Notices by publius (publius@mastodon.sdf.org)

@joeo10 @Ricardus

Not too unlike local broadcast blackouts.

@tek

"We can't find workers" is not always equivalent to "we're not willing to pay", but when you're trying to fill those positions with teenagers (who almost by definition don't have experience, training, or education which may actually be scarce), it's sure hard to interpret any other way.

My father is closing in on retirement. One of the folks who works under him intends to leave when he does. There are maybe two dozen people in the world who do exactly what they do. It's a small field.

@tootbrute

Many do. I don't, but I always wear socks in the house, and much of the year, carpet slippers as well. It's very difficult to keep the floor clean enough for bare feet, and slab-on-grade construction means cold floors even in summer in Texas.

@_chris_real @jonny

I've been known to say that economists serve the same function in the modern world that soothsayers did in the ancient world, giving a veneer of divine sanction to the arbitrary choices of the powerful.

@adamd @snowdusk

You might be surprised to know that an accident, in a sense far more severe than what happened at Three Mile Island, happened at Pickering in August of 1983. One of the pressure tubes in Reactor 2 ruptured during full-power operation.

It's never talked about, because the operators were able to bring the reactor quickly to a "safe" condition. There were no radiation exposures to personnel, or radioactive releases to the environment, beyond normal (minimal) operating levels.

@capntransit

Burning wood is not, by any sane definition, a clean or sustainable form of energy.

It is also not in any way adapted to the needs of a society where most people live in cities.

#atomicpowertothepeople

@yacowaco

In many parts of Japan, they don't even have gas lines. As a legacy of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, it's all bottle gas in the Tokyo area.

@wakame

"A single person", or "Donald Knuth"?

@ryanc @cstross @dashdsrdash @Zeugs @nf3xn

Oh, what Big Clive calls the "Dethdaptor"!

@dashdsrdash @Zeugs @ryanc @nf3xn @cstross

I bought an outlet plate (for a standard US 2× NEMA 5-15R outlet) which includes a little parasitic rectifier and voltage dropper feeding a USB-A socket.

When it stops working, or being relevant, I can just pop it off and pop a regular wall plate on. Nothing is wired in. (It has contacts which slip over the screws on the side of the outlet.)

Mind you, it was $1 at a thrift store. I doubt I would have paid full price.

@cstross @dashdsrdash @Zeugs @ryanc @nf3xn

I am aware that such "minimally invasive" options might well not be available everywhere. On the other hand, my experience is that it's not difficult in Europe to buy "power strips" or whatever you want to call them, boxes of receptacles on the end of an extension cord, which also include a USB power supply. That also seems to me like a reasonable compromise.

@gemlog @cosullivan

The Leonards were smart. They figured out how to keep bringing traffic to their downtown department store despite motorization and suburbanization.

That store was also the first major air-conditioned public building between the Mississippi and the Sierras, so they were clearly good at keeping up with the times.

@kaia @maija

I know a place in Munich where I can buy farm-fresh eggs and sausages out of a co-op run vending machine, at any time of day or night.

@gemlog @kranfahrer

60¢ per kWh residential electricity price doesn't strike me as living very well, for all that it fulfills the "ein Kugel Eis" promise (at the eiscafe around the corner a scoop of gelato is €1.80, and 3 kWh a day could be enough if you're not using the oven). And Germany has gone from a net exporter of electricity to a net importer, after creating market mechanisms which assure it will sell cheap and buy dear.

A coal exit was never intended.

@cahollenbeck

@i314159265

That would be SIX YEARS AFTER Russia invaded Ukraine. SIX YEARS with Russian forces occupying territory which Russia had made the most solemn possible guarantees to respect, in exchange for Ukraine's surrender of strategic thermonuclear weapons.

Zelensky had nothing to do with it. He was elected AFTER the invasion.

@DigitalStefan @libreleah

I have found an X220 completely usable with current Linux distributions for pretty heavyweight tasks. It'll handle video streaming, for instance.

@gemlog

You could get around it by discharging the whole load of fuel and reloading fresh, but that isn't good for fuel economy.

Naval reactors do exactly that, but (a) they have very different operating criteria from civil power stations, and (b) they use exotic core designs, with high enrichment and heavy loading of "burnable poison", to get 25+ year refueling intervals.

Continuous fueling greatly simplifies managing power shape and reactivity.

@gemlog @KayKap

As an interesting sidelight : there is no generic LWR fuel. Core-design calculations have to be run for each reload, and the assemblies have to be tailored to match the desired reactivity profile, taking into account the history of the assemblies which are not being exchanged (but may be moved around). AREVA figures suggest that this is a full-time job for a nuclear engineer for each reactor supported.

Meanwhile, each and every CANDU bundle is identical.

@gemlog @KayKap

Yes, the standard Russian deal is to supply the entire plant, plus fuel, and take away the spent fuel to their reprocessing plants.

If you have good reason (as, for instance, Ukraine does!) for wanting out of that deal, Western fuel fabricators can now supply assemblies of suitable designs. (The basic difference between the VVER fuel and its Western equivalent is that VVER assemblies are hexagonal and Western ones are square.) So it's not total vendor lock-in.