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Bongkrek acid [2] is odorless, tasteless and is not destroyed by cooking. Food can show no signs of spoilage and contain a lethal dose, though fermented products that were contaminated during production might show differences in color, texture and smell if the Burkholderi out-competed the normal fermentation process.

> So if we didn’t need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we weren’t seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the business take off, were eager to support it. And we, in turn, were eager to have them: they were the ones, after all, who joined us in taking a real leap when it felt like there was a lot more risk on the table.

> ...

> Our intent in starting Oxide was not to be an acquisition target but rather build a generational company; this is our life’s work, not a means to an end. With our Series C, customers don’t have to merely take our word for it: we have the capital to assure our survival into the indefinite future.

Maybe you could read that and think its complete bullshit and they're lying their asses off. Considering the people behind Oxide and their history, that's vanishingly unlikely though.

The reasonable conclusion is that they would not have raised yet more money if it wasn't due to being offered very generous terms by investors who wouldn't threaten the long-term future of the business.

Under "rail break monitors" it mentions both electrical continuity and time-domain reflectometry can be used, and are most frequently used on high-speed tracks.

In addition, there are vast array of other detectors using acoustic sensors, strain gauges, accelerometers, cameras in the visible and infrared spectrum or laser measurement, that potentially could have detected an anomaly (i.e. damage to the wheels of other trains before the incident).

Nuclear reactors do not work off radioactive decay. U-235, for example has a half life of 704 million years. Radioisotope thermal electric generators [0] by contrast do run off radioactive decay, an isotopes used for that application have short half-lives, such as Pu-238 with 87.7 years.

Commercial nuclear reactors use unenriched or minimally enriched fuel. This means that, within a fairly short period of time, the percentage of fissile material in the fuel drops to the point where continuing to use it is no longer economical. At that point the fuel is a mixture of extremely hot fission products, transuranics, unreacted fuel, and non-fissile (but fertile) isotopes such as U-238.

It's not practical to use the decay energy from the fission products for power. What would make much more sense would be to remove the fission products and recycle the fuel that remains into new fuel (for a reactor that's designed to use it). This would be a much more efficient use of mined nuclear fuel (allowing nuclear power to be used for thousands of years), it would vastly reduce the volume of nuclear waste, and it would mean nuclear waste would only be hazardous for decades to centuries.

The US was on the path to this with the Integral Fast Reactor and Pyroprocessing [1] developed by the Argonne National Laboratory. This was killed [2] in 1994 by the Clinton administration. Not for any technical reason, but because it was a "threat to nuclear non-proliferation". How that makes sense when, to the best of my knowledge the process developed by Argonne couldn't be used to produce weapons-grade material, and even if it could the US already had nuclear weapons so it wouldn't be proliferating it to a non-nuclear country, I don't know. But, apparently, since some other forms of nuclear waste reprocessing can be used to generate weapons-grade material (by extracting Pu-239), it was a bad symbol so it had to go.