They can’t. Not in a nuclear explosion anyway.

Chernobyl was a steam explosion. Basically due to a poor cost cutting design, and not training the operators in the failure modes introduced by that design, the operators were able to accidentally raise power levels faster than the automatic systems could compensate. This made a ton of heat which flash boiled the cooling water. The resulting high pressure steam blew the top off the sheet metal building. The fuel never exploded, it got hot and melted. Total death count: ~100

Three Mile Island was only a meltdown. A lot of things lined up to go wrong at the same time and the operators didn’t recognize what was happening so they accidentally let the water in the core slowly boil until the fuel was uncovered and started to melt. When the next shift showed up they immediately saw what was wrong and fixed it but by then half the core had melted. (This led to a ton of lessons learned and improvements to equipment, procedures, and training) Total death count: 0

Fukushima was a hydrogen explosion. The plant lost all power from the tsunami and the back up generators were flooded. Eventually the core boiled off its water coolant. High temperature steam interacting with the zirconium cladding on the fuel started to convert into free hydrogen and oxygen and floated to the roof of the containment building. Eventually it found an ignition source and exploded. Total death count: 0 from radiation/explosion. ~50 from the unnecessary evacuation. (Evacuation deaths were mostly from people already in the hospital for other reasons that were then moved several hours away and died on route or shortly after. )

Just something to note, this is the full list of commercial nuclear power disasters. All of them. ~150 dead over ~70 years. Nuclear is by far the safest energy source.

Reactor fuel and bomb fuel are very different things. Current reactors use U-235 enriched to between ~2-5% with some of the new SMR designs using fuel enriched to ~20%. Bombs use ~90% enrichment. You can’t make a bomb with less than that enrichment. The physics just don’t work. No one is going to think that your rocket carrying a reactor bound for the moon is secretly a bomb headed to a city.

Also the total amount of fuel you would need for something like a 100MW reactor would be on the order of 100kg. Maybe up to 500kg depending on design. A tiny fraction of a rockets payload. You could easily let international inspectors look at it before launch to ease any fears.

Reactors on earth are huge and built to run at 100% all the time because that’s the most economical way to do it. That is not a physics requirement, it’s just the most profitable for the current economic environment. You can design a reactor that can throttle output if you need to and many small modular reactors currently in the licensing approval process include this ability.

Nevermind the fact that a “large” RTG only puts out about 100 watts of electricity and it’s nuclear fuel must be bred in reactors beforehand. There is only enough RTG fuel for maybe 20 large units on the planet right now.

I feel your pain. That was my biggest issue when I switched. Initially I switched to popos and after a month I could never get them working quite right. Eventually I changed to endeavor os and suddenly all the guides on how to mount drives actually worked.

The most important detail is it’s not a reboot.

The times I was living in an apartment complex were worse by far than living in a house. Because having neighbors that share walls is always worse. Made even worse if you work night shift.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to bike up a snow covered road at a 30 degree incline but I certainly don’t want to try it. Last winter me and half my neighborhood couldn’t drive up the only entrance road for several days after a heavy afternoon snow.

If parking and transit from the periphery of a city into the core actually existed and were usable then I’d like that but that’s not the world we live in now. One of my biggest gripes when traveling to a new city is trying to find parking for any of the big tourist locations. More often than not there is very limited street parking and no parking garages for several miles, nor any obvious transit locations. I often ended up just not going to the place I wanted to see because I can’t find a good way to get there.

I don’t mind walking a couple blocks to go somewhere. I do mind having to walk 30 minutes to see the one shop or restaurant I was interested in.

If you don’t already live in the heart of a big city they absolutely suck to get around in. Even more so lately with the advent of apps for parking or transit that you have to sign up for beforehand and that don’t have cash or card readers for non locals. I absolutely LOATHE creating accounts for more garbage apps and services I need to use a single time.

According to Google maps the nearest grocery store is 34 minutes away by bike with a 600ft elevation change, almost all of which is in my neighborhood. Going to work would be an 80 minute ride with 950ft of elevation change. I also live where it snows in the winter and my neighborhood sometimes doesn’t get plowed at all. Furthermore even if I wanted to ride a bike I would have to get onto a highway to get anywhere.

There is no public transit near me. None. At all.

Stop pretending that everyone should just live in a dense city and be happy with 30 neighbors.

He skips over the extremely important points of first knowing that a manual exists and knowIng how to access it. Then knowing what all the jargon means and what the manual doesn’t say because its written assuming a high level of knowledge already.

The reactors we use now can’t run on depleted fuel. It’s true that like 90% of the uranium is still present in deleted fuel but that’s not the problem. The problem is the build up of fission products. The fuel itself is essentially a ceramic pellet in a metal tube. As it gets “burned” some of the atoms in the fuel split into new smaller atoms. Specifically some that are “poisons” and some that are gases. The poisons absorb neutrons much more easily than the fuel atoms, stopping the chain reaction. And the gases create pressure inside the fuel pellet. If enough gases build up this can cause the pellet to crack, releasing them into the metal tube. Now you have one less barrier to releasing radioactive material and your pellet isn’t in the shape it’s supposed to be anymore making it harder to know how it will react.

So we can’t use them in current reactors, what about “low power” reactors? This is a problem of economics. Depleted fuel is hot, but not hot enough to quickly boil water and make steam. It’s like asking why don’t we power our house off all the free heat coming off a person all the time. The temperature difference and heat output is just too low to be useful in any but the smallest niche application.

So how do we deal with the depleted fuel? We reprocess it. Break down the fuel and dissolve it in acid so you can recover all the useful uranium to make new fuel. The leftover radioactive material can then be turned into glass and safely stored or you could feed it into a different type of reactor that “burns” the waste turning into something that only needs stored for 200 years instead of 20,000 years. All this has been well known and understood since the 80s but politics consistently gets in the way of actually doing anything.

I second your feelings on bazzite. Last year when I switched to Linux I spent a while researching the best distro for gaming and what I could find pointed to PopOS or Mint. Never even heard of bazzite.

I can only speak to PopOS as that’s what I chose when I switched last year. It’s been mostly fine but there have definitely been pain points. If you use a hard drive other than your os install drive then you need to go to the steam website to get the installer and not use the one in the built in app store. Getting mods working for games has been incredibly annoying anytime I have to use protontricks.

Non gaming related I’ve had numerous issues trying to manage permissions for my hard drives. Not sure if this is a Pop issue or general Linux issue.

It depends how they are designed. Same as regular uranium reactors. Thorium isn’t a reactor fuel after all, it’s what you use to breed more fuel. The actual fuel is still uranium. Thorium turns into uranium-233 then that is the fuel. Normal reactors use uranium-235. Both isotopes can be made to be passively safe.

Literally nothing you just said is correct.

Nonsensical or thoroughly debunked technobabble. The most annoying for me is faster than light communication via quantum entangled particles. Yes entangled particles will change each other’s state faster than light but this effect CANNOT be used to send information of any kind. At all. Ever. This has been known since engagement was first discovered but Hollywood is always like “I’m just going to ignore that second part.” I don’t even have anything against ftl comms or any other physics breaking things, just use an explanation that isn’t literally impossible and well known why it’s impossible for God’s sake.

Shooting two guns at the same time does in fact look cool. That’s not a myth. Hitting two targets with two guns at the same time is really hard though.

Nowhere did I say or imply that capturing CO2 is a net positive of energy. It is in fact a huge energy sink. If you aren’t using renewables to power CO2 capture then you’re just making the problem worse.

We have to do both. If today our emissions went to zero we would still see more warming because of all that CO2 we’ve already released. First priority is to get to net zero so we can stop making the problem worse, then we have to remove all the CO2 we released. We have the technology now to do step one it’s just a matter of scaling it up. While we work on step one we need to do the research on the best way to do step two so when we get to that point we have something ready to go. Pulling CO2 out of the air is going to be inefficient no matter what just from the physics of the problem but it still needs to be done and the energy to do so has to come from renewables.

Doing some back of the envelope calculations we have put about 1.6 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Latest estimates put the number of trees on earth at around 3 trillion. Looking at how much CO2 a tree takes up puts the average around 600lbs over the first twenty years. So combing all this if we want to plant enough trees to take up all the excess CO2 we would need about 5.3 trillion more trees, or almost double the total number of trees on the planet.

This is simply not achievable in a fast enough time span to make a difference. Nevermind that I was being super optimistic with all my calculations and the real number needed is likely much higher still.

It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.

In addition to what has been said already, in many places the cost to upgrade the electrical service to the building to handle the amount of power that could be generated can be as much or more than all the other costs combined. So now the building operators are looking at millions in cost with a potentially 30 year payback period. It just doesn’t make sense at that point.