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Also, anything that uses airwaves: So, nuclear powered phones, watches, airtags.
This would be the biggest breakthrough for humanity. We have nuclear powered submarines but miniaturization of nuclear stalled since then.
I love the way cars explode in Fallout. I mean, random car crashes have historically been the epitome of excitement, 4k war footage made me pretty indifferent towards bloody windshields and burnt out station wagons. I really think, the intensity of an unexpected fission event projecting its authority through my eyelids could make me feel something again.
While I'd love to see more nuclear reactors in our society. The "nuclear everything" argument breaks a core tenant of US national security policy, making U235 very hard to get.
It was extremely clear to me that it was a comment to show the stupidity of the admin insisting that energy density was the right/only heuristic for evaluating which fuel sources to use/support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
Proper reactors are impractical scaled down, as far as I know. Inside a large submarine or aircraft carrier is probably the smallest practical scale for a reactor and I bet there is a ton of trade-offs.
It‘s the battery tech, which is classified military stuff. I presume it’s a thing you put in submarine detectors deep in the ocean, or compact spy satellites.
But indeed, it’s the type of radioisotope that’s dangerous to just be around, where minuscule amounts could fuck up the whole village. But terrorists would probably rather get their hands on emitters from the medical field than fly to mars.
The rover ones use Pu-238.
> You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.
The Curiosity and Perserverance rovers each have one MMRTG (multimission radiothermal generator), and I've never seen a picture of the rover where it is censored, and its actually explicitly called out and shown and drawn attention to in lots of NASA publicity stuff.
I bet the crew on the submarines is much more focused on what they are doing…
A large-scale nuclear plant will be way more efficient than a bunch of mini-plants, so having battery electric cars + nuclear power plants already gives you nuclear powered cars without even having to invent anything new.
We only need to focus on fuel generation (power plants), and the small number of remaining places that don't just take power from the grid (planes, ships, other things that have their own fuel/generator on board).
It's not just bad for energy generetion either! China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents. Its incredibly sad to see this un-forced error, this sabotage of America, this destruction of our leadership. To walk back to a fake Great Again idiocracy obsessed only with doing the opposite of the liberals.
My understanding is that China doesn’t care about abusing patents they don’t own. Is this incorrect? Do they value patents only when they hold them and enforce them?
Asking sincerely.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. It is the West that first turned patents into the weapon for big corps to fuck the rest of the world. Well now they're tasting it themselves
The "west" absolutely has a monolithic IP jurisprudence, rules codified by trade agreements and passed laws[1]. This has harmed open source in the past, such as the multi-decade, recurring issue where folk have the license to make use of the source code, but not the associated trademarks.
1. As evidence, I offer the great mobile patent wars of the 2010's, which played out similarly across multiple countries the suits were filed, except the home-countries where the scales were the scales were thumbed.
This isn’t about protecting knowhow or actually producing anything, but about generating as much legal and financial friction as possible. The difference is that in China it can be semi-state-backed or at least tolerated, so it’s not just a bizarre parasitic business model like in the West but also a geopolitical tactic.
They didn't intentionally or exclusively targeting open source, the "# of patents" are very explicit KPI requirement for tech companies in China. Every team gotta grind patents as much as they can.
Imposing bureaucratic offset requirements etc. for renewable generation is the opposite of that. It can't really be news that Trump is a hypocrite, but water is wet again today.
Dam removals have multiple factors behind them, from pure economics (cheaper to remove than repair) to environmental -- restoring fisheries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dam_removals_in_Califo...
We need all the non-carbon power we can get, and it's a shame to remove existing power sources but as electric power is eminently fungible, that loss can be mitigated with other sources.
Meanwhile, efforts to modernize the US electric grid have been stalled by Red states that are ideologically opposed to renewable power. There's plenty of potential power to be generated that is hamstrung by that resistance (pun intended).
Maybe other people are thinking about different dams, but the ones that were in the news semi-recently for being dismantled were producing something like five wind turbines worth of energy. China has built five turbines in the time it took you to read this comment.