andygates

I'm really not sure you can amortize deaths like that to individuals. Folks are dead or they're not.

Deep geological time isn't very relevant to human civilisations. The Fall Of Civilisations podcast has great long deep dives into what does threaten them, and the score is about 50:50 between climate change and Outside Context Problems.

"siri, what is a proxy war?"

Nothing runs at 99.99; 85% is a realistic nuclear reactor uptime. And remember to have multiple gensets so you can take them offline for maintenance.

Variability is smoothed with diverse overbuild and robust inteconnects (sorry, Texas).

Batteries are needed for peaker plants, like gas is used now. But they don't need to be everywhere.

Nuclear power stations have very slow demand response. That used to be done by gas peakers and hydro; in a decarbonised world that changes to battery peakers and hydro.

Interesting word choice "consumable" versus "parts require maintenance".

One suggests a lie, the other is just SOP in any plant with moving parts. Are you sure you're an engineer?

The carbon industry wants delay on decarbonisation. New nuclear projects are poster children for delay, because the industry has been mostly incompetent at shipping and lacks urgency.

"Serious designs" are nice but no pathfinder demo plants yet. And all that stretches the timescales.

It's a technology demonstrator, and one of the technologies it is demonstrating is "survive the night". Does the heating, panel and charge management all work as expected? Repeat! Then fly once the daily charge-state is understood.

This looks like a job for demilitarised Jaegers.

That's the most obvious part of the grounding, but the ship is properly wedged at both ends. It's not the whole problem.

That’s just a bit of wraparound suction flame, no big deal.

The landing propellant comes from very small header tanks (to reduce slosh), and those tank sizes constrain how long they can run a landing burn. Future iterations may end up with a bigger header: these are still early prototypes.

The other key take-home is that nobody got a serious case so that's 100% effective at preventing the collapse of the healthcare systems of the world.

It's really good news all round.