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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It makes it sound like these attacks are out of the blue with no justification. The Israelis have been bulldozing civilian homes and stealing their land without repercussion since 1967, not to mention a long history of summary executions and random shootings. This is the type of asymmetrical warfare that should have been predicted.

    The IDF response has been targeting civilians in far higher numbers with completely indiscriminate retaliatory rocket, artillery and airstrikes. The blockade of all humanitarian aid to the West Bank and Gaza, including food, fuel and medical aid will result in widespread civilian deaths. It’s the same tactics used in the Holomodor and in the Warsaw Ghettos, and most definitely war crimes.

    There are no white hats here.


  • That’s just not true. The Westinghouse AP1000 was given type approval in 2011. It’s what is referred to as a GEN3+ reactor. A lot of R&D was put into simplifying the design, reducing the number of pipe runs, valves, pumps etc compared to GEN2 reactors. It also used large sub assemblies that were factory built off-site then moved for final assembly.

    In theory they should have been cheaper to build, but they weren’t. Large assemblies that don’t fit together properly need a lot of very expensive site time for rework. There were other issues on top of that, which just compounded the assembly problems. It’s how Vogtle ended up going from $12B to $30B+, and V.C Summer went from $9B to an estimated $23B when the project was cancelled while under construction.

    The EPR units from Areva were similar GEN3+and received type approval in the early 2000s. They had similar cost overruns, for similar reasons.

    I have strong reservations about SMRs. So far the cost/MW is about on par with traditional reactors while the amount of waste increases by 2 to 30x traditional reactors depending on technology used.

    There are reasons why reactors moved from 300-600MW units to 1000MW+ in the first place. The increased output would cover what was thought to be marginal increase in costs. That turned out to be at least somewhat true.


  • Just like assuming a perfectly spherical cow, or a frictionless surface, you can completely ignore the economics, the massive cost and schedule overages to make nuclear work.

    Flamanville-3 in France started construction in 2007, was supposed to be operational in 2012 with a project budget of €3.3B. Construction is still ongoing, the in-service date is now sometime in 2024, and the budget has ballooned to €20B.

    Olkiluoto-3 is a similar EPR. Construction started in 2005, was supposed to be in-service in 2010, but finally came online late last year. Costs bloated from €3 to €11B.

    Hinkley Point C project is two EPRs. Construction started in 2017, it’s already running behind schedule, and the project costs have increased from £16B to somewhere approaching £30B. Start up has been pushed back to 2028 the last I’ve heard.

    It’s no different in the US, where the V.C. Summer (2 x AP1000) reactor project was cancelled while under construction after projections put the completed project at somewhere around $23B, up from an estimate of $9B.

    A similar set of AP1000s was built at Vogtle in Georgia. Unit 3 only recently came online, with unit 4 expected at the end of the year. Costs went from an initial estimate of $12B to somewhere over $30B.

    Note that design, site selection, regulatory approvals, and tendering aren’t included in the above. Those add between 5-10 years to the above schedules.






  • Sir_Osis_of_Liver@kbin.socialtoMemes@lemmy.ml3 browsers
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    1 year ago

    There were a number of sites that FF choked on, so I just ended up using Edge. uBlock works with it, and that’s about all I need for extensions.

    Not sure how people decided that Google is more altruistic with data handling than Microsoft, but here we are, I guess.





  • At one point we had a remote office in a bank. One of my coworkers, W, had a pretty severe intestinal condition.

    Anyway, I’m using the facilities, and one of the bankers comes in and heads to a stall. His phone rings while he’s in there, which he answers. It’s obviously a work call.

    By this time, I’m heading over to wash my hands, just as W slams open the door with an panicked look. He violently shoulders open a stall, drops trousers, and unleashes just an absolutely unholy flume of waste, accompanied by a couple of mercy flushes.

    “Uh, I’ll call you back”.

    I’m assuming lessons were learned that day.



  • I used to restore “barn bikes”, most of them were Japanese. It took me a while to figure out the difference between Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS) and Phillips screws. Of course over the years, a lot of the fasteners had already been cammed out by previous owners using a Phillips screwdriver in a JIS screw. I had to resort to the die grinder method far more than I’d have preferred.





  • “Regulatory sabotage” is the latest talking point put out by the nuclear lobby. It’s a fabrication. Regulations were built based on incidents and accidents in the past. Building nukes on the cheap would be like building deep-sea submersibles without certifications. It’ll work fine, until it doesn’t.

    Certification and licensing only make-up a tiny percentage of a plant’s upfront costs. Typically it’ll be dumped in with engineering/design costs and those would be down around 15% of capital costs, depending a lot on the project.

    The French government has traditionally been very pro-nuclear, and the industry has broad support from the population aside from the Green movement. They have had extensive incentive programs for the industry, both domestic and for export. And yet, they have had no better luck in building plants on time and budgets. Flamanville-3 is the poster child for overbudget nuclear projects. Construction started in 2007, was supposed to be on-line in 2012, but is currently projected to be completed in 2024. The budget went from €3.3B to an estimated €20B as of a 2019 French court audit.

    The “oil industry” doesn’t care about nuclear at all. Oil fired generators haven’t been a thing since the oil shocks of the 1970s. The few that are still around are typically used as backup or peakers, as they’re ridiculously expensive to run.

    The coal industry would be so inclined, but in the US, coal plants have dropped from ~65% of generation to less than 20% of generation over the last 30 years. New plants are almost as expensive to build as nuclear, and as the plants get to end of life, they’re being decommissioned rather than refurbished. The writing is on the wall.

    Of the fossil fuel industries, only natural gas is competitive, and the plants are far, far cheaper to build than about anything else. They are the preferred type of new generation for utilities that have access to gas. Only regulation or government mandates really slow down new gas plants.