-29 20:05:34 UTC

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Ah, yes, nuclear energy, well-known for encouraging the use of fossil fuels, unlike wind and solar.
What world are you living in?
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/804/638/294/498/327/original/0e53f8aee98c0f01.png
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/804/642/655/267/464/original/5a1d56f8d15e7623.jpg
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/804/645/426/558/937/original/c075cc58ed76f912.jpeg
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/804/648/453/852/957/original/bc0b859e4076484b.jpg

2025-12-29 19:27:24 UTC

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This is a few years old now, but it makes the point.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/804/495/566/069/942/original/0e85008afef61a16.jpg

2025-12-29 16:45:42 UTC

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From the first fission critical experiment to the first power-producing reactor (EBR-1) was 9 years. From the first critical experiment in Britain to the first industrial nuclear power plant (Calder Hall) was 7 years. An estimate of 30 years, when the technology can be bought off-the-shelf, suggests something extraordinarily bad about your country.
And if you have the land and the capital to totally island yourself with PV and battery, you're an outlier.

2025-12-29 16:10:37 UTC

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Yes, indeed it is. For an inductive argument, consider the many thousands of US, British, and French Navy submariners who have spent months sealed up in a steel can within a few tens of meters of one.
More rigorous scientific demonstrations are available. It is not difficult to show that nuclear power has a much lower rate of industrial accidents and fatalities than other modes of producing electricity, and the precautions that protect the workers protect the public.

2025-12-29 15:55:39 UTC

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I keep having people tell me that renewables plus storage can deliver "firm" power cheaper than nuclear.
On a generous estimate, you'd need 8 GW nameplate capacity of generation plus 96 GWh storage to serve a 1 GW load with reliability. Passing over the fact that NOBODY IN THE WORLD has 96 GWh of storage (the UK has about 30, for an average load of 72 GW), you'd have to inflate the costs of nuclear to Hell and gone before that would be cheaper than 1 GW of fission.

2025-12-21 18:59:34 UTC

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Starting in the 1970s makes some sense because that's when the current international regime of floating exchange rates starts. But to be clear, the British economy was NEVER healthy during the whole period that you mention. So the most one can usefully say may be "it's debatable how meaningful any of this is".

2025-12-20 01:47:50 UTC

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Considering how fond governments are of 'creative accounting', I can't understand why they don't calculate the amount of electricity that can be generated from their stocks of depleted uranium using plutonium breeders, then multiply by the current wholesale price of a kilowatt-hour, then by (say) 0·2 for a typical nuclear contribution of fuel to power cost, and announce that the whole country is rich.

2025-12-19 23:29:47 UTC

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Can we get over this idiocy of labelling plutonium as "waste", at some point? It was always intended as fuel.

2025-12-15 17:53:48 UTC

Thanks to @npub1wzg…lxa0 for handling this PAL VHS transfer. Unfortunately the tape was not in good condition, and the resulting video is quite glitchy. Nevertheless, “The Generating Force” is a very interesting snapshot of the British nuclear industry at the beginning of 1994, and the turmoil caused by the Thatcher decision to privatize electricity supply.
https://toobnix.org/w/teybbFPR1B1NEYFULSnYro
#AtomicPowerToThePeople
@npub1pnw…qhcz
@npub135q…mq2e
@npub13lc…5624

2025-12-14 22:43:08 UTC

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Well, that's going to be interesting, considering all the bizarre money games being played.

2025-12-08 18:36:32 UTC

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Unfortunately, wind and PV solar do not provide the same kind of energy services that thermal power stations do. To "fake it" is incredibly expensive and difficult (the largest proportion of grid storage in any major country is in Britain, and is equivalent to about half an hour of average consumption). So the real alternatives are fission and coal.
The harm done by coal is very real. The dangers of fission are mostly hypothetical.

2025-12-07 00:39:34 UTC

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I was going to talk a bit about that in today's ASFO, but it'll keep for next week.
Likewise Carl von Ossietsky, who was mentioned on northernlights' show this past week.

2025-12-06 21:04:58 UTC

@npub1pnw…qhcz
I am in your country and at the same time very far away from you.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/674/639/086/254/542/original/68d4573d611c8696.jpeg
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/674/639/192/767/579/original/65e1632389e1f716.jpeg
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/674/649/596/903/402/original/76dd282db50704f9.jpeg

2025-11-13 10:11:26 UTC

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In a word, simplicity. In any package-power situation, but especially in ship propulsion, you want the minimum of manpower and maintenance, the minimum of diferent parts and functions. Shipping would also prefer a minimum of risk, and PWR as the best-proven type would be ideal for them, except that it requires a lot of auxiliaries (water chemistry plant and so on), and steam plants of any kind require a lot of maintenance. Rod Adams, former US Navy, explains it better.

2025-11-12 21:23:54 UTC

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That's a really strange choice for a ship propulsion reactor.

2025-11-12 07:54:51 UTC

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I unexpectedly spent the night in Leeds. All of Britain is clouded over and rainy, so no aurora for me either, alas.

2025-11-09 19:17:51 UTC

Got called deranged by someone on here for saying that central–station electricity is democratic and democratizing, and rooftop solar is not.
I’m from Texas. It’s considered normal here to think that the remedy for the tyrannical implications of armies and police forces is individual ownership of heavy weapons. If I say something inclines toward feudalism, I’m not just vaporing.
#AtomicPowerToThePeople
@npub1pnw…qhcz
Generate your own poster here : https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/ccshan/for/for.html
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/521/343/685/038/108/original/ce942c16d024e3ec.png

2025-09-02 05:24:34 UTC

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For Christ's sake. The only place that stockpile of plutonium should be “immobilized” is in the cores of fast breeder reactors.

2025-09-01 22:23:37 UTC

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That is one of those complicated sentences.

2025-08-30 06:24:49 UTC

Urgh. I wish I had a proper telephone directory. I want to find a local shop that does offset printing, but a Web search just turns up page after page of SEO nonsense.

2025-08-27 23:37:48 UTC

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Being here in Fort Worth all this time, and being in engineering school part of that time, and because of where and with whom I tend to socialize, I am not at all surprised by any of this. I've never really met anyone who was working on the F-35 program and thought it was a good aircraft, much less a good use of money.

2025-08-22 23:03:42 UTC

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Ah, but Helen Caldicott says nobody needs air-conditioning!

2025-08-20 05:14:49 UTC

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I can't imagine that this "retrieval" operation presents less hazard to workers and the public than simply leaving the stuff in place.

2025-08-13 19:09:53 UTC

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People who use “cornucopian” as a swear word are going to be SO mad. Personally I prefer “Promethean”.
#AtomicPowerToThePeople

2025-08-02 23:57:06 UTC

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OK. So first I have to confirm exactly what it is that you want to do. You have two A4 size pages, and you want to reduce them so that they are side-by-side on one letter-size sheet?

2025-08-02 23:51:26 UTC

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This is actually really easy under Linux or similar operating systems, with a package known as "pdfjam". But "pdfjam" is actually related to LaTeX, so I suppose any computer system with a full installation, whatever the operating system, would be able to do it. Would you like me to give details?

2025-07-11 21:39:22 UTC

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For a Japanese politician to say "I feel strong resentment" is the next thing to a declaration of war. It's almost impossible to explain how huge it is.

2025-07-08 16:09:21 UTC

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"You will be able to see quotes but not make them" implies that SOMEONE will be able to make them, but who? Other than users of some yet further future Mastodon version, that is.

2025-07-07 10:03:28 UTC

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It seems as though "small modular reactors" are hear primarily for the buzzword value, because their grid was built around Ignalina.

2025-07-06 14:02:42 UTC

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Although I've never found the need to implement such a thing, I suspect a combination of HTTP POST method, plus some kind of frameset element with an auto-reload command, would do the job.
Of course, HTTP/2 adds a "push" capability which is supposed to eliminate the need for repeatedly requesting updates, but the overhead of an auto-reload command responded to by a "NO CHANGE" message isn't huge.

2025-07-06 10:41:56 UTC

I've said it before and I'll say it again.
I do not want to have to compile, interpret, and run an application in my Web browser in order to display text and images, a job the browser itself is already very good at.
https://www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/javascript-broke-the-web-and-called-it-progress/

2025-06-30 21:55:43 UTC

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Of course all this is well known. You hardly need me to re-hash it, anymore than you need me to remind you that French nuclear power loses very little of its potential annual production to excessive heat, and virtually none of that for engineering reasons. If it were a serious problem, EdF could meet their water discharge temperature targets by building a few more cooling towers.

2025-06-30 21:23:04 UTC

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Solar and wind require several times the amount of T&D infrastructure that nuclear needs, especially when existing sites where the lines are already in place can be used.
According to reliable life-cycle analyses, nuclear needs about as much mining as solar and wind, or quite a bit less once we add a few "breeder" reactors into the system and close the fuel cycle. There is not strictly a need to mine any more uranium at all, as I have shown elsewhere.

2025-06-30 20:44:10 UTC

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I'll be visiting Hartlepool in a couple of weeks.

2025-06-30 20:40:46 UTC

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While that is true, the fact that all UK electricity needs can demonstrably be supplied from the few square kilometers recently or still occupied by nuclear and coal-fired power stations makes it seem somewhat absurd ; and the fact that UK peak electrical system loads typically come on winter nights, when the solar contribution is precisely zero, makes it seem like unnecessary cruelty.
#AtomicPowerToThePeople

2025-06-30 18:44:47 UTC

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https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/773/788/457/584/439/original/18eda4f4e41cf138.jpg

2025-06-24 07:26:15 UTC

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As with the Machhu dam collapse in Gujarat a couple of years later, which is thought to have killed perhaps as many as 25 000 people, I tend to assign the River Ru catastrophe primarily to non-energy activities. But Vajont was a pure hydro dam, and the Buffalo Creek dam which collapsed in West Virginia, USA, in 1972 and killed 125 people was built to retain coal-mining waste, so is analogous to Aberfan.
All the disasters shown occurred in nuclear countries.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/737/130/733/038/517/original/5f5f006c9b40a115.png

2025-06-17 20:41:59 UTC

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If you ever actually read LIGHT AND SHADOWS IN NEW YORK, you'd know that the biggest slum–lord (in the sense of owner of tenement properties, charging as much rent as they could while doing as little as they could in upkeep) circa 1890 was… the Episcopalian Church.

2025-06-16 07:56:50 UTC

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Personally I think 1 TW would be a much better target. But I wouldn't expect more than about 200 GW of that to be LWRs.

2025-06-16 06:49:51 UTC

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In a vacuum, that statement is meaningless. Only if compared to, say, the cost of the German Energiewende, or the annual costs of procuring fossil fuels, does it acquire meaning.

2025-06-14 19:33:32 UTC

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https://isgermanyclean.today/

2025-06-12 08:08:13 UTC

The British nuclear power announcement the other day struck me as a little disappointing. After all, back in 1966, Britain had such a world–leading civil nuclear industry that it was considered a distinctively British technology.
@npub1pnw…qhcz
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/669/360/970/600/193/original/55b2ce235f243907.jpeg

2025-06-12 07:31:20 UTC

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Probably cheaper than massive storage installations, plus whatever is meant to feed them, would be replacing the big coal-fired power stations with nuclear ones. CANDU-type stations, able to use uranium just as it comes from Australia's mines, or recycled uranium from reprocessed LWR reactor fuel, would be very well suited to the conditions.
@npub1pnw…qhcz

2025-06-06 23:22:54 UTC

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https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/638/985/218/210/192/original/7574002cf2511364.jpeg

2025-05-10 18:45:12 UTC

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One of the first things neutron transmutation was used for was to convert gold into mercury.
Perhaps you're wondering why. The reason is that Au is monoisotopic (197), but natural Hg is not. The US Bureau of Standards wanted monoisotopic Hg for its sharp spectral lines. So in 1939 they shipped a quantity of the US Treasury's gold reserve to California, to be bombarded with neutrons from the big Berkeley cyclotron. Later it was sent to Oak Ridge, to the X-10 pile.

2025-05-09 18:43:07 UTC

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It would have been an ideal opportunity for the Canadians to step in, with finance et cetera, and build either CANDU-6 stations, or four-blocks based on Pickering. (I'm not sure anyone has made a really good case for the CANDU-3 even now.) Or, for that matter, India with its 220 MW PHWRs. Now that would have been an intriguing geopolitical development!

2025-05-01 19:43:30 UTC

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I still want to know where the ²³⁸Pu is coming from.

2025-04-26 19:38:16 UTC

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I've seen various estimates of elevated premature deaths in Japan alone due to increased burning of coal and other fossil fuels since 2011.

2025-04-22 16:47:10 UTC

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Here's the thing.
On the one hand, "alternative energy" has ALWAYS meant "alternative to nuclear", NOT "alternative to fossils" — as in Amory Lovins' "coal-based, fission-free bridge to a solar future".
On the other hand, I will happily tell people that I can envision a world in which half to two-thirds of the energy is supplied by solar, wind, et cetera — but only if the remainder comes from nuclear. Concentrated to balance diffuse at acceptable density.

2025-04-21 18:55:28 UTC

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Ultimately, my attitude is shaped by the many times I have been told "we don't need nuclear, renewables are more than enough", and the fact that renewables have (at least since the 1970s) consistently been used as a smokescreen for anti-nuclear-ism, and consistently tied to the "low-energy society"/"degrowth" concept.
Not everybody who promotes renewables does so in bad faith, but renewables promotion itself is basically a bad-faith enterprise.

2025-04-09 08:10:24 UTC

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If you look at wealthy countries which actually reduced their total consumption of fossil fuels between 1973 and 1993, one stands out : France.
This should be an indication of what works.

2025-04-08 12:21:24 UTC

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If you look at the long-run total cost of electricity to the consumer, which is the most obviously relevant criterion, you rapidly see that systems with a lot of nuclear typically rank near the bottom. Systems with a lot of solar and wind, which we are always told are "cheap and getting cheaper", generally rank near the top.
Nuclear is expensive when you only do a little bit of it.

2025-04-08 08:14:39 UTC

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I will continue to argue that the 1983 Pickering accident shows that, that by any safety criteria which make the slightest bit of sense, a large CANDU plant can be located as close to a major city center as land prices allow.
Rupture of the reactor pressure boundary during full-load operation, with no releases of radioactivity to the environment, or radiation exposures to personnel, outside normal operating parameters. You couldn't ask for better.

2025-04-04 07:30:06 UTC

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Everything I've seen shows that, so far, typical lifetimes of offshore wind turbines are in the 10—12 year range. That should improve a bit once the experience is a bit better digested. We've seen foundation scour, a whole lot of stress-corrosion problems and just physical damage due to the sea-air interface, very rapid blade erosion due to spray, and of course the usual cyclic loading effects.
Nuclear plants belong near load centers, to supply heat plus power.

2025-03-21 12:01:48 UTC

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I went out to the local Munich-area "Nuklearia" meetup last night. Anyone with eyes can see that what Germany has been doing isn't working, neither economically nor environmentally, and yet there's such a strong reluctance to admit that, much less to do something different. And so many outside Germany continue to see it as a model to be imitated!

2025-03-21 09:32:05 UTC

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That's a large number.
Large enough to buy some nuclear power stations, which would in turn reduce the need for overbuilding the electrical network.

2025-02-28 14:20:21 UTC

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We'll see if they can make it work, given the well-known problems of materials compatibility problems and coolant freezing.
What I want to explore is using a Loeffler boiler. It appears to me that the sodium-steam heat exchanger, which never contains liquid or two-phase water, should make high reliability easier to achieve at lower fabrication cost. The biggest change from Phenix to Superphenix was in the boilers, and was supposed to make them cheaper. Didn't quite work out!

2025-02-28 14:08:00 UTC

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There's a very good reason why the very first power-producing fission reactor was a sodium-cooled fast breeder. It has been obvious from the first that the regenerative nuclear fuel cycle is necessary if fission is to meet a large portion of the energy needs of the world for a long time. But politicians continue to convince themselves, despite all available evidence, that fission will not be required for that, and promote converter reactors and direct disposal of spent fuel.

2025-02-26 23:52:15 UTC

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Nobody should be mining by hand. The idea is disgusting.

2025-02-26 13:41:02 UTC

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You'd think! And yet I still have people tell me about the wonderful German energy transition, or even that "Germany is 100% solar now".
Yes, someone has said that to me.

2025-02-25 14:09:41 UTC

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Asceticism and pastoralist fantasy are no basis for policies oriented toward the needs of people who are actually living in the world. Nor is the post-genocide fantasy of solarpunk, in which there are mysteriously fewer than a billion humans, all of them with master's degrees or doctorates.
Instead, turn to Buckminster Fuller, who pointed out in the 1960s that the effectiveness of using material resources was growing rapidly — very much because of the use of energy.

2025-02-24 02:09:15 UTC

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If it's the machine I think, my grandfather literally wrote the book on how to use it. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to provide a copy right now (I'm in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean).

2025-02-23 03:19:53 UTC

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Referred to as the "Stone Age nuclear power plant" :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRpUBWqBSHM

2025-02-23 02:37:16 UTC

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Kozloduy 1—4 were the subject of hit pieces in "Der Spiegel" and its associated TV program, which stigmatized the Bulgarian people as backward, stupid, and poor, people who had no use for nuclear power and should not be allowed to have it.

2025-02-10 17:26:03 UTC

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There is a desperate need to acknowledge that energy supply is what supports the industrial activities which produce the things we consume, and therefore, trying to maximize employment in that sector is counterproductive.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/980/740/065/763/237/original/c83695cec5a9c63e.png

2025-02-06 15:04:13 UTC

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Belgium was, as best I can work out, the first country to exceed 50% nuclear electricity, a few months before France in 1984.

2025-01-25 19:37:50 UTC

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I've seen people promoting North Korea as a revolutionary workers' state, when it is clearly a hereditary absolute monarchy.

2025-01-25 05:07:44 UTC

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You can read about the work of SKB, including its Forsmark repository, in this 1985 booklet which I have just recently put on-line (although I scanned it a while back and am just now working through the back-log).
https://www.man-and-atom.info/resources/scans/se_skb_activities-1985.pdf
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/887/254/675/175/993/original/2e9566dac8096309.png
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/887/254/689/190/753/original/0c02d44d5d0cc93f.png

2025-01-24 05:19:37 UTC

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I don't know if they truly think 100% renewables is feasible or cheap. That's certainly what they say, but they also have a history of paying lip-service to decarbonization while treating any fossil fuel (including lignite) as an acceptable "bridge fuel" for an indefinitely long transition to an undefined future.
Certainly they believe that nuclear energy is radically immoral, "a fundamentally inappropriate exercise of human intelligence", regardless of what it does.

2025-01-24 05:15:19 UTC

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The Embalse CANDU plant in Argentina was built largely by Italian contractors.
What's really absurd is that the Vajont dam disaster, a dam built specifically for hydropower, actually killed about 2000 people just months before the first nuclear power plant in Italy started up. Of course no nuclear power plant anywhere has ever done anything of the kind, or likely ever will. But nobody bans hydro because of its proven potential for causing mass casualty events!

2025-01-21 01:59:39 UTC

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I had a "green energy advocate" tell me that air travel will have to be abandoned because there simply isn't enough land and other resources to build the renewable energy infrastructure to produce fuel for the current scale of jet traffic.
When I pointed out that this is only about 3% of world fossil fuel use, and if renewables can't do this, they certainly can't do the rest, I didn't get a very useful answer.

2025-01-03 04:46:34 UTC

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Tell me again about how enlightened, benevolent Germany is exporting clean renewable energy to its benighted neighbours. Last word I had from my friends in Munich was that the uncapped price of electricity was up over €1/kWh, thanks to an extended period of overcast and calm.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/762/604/848/884/250/original/9182d27aeca8db5c.jpg

2025-01-01 17:19:39 UTC

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In the middle of the article I get linked to a piece entitled "The West’s Reliance on Russian Nuclear Fuel Funds Moscow’s War", and I think, "it's a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of euros a week for oil and gas, which is far more than the highly-controversial aid to Ukraine."

2024-12-31 16:58:54 UTC

After a misfire with my first attempt at procuring new stickers, these look pretty good.
Actually, they look a lot like the previous stickers. The main difference, not visible here, is the “crack back”, which makes them MUCH quicker to apply.
If you want some for yourself, I will happily mail them to you. Send some mail, including your address (and make sure I can read it) to :
“Man and Atom”
PO Box 1035
Fort Worth
TX 76101 USA
or $1and address in the notes field to
https://paypal.me/prometheuslives
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/748/474/955/809/851/original/857d818feca2d60d.jpeg

2024-12-27 16:13:39 UTC

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Did you make this, or where did it come from?

2024-12-20 17:50:45 UTC

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This "game-changing new technology" sounds astonishingly like Enrico Fermi Unit 1.

2024-12-14 23:04:45 UTC

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I continue to believe that SAVANNAH should be reconditioned, with a modern reactor-plant installed, and returned to service as a demonstrator of peaceful nuclear energy and a pathfinder for future civil nuclear ships. This is doubly important considering the current press for decarbonizing transportation.
#atomsforpeace
#atomicpowertothepeople

2024-10-17 18:21:36 UTC

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…than nuclear, which long ago proved to be cheaper than fossil-fuel power, at least in high-load-factor applications. Nuclear is often quoted as having a very high cost, but when you look at what you get for the money, the picture is quite different. This is especially important because most decarbonization schemes imply at least tripling electricity consumption in the wealthy countries, and much greater increases in the poorer ones.
(to be concluded)

2024-10-17 18:17:27 UTC

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…but saves considerably on heat pumps.
In a conventional central-station power system, with fuel-burning power plants close to the load, it's common for transmission and distribution to account for 60% of the cost of supplying the kilowatt-hour to the consumer. Renewables require far more T&D, even before we consider storage schemes. This implies that, even if renewables were completely free at the source, they would supply power at a higher price to the consumer…
(cont'd)

2024-10-17 18:14:05 UTC

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…already mined would suffice to provide current and foreseeable world total energy (not just electricity) needs for generations, to say nothing of the stockpiled by-product thorium from rare-earth mining, or U and Th from coal ash, seawater, and other unconventional resources.
Speaking of total energy, nuclear plants located reasonably close to cities can provide heat for domestic and industrial use, and this heat can even be used for refrigeration. This costs in pipe-work…
(cont'd)

2024-10-17 18:10:08 UTC

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…vast tracts of land, as well as non-fuel mineral resources (steel, concrete, et cetera) in large quantities. Obviously, some areas are more favorable for wind or solar development than others, just as only certain places are suitable for hydro.
Fission power plants, on the other hand, are very compact and can be sited almost anywhere, notably, near the load centers. Likewise their raw material requirements are modest. With the regenerative ("breeder") fuel cycle, uranium…
(cont'd)

2024-10-17 18:06:16 UTC

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…on nuclear disarmament is a dangerous distraction.
More than that, in the past 100+ years, conflict over fossil fuels has been (and continues to be, see Essequibo for instance) a major cause of wars, while control of fossil fuels has been a decisive factor in the outcome of wars.
Before fossil fuels were important, land was a major focus of conflict. And that means food, fodder, and firewood — the fuel sources of a pre-industrial society. Renewables likewise require…
(cont'd)

2024-10-17 18:03:18 UTC

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So, I'm known for taking a pretty strong stand on this question.
https://anonradio.net/tag/a-step-farther-out/
https://man-and-atom.info/index.html
To the question of nuclear weapons, creating and using them is a POLITICAL, not a technical matter. None of the countries that have done so used civil nuclear power plants to get there. Most built power plants only after building bombs, and Israel and North Korea don't have nuclear power yet. The true enemy is war and militarism, and focusing…
(cont'd)

2024-10-02 11:13:32 UTC

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More important than the specific technology is reducing the overall number of and reliance upon cars.

2024-09-20 19:52:00 UTC

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Nuclear power has consistently proven to be safer than virtually every other industrial activity, from the point of view of the workers, the public, and the natural environment. This suggests that it is not inadequately regulated. In fact, nuclear energy started with a very strict safety regime, unlike most any other industrial activity ; and the main complaint of the industry is that rules proven irrelevant by science or experience have not been loosened.