fullsquare

weird that EDF didn't want to buy it, maybe they also have surplus plutonium (reactor grade, so of worse quality)

either sub or aircraft carrier reactors might be somewhere around 50 to 220MWe, panamax might need 60MWe tops, regular land based PWRs are more like 300MWe and up. the smaller you go, the higher enrichment you need, but also military propulsion has different priorities, they use 90%+ enrichment in part because they can, and in part because this gives them massive excess reactivity, which means power level can change ridiculously fast. tradeoff is that spent fuel has much more useful uranium, and it's overall expensive, but you also don't skimp on your doomsday ride so it's all fine. commercial powerplants are physically capable of doing slower load following, but it's more economical most of the time to just use full power in order to best utilize fissile material. what you're proposing would have all disadvantages of both, because no way in hell this thing will run on standard, low enriched fuel for PWRs, it might need something maybe more than 5%, maybe closer to 10%, perhaps more, which means problems, because it means worse proliferation risks than with normal fuel and it's already fuel that goes around, and can be taken over in some unfriendly waters; higher enrichment also means it'll be much more expensive, both because of more SWU needed, but also because it's a specialty product that requires extra licensing; and it also won't be as compact and responsive as military reactor, because civilians don't get to play with HEU like that; and also it will require refueling after some time, maybe longer than regular-sized PWR (refueling every year to three) that probably will require visit to manufacturer to do refueling there, which would be, everything else equal, a bit harder than in regular powerplant because it needs to be done in a drydock

it has all disadvantages of SMRs but also you can steal them on high seas and it's probably great for diplomacy if some random ass pirate get hands on that

no you can't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium_Management_and_Disposition_Agreement

russians did their part, they basically gave that plutonium to their nuclear engineers for new things development to fuck around with and got a couple of working fast reactors out of that. americans did something that is very mckinsey coded and debated whether to burn it in pwr as mox like the french do or mix it with some magic powder and hide it in mountain which would be basically the same, right, and russians didn't like it because you can reverse that, and it ended up with americans doing nothing, then russians withdrew (and they were right in doing this)

tldr diplomacy by committee

uranium or plutonium, because i've heard of some plutonium that was slated to be disposed of this way 20 years ago and just sat there unused (not that saltman has facilities or people to do anything with it)

high latitude is sort of served by hydro because there's lot of river per person in some of areas that are in any significant way populated (norway, russian north)

medical isotopes are research reactor thing because of frequent loading/unloading - either that or some kind of channel reactors so either CANDU or RBMK. neither are exactly industry standard

marine power requires small reactors = way more enriched than usual sub 5% = expensive and a lot of diplomatic noise about proliferation

iirc us navy loads their reactors with 93% enriched uranium, the same grade that is used in (american) nukes (and also in couple of very special use cases like oak ridge high flux reactor fuel). can't hand this out just like that. one fuel load is expected to last entire ship lifetime. the less enriched grade you use, the bigger reactor becomes and refueling has to be more frequent

renewable generation, i'm with you, but i'm not sold on storage. i'm not even sure if there's enough lithium for grid batteries to seriously matter, so it might need to use something else. the boring, working option (geographically limited) is of course pumped storage hydro, but other than that, i think that the right way to do things is to use energy when it's made, not when it's needed. in particular, water heaters have tiny duty cycle and hot water just sits there, which means you could, in principle, make it so that water heaters soak up all, or at least as much as practical, of excess power, wherever it is available

some countries do fund nuclear power as a kind of strategic energy independence hedge* no matter costs, most prominently france and russia, and to some degree india and a couple of others

*also for military use

have you seen how much time it takes to built single NPP? openai will be a smoking crater well before site for the first plant will get selected. then you have a backlog for turbines and reactors

curb your enthusiasm. Girkin got shut down and jailed after he very loudly declared that he'd do things differently, and that more aggressive approach including mass mobilization would be a necessity. Did anything came out of it?

yes you can do it and it's so easy it sometimes happens accidentally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_the_mall_technique

strictly speaking you don't need machines for it but if there is any that would be rightwing propaganda enterprise

btw did you know that zucc studied psychology? and that research on this would be maybe not the hottest shit by the time he studied, but at least well disseminated?

This reminds me of another tech bro many years ago who also thought that expertise is overrated, and things really aren’t that hard, you know?

lmao, what's his lesswrong username?

it's worse than that, you should probably take number of adults (as in, 18+) as base here, and it's 78% of them (267M), according to first random source i've found, so it's closer to 34%

from what i understand, american anomaly is that they take debt like that even when not strictly necessary in order to pump up their credit scores which might be useful later, but even then, 9% of population relies on going to loan shark the app in order to get food, absolutely nothing to look at here, move along,