it’s very well comprehensible if you’re good with numbers.

remember that flock cameras can be seriously impaired with a little spray paint

apparently. “natural uranium” refers to uranium with about 3% U235 content meanwhile the remaining 97% are U238, i think.

edit:

ah i had the numbers somewhat off apparently.

debt-to-gdp crisis

is not an actual crisis, money on those political levels doesn’t work the same way as it would for households.

did you calculate how much gram of CO2 that is per kWh actually?

CANDU 9

very interesting. for those who want to know how it works:

Most commercial reactor designs use normal water as the moderator. Water absorbs some of the neutrons, enough that it is not possible to keep the reaction going in natural uranium. CANDU replaces this “light” water with heavy water. Heavy water’s extra neutron decreases its ability to absorb excess neutrons, resulting in a better neutron economy. This allows CANDU to run on unenriched natural uranium, or uranium mixed with a wide variety of other materials such as plutonium and thorium. This was a major goal of the CANDU design; by operating on natural uranium the cost of enrichment is removed. This also presents an advantage in nuclear proliferation terms, as there is no need for enrichment facilities, which might also be used for weapons.

From Wikipedia. So the key is to improve the neutron economy sothat there’s more neutrons available; then, these extra neutrons can go on to split extra material, which is thereby consumed.

better yet: pour it into concrete, dump it in the ocean.

it’s just not done yet because people are thinking that there might be another use case for nuclear waste in the future.

yeah and until recently they imported all their uranium from states like niger which is why it took till 2023 for niger to kick out the last french troops from its country.

which is interesting because solar became the cheapest form of electricity in 2020 and france let go of niger shortly after that.

How dependent is France on Niger’s uranium?

The military coup in Niger has raised concerns about uranium mining in the country by the French group Orano, and the consequences for France’s energy independence.

FYI 1 kg battery when fully discharged loses about 10⁻¹² kg of its rest mass …

yeah it’s pretty crazy how much energy is in fuel.

1 kg of oil contains about 30 MJ of energy. enough to accelerate an object of the same mass to 7.7 km/s. which is almost escape velocity on earth (11.2 km/s), or enough velocity to shoot the object out of earth’s gravity field altogether.

(a kg of oil, ofc, costs about $1)

oh very interesting. i’ve been wanting to get into the details of how federation actually works, and i wanted to figure out why mastodon<->lemmy federation does often not seem to work. but i guess that’s a deep rabbit hole too!

yeah, we basically know the chemical composition of other stars from their emission lines (every chemical emits light at specific frequencies, depending on the atom type). and so we know that most matter in the universe (at least in the brightly visible stars’ outer layer) is hydrogen, followed by helium, which make up 99% of the mass. the rest is all other elements combined.

yeah it’s called a water bottle rocket i think and i’ve seen one like 2 months ago.

also you can’t reach orbit that way. the rocket equation says that you’d need exponentially more fuel the higher you want to go, simplified. precisely, it’s a bit more like: m₀ / m_f = exp(Δv/v_e) where v_e is the effective exhaust velocity (how quickly the water is thrown out behind) and Δv is constant 7 km/s for going to orbit, so if v_e is sth like 20 m/s you can see how that’s difficult. chemical fuel has v_e of 3 km/s so Δv/v_e is sth around 2.3 and exp(2.3) ≈ 10 so that’s doable.

would you like to know whether you’re speaking to an actual human on the other end of the line?

“bot speak” becomes unintelligible to humans.

at some point we will give a name of this phenomenon of internet users who are completely undecipherable for normal people … and call it autism (/hj)

It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement.

huh that’s weird, it’s not paywalled for me.

uhh, the bots are requesting multiple sites in parallel, not in series, so it’s difficult to say “hey look, that user moves through 5 pages per second”. instead, you’d say “hey look, there’s 5 users each crawling through 1 page per second”.

look i know that this gets a lot of hate but the current trajectory of “you need to prove your worth to the world to have a legitimate reason to exist” is just not sustainable. fuck all that “we support that artist”, we should be supporting the person, whether they output art or not.

the current rage against AI is 90% driven by the idea that humans need to produce output sothat we can donate to them and give them money sothat they can live. and frankly, that’s a dystopian idea in my eyes.

yeah exactly.