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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • BrightCandle@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*deleted by creator*
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    7 months ago

    The law comes in two parts, the actual written bit that says what it is and the enforcement. Most people consider the first part what is necessary and lobby hard for it but really the most important bit in a practical sense is how it gets applied and enforced, without which the law is worthless. In many countries one way to defang laws is simply underfund the legal system or quangos that do the enforcement, another is putting someone in charge at the attornies office who de-prioritises those cases. The law as written isn’t worth the paper/bytes its written on unless there is a plan for enforcement that doesn’t involve every poor person using the rich mans legal system against giant corporations with infinite defence money.




  • You only really get the choice between misinformed or uninformed, there is no option where you can be informed enough on the topics you need to know about.

    While they are right that misinformation in social media is causing a lot of the problem I think misinformation in the press is also driving people to seek information in social media. You can’t have governments and the press repeatedly proven to be lying and have the population accept that version of reality they push. What replaces it is a variety of conspiracy theories, some are just genuine conspiracies but definitely not in the mainstream press. This second aspect the research is consistently ignoring and it matters because its a large part of what is driving people to conspiracy theories. Fake news is not about Trumpnews or theonion its about the mainstream media however much they try to deflect from it.


  • They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a “factory”. This still doesn’t scale well.

    I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn’t require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can’t help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.

    I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.

    You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn’t last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.


  • It doesn’t really make much sense to go faster than silicon node changes unless there is a lot of optimisation on architecture that needs doing. Historically all these refreshes between nodes were largely pointless with small benefits and preparing them took development effort away from the big changes. It’s progress in silicon that matters and brings the performance improvements and moving to a faster cadence hasn’t historically worked out well.