"what the fuck is exponential backoff" - someone writing software for these meters ten years ago

it's also made worse by the fact that many appliances are turned on in blacked out areas, so when these are brought online, there's spike in load power that then tapers off pretty quickly. this can be managed by powering on areas on in smaller chunks, as small as single blocks

this is PSA to turn off appliances off during blackout (biggest ones are things that deal with heat: mostly air conditioning/heat pump and all kinds of heaters)

also in Spain specifically some capacity was met by spinning generators from nuclear or hydro or gas powerplants, but also there's a lot of photovoltaic generation, which doesn't vary frequency with imbalances in load. after loss of power nuclear reactors that were running at that time are out for a day because of xenon poisoning, and it looks like first nuclear powerplant went online again only yesterday

maybe they'll update inverters in at least some of generating stations so that blackstart with PV assistance would be possible in future, because from what i understand most of these are grid-following inverters. this might require policy changes and tighter control of PV powerplant by grid operator. hydropower is most useful in starting from complete blackout condition because all power that is needed is just what it takes to turn valves + some communications and remote switching to make sure it goes to other powerplants

for now no one knows what really happened, but i do hope that investigation will allow for figuring out what went wrong and preventing similar failure in the future

it looks like Portugal had it even worse - their power generation dropped to zero (until 15:00), disconnected from Spain, started hydro and pumped hydro to bring up gas and wind power (22:00 to midnight), then solar, then when they figured their shit out connected to Spain again and lent them a couple gigawatts (bigger grids are more stable so it's good for both)

idk if i want agent orange to get a stroke because on one hand might just die but on the other hand the nonsense he speaks could just get more powerful

i'm convinced that rhyming slang is just 19th century coal mine brainrot. you cannot change my mind

These were not supposed to be breeders, but this is only due to agreements that are ignored ny now. Technical capability is there

This sounds like that material would be more useful in high performance radars, not as flash memory

jerboa defaults to .ml

time travel (backwards) would break physics as we know it, what are you talking about lol

These are fast reactors and operate on different principles. The coolant there is sodium and while hard to design and run, it's doable. French had similar reactor but only one and it was shut down. Nice thing about fast reactors is that these can burn even-numbered isotopes of plutonium, useless in water moderated reactor, and give fresh mostly 239Pu plutonium of good quality. weapons grade even, and IAEA doesn't like it. But who cares since nonproliferation is dead anyway?

SMRs too

yeah either that or sometimes that one biologist illegally gene-editing embryos shows up

i mean boeing technically knows all their whistleblowers

i will call MSRs (not thorium power, this is fine) toys until a single 100MWe+ unit gets built up. wanna bet that it won't happen in 20 years?

they haven't demonstrated anything yet, but maybe they will develop something. perhaps. maybe. it's all uncertain at this point and technology for it doesn't exist yet.

high voltage transmission lines are a thing, look up where lignite or hydro power plants are situated relative to where people live. this is a solved problem

You're confusing subcritical reactors with thorium power

You absolutely can make a nuke out of thorium-derived material (first in Teapot MET, 1955, then possibly later by India). It's not widely used because plutonium is similar and in some important ways superior material

The tradeoff in using salt as fuel/coolant is that now almost all the fission products are in soluble form, instead of nice ceramic chemically inert pellets, which makes any spill much worse, and i wouldn't say it's safer for this reason - it's different, and it's a tradeoff few thought it is worth making. We have figured out how to make PWRs not explode so it's not that big of a problem. This goes both for uranium or thorium as a fuel

The reason Yucca Mountain is needed is that nuclear waste exists, if US reversed their policy on reprocessing maybe it wouldn't fill up so quickly. It's a matter of political will

At least now, the chemical engineering for reprocessing fuel when reactor is on is not there. Maybe it'll get developed in this project, but this didn't happen yet. It all has to be weighed against existing alternatives, and it's possible to breed 233U in normal water-based reactors, so maybe there's a little reason to make MSRs in the first place. India has some thorium energy projects as well, but they're slowed down by lack of fissile material to bootstrap it (you can't fuel reactor using thorium only, it needs some fissile material)