cocoablazing

This isn’t relevant to the fact that upgrading safety and safety support systems is less costly and a smaller engineering task than designing a new reactor.

Upgrades to such systems, including flex interfaces, has occurred across the US fleet in the years following Fukushima, while exactly zero new reactors have been designed and built.

Sure, there are better designs for EDG siting and support system integration. This is completely besides the point. The point is, even moving the whole safety support system kilometers away is cheaper than designing a new reactor, which I think should be a pretty uncontroversial statement to engineers familiar with the complexity of license approval for power reactors.

Moving several EDGs and support system a couple kilometers is a small task in comparison to the design, qualification, construction, and training associated with a new power reactor design.

There’s nothing very complicated about the EDG buses that supply safety-system components.

That is an extrapolation using the unproven linear no threshold hypothesis.

An SFP fire is not a reactor meltdown, and the distribution of fission products from a SFP and a weapon are also very dissimilar. SFP fires will result in long-lived contamination over plumes of >100km that would result in exclusion zones.

For example, failure to restore cooling to the Fukushima pools could have necessitated the evacuation of 35MM people.

http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs24vonhippel.p...

Even in a pure-counterforce exchange that avoided targeting population centers, the resulting damage to infrastructure could result in the denial of current urban centers to habitation for many decades.

Most of the quants and quant devs I work with are out-of-work physicists who want to provide for their families. Most of them would rather be tenured. I work in this industry because I cannot find employment in my field of engineering near my friends.

We maintain a lightweight platform alongside a legacy platform that is an untestable ball of mud. This resulted from rapid implementation of business demands over the years, along with a practice of addressing numerous data quality problem through hacks in components, rather than cleaning the data or using a sanitization layer to access it.

Lack of dependency inversion in systems like this is truly the road to ruin, as the system complexity grows so quickly in time, due to interactions, that eventually nobody really understands what it does or why it does it.

I suppose this is tolerable for some applications, but if you need to numerically validate it, it's a nightmare.

Nuclear Winter won’t matter when spent nuclear fuel pools in those nations undergo meltdowns following sustained losses of offsite power caused by catastrophic damage to the national electrical distribution system. The fuel in a nuclear reactor is marginal relative to SFP loading.

You can build a cheap and heavily shielded ionization or Geiger system, or a more expensive spectrometry system. In this case, Ruthenium is a condensed solid, and would be ideally detected by an air particle sampling system that continuously concentrates air onto a filter, and measures emitted radiation with a detector capable of resolving very narrow peaks in the spectrum. I would pick up Knoll’s book on detector systems if you are really interested in building such a system.

In reality, so many people have a problem with it that they are actively interfering with the code of the webpages to the point of endangering the business model of much of the web.

DPRK leadership wouldn't know a strike was underway until most of their military capability could be destroyed by stratcom.

A strike would not originate from North Dakota -- it would come from stealth bombers right on top of their artillery forces and command and control infrastructure, as well as from nearby boomers (ctf134) launching at a pace of a dozen warheads per minute, per boat, throwing mk-4/5's with recently upgraded fuzing systems.

When the LEP is complete, they will be GPS guided and accurate enough to destroy hardened targets from kinetic energy alone.

If the DPRK threat continues to escalate, and the US were concerned enough, F-35's could be upgraded with B61-12 harnesses, adding a nuclear stealth armada with pinpoint-accurate weapons to the arsenal. US fbm's are also not equipped to close to capacity due to arms control agreements. During initial flight testing, maneuvers consistent with deployment of 14 warheads were observed, meaning an fbm could deploy 336 warheads.

You’re assuming that China’s nuclear force posture is like that of the US or RF. It is much more robust against false alarms. Given the massive alert arsenal the US possesses, along with the historical fact that both the USSR and US sat out strong technical alerts of incoming massive strikes, rather than launch — it’s a good prior that they would sit it out.

If the military learned a lesson from exploding a reactor with an automatic control system, you might never know - it's not required to be reported to the public.

Yes, steam demand controls the power response of a nuclear reactor.

I can't believe these watchstanders had the LOK they should have had on the steering system, or every one involved in ship control would have been able to immediately identify the problem and realign the steering system, other than bmow.

I don't think the senior watch team had their st either, or the orders to prepare to take manual control of the steering and propulsion system aft would have immediately been out.

Also it makes little sense that lookouts who calculated cpa at collision weren't raising the alarm. These guys who I had to do their job for them: I got them removed, and tried to get them off our boat. They were fine people but they were a danger to us.

A key occurrence during this mishap:

0127 The Officer of the Deck ordered course to the right to course 240T, but rescinded the order within a minute. Instead, the Officer of the Deck ordered an increase to full speed and a rapid turn to the left (port). These orders were not carried out.

0129 The Bosun Mate of the Watch, a more senior supervisor on the bridge, took over the helm and executed the orders.

I've witnessed multiple similar situations on a warship (imminent loss of extremely critical systems), and had to forcibly push the watchstanders out of the way to do their job for them. Many people are going to freeze when the SHTF, and there may be no prior indication.

Major attaboy to the BMOW who saved many of his shipmates. Given the incident angle of collision, many more would have died from a perpendicular collision.

A "dumb" plastic ID won't help either because they could still retain a badge they previously "lost".

Ironic that this system was built and is used for communicating with systems capable of creating radiation belts.

https://fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/verdin.htm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_radiation...

Plenty of high-paying quantitative jobs requires such a degree and experience. The majority of phd’s don’t go on to support their family with a tenure-track academic salary.

It sounds like he’s talking about scripts generated for research, rather than code for components intended to be persistent.

The Europeans were developing one of the most interesting secure distributed platforms 10 years ago as part of the European Multilaterally Secure Computing Base initiative, but it appears to have gone dark. Maybe funding priorities shifted, or the technology was deemed to be something that shouldn’t be open.

Think about the market for those teachers. Anecdotally, I took one physics course in my secondary education, and about eight math courses.

Lead is a high-Z material, which provides a lot of electrons to interact with photons (and charged particles). It’s not good for stopping the neutrons that pose the danger here, because of the disparity in mass between the shield nuclei and the neutrons. For storing fissile materials in proximity, the optimal material is something with a high absorption cross section, like boron. Water and plastic are good at removing energy from neutrons and preventing leakage in typical large shielding scenarios, but in this case they would increase the danger, because they thermalize neutrons efficiently (as does a workers body) and this increases fission interaction probabilities and reduces the margin to criticality. For spent nuclear fuel, something like a boron-carbide plate is used. LANL may use something similar.

OSX makes these interfaces somewhat usable by providing a keyboard-driven filter for all menu items. Microsoft should copy this feature.

Actually, all large nuclear weapons states have agreed to do that, they just ignore their treaty obligations in perpetuity.

NPT:

"Article VI

Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control."

A 20MT weapon detonation could result in disabling the global electrical production and distribution system, as well as permanently disabling the electronics necessary to move food, water, and medical supplies.

Your thesis is that an instant global economic collapse, destruction of all advanced agricultural systems, transportation systems, waste management systems, water purification systems, etc. won't result in >= 20M deaths.

You really have no idea what the effects of a significant nuclear exchange would be.

The mid-80's were actually the peak of cold war TNW preparation.

NATO's provocation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83

Soviet response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYAN

This fallout remained in the atmosphere at such significant concentrations that it intermittently interfered with terrestrial radiological contamination measurement for decades after above-ground testing was banned.

Volcanic eruption energy is partitioned between thermal and mechanical energy. The mechanical energy is distributed between translation (ejecta) and vibrational (tremors). These proportions vary significantly between volcanoes and eruptions. So, perhaps little of the energy is imparted to bring cooling aerosols and particles into the high atmosphere.

A limited nuclear exchange between RF/USA could extend to all large munitions stores, rocket stores, and petrochemical stores. All stores of nuclear launchers, warheads, and supplies intended for strategic war could be targeted.

Imagine all significant above-ground petroleum storage in RF/USA - large petroleum producers - is ignited. All counterforce sorties against targets near wooded areas will result in large forest fires.

Airburst nuclear weapons would be deployed against dispersed soft targets prone to firestorms - firestorms large enough to elevate soot into the region where it can mix with ionized fission products and weapon debris.