There are no working SMR's ready to be deployed in the West. The company (NuScale) that was furthest along had its flagship project die after cost estimates ballooned. Its other project was a crypto scam.
Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.
NuScale is a terrible example. Their flagship project collapsed before it even started because of cost escalation and their other project was some sort of crypto scam.
Good for Anthropic for standing up for themselves but think of the masses of companies that decided not to take the risk. The tone was definitely set at Trump's inauguration with all the tech execs front and center on display. They knew that if they didn't play ball Trump would use government power against them.
Law firms blackmailed into doing pro bono work for Trump's pet causes, intelligence analysts not able to tell the truth, energy companies giving up wind leases and switching to fossil fuels. And of course the constant shakedowns for cash.
In his recent interview Emil Michael (DoW undersecretary, "AI czar") even mentions that the Anthropic case served as motivation for Google folding.
It is a shame that Google's leadership is so spineless. On the minuscule off-chance any of those VPs are reading HN - you are bad and you should feel shame for increasing x-risk for a percentage point of profit.
Don't forget OpenAI, whose CEO bragged gleefully about taking the contract Anthropic refused to sign since it granted the DoW the ability to build Skynet (autonomous weapons) and a Chinese-style mass domestic surveillance system using their models.
Google does plenty of evil. This has nothing to do with the slogan.
"Don't be evil" was never removed. But even if it was, the idea that Google just was champing at the bit to do all this evil but was held back by the pesky slogan is ridiculous.
> It is a shame that Google's leadership is so spineless.
This is wrong, just like the article you linked. Google has been a proud member of the military industrial complex for many years.
Alex Turner is naive when he thinks big psychopath corporation may have internal regulations to protect us from big psychopath government. He's somewhat deluded when he thinks this is a new problem and he personally has power against this. The only way we workers can enforce some level of ethics is via powerful unions (with strikes/sabotage), not as lonely individual "threatening" to leave the company.
I'm sorry he had to learn this the hard way. There's still plenty of time for you to realize that no or few company will grow a spine, because that's not what companies do, what they are for, or what they're directed to do (except maybe a small mom and pop shop).
> The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite.
Not according to the federal government's data. BTUs from fossil fuel production set a record last year and is on a faster pace this year. Your bringing up a few coal plants is only tangentially relevant.
> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.
Are you familiar with the concept of necessary but not sufficient?
In any event the war with Iran is speeding up the future that was coming anyway. China's EV and solar exports are surging throughout the world. Both China and India have said for many years that their emissions would rise and then fall.
For those that don't recall or weren't around the Obama administration send thousands of medical and military to assist with the 2013-2016 outbreak. A big part of what they did was construct medical wards, but they helped with treatment, PPE, testing infrastructure, etc.
That outbreak had 11K dead and things were on the verge of being a lot worse. There were beginning to be neighborhood level lockdowns to prevent spread and civil unrest. Its difficult to play what-if games but it certainly was a very serious situation.
From what I've heard this outbreak is spreading faster than that one at the same stage.
The US has travel restrictions, therefore you are incorrect that "western countries don't even entertain the possibility of preemptively denying travel from these countries until things get under control"
OK, guess I missed that one. Score a point for mean ol' Trump I guess.
But, you're ignoring that it's also not exactly a blanket ban on travel from the DRC, just "within the last 21 days", which... does that make a meaningful difference? And, where are the other western countries doing the same? Kinda my point. If it's done at all, it's a day late and a dollar short.
I believe that Ebola will kill you a lot faster than 21 days. It's not going to be latent in you for that long.
[Edit: Arodex notes that it can remain dormant for years (at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49418182). So, yes, someone could bring it back. It probably wouldn't be an active infection, though. But what is the alternative? Nobody who ever visits the DRC can enter the US ever again? That seems like overkill.]
> But, you're ignoring that it's also not exactly a blanket ban on travel from the DRC, just "within the last 21 days", which... does that make a meaningful difference?
What's the alternative here though? It's not really okay to lock your own citizens out of the country indefinitely, so there has to be some way for people to be able to come back home eventually. Requiring an Ebola test on entry would be one option, but those Ebola tests would probably be better used on patients in Africa, so it would be hard to defend such a policy from an allocation of resources perspective.
This would seem to be an issue MAHA would want to engage on. But they instead seem to be focused on issues for which there's no evidence or even substantial negative evidence like vaccines. What a wasted opportunity to actually improve public health.
yes, but at least you know what Grokipedia is, just like you know what you're going to get if you read Truth Social, or the Jacobin.
but because the content is assimilated by GPT/Claude/Gemini and then mixed in with everything else, the bias is much much difficult to spot, making it much more effective and reaching a much wider audience (i.e., those who never visit Grokipedia)
I don't know this plant. In navy submarine reactors like the S5W, you have 440V/3-phase power holding the clamp. If you dropped a rod due to a power or clamp malfunction, usually you'd simply shut down the reactor, drop all the rods and mechanically re-engage the clamp. It could take a few hours which isn't fun because no power which probably means submarine/snorkel depth to run the incredibly noisy diesel, but no step was particularly hard or dangerous.
Now I’m curious. What if it occurs when you’re like under the enemy and you can’t surface? Do you have to just chill at depth until you can get the reactor running again?
Warships have a “battle short” on some critical equipment, which will bypass safety equipment like fuses. If your gun turret traversal motors pull too much current in the middle of a battle, you’d rather risk damage or fire to have them keep working rather than disable themselves to protect from a fault. Total speculation here, but it would make sense for military reactors to have something similar, to put them in a mode where the threat of a reactor accident due to a malfunction is less than the threat from the enemy if it goes down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort
Likewise commercial aircraft have bypasses on the fuel and oil filters in case they get clogged in flight. The engine will need a thorough inspection if this happens but it's better to damage the engine if it gets you to the nearest airfield.
They initially didnt have quick restart procedures for that and it contributed to a nuclear sub sinking. After that they added those procedures and improved the technology
> After the accident Rickover further reduced plant restart times, which had already been gradually improving with new technology and operating experience, in addition to limiting factors that could cause a shutdown.[26]
I’ve never been in the Navy or on a submarine, but my impression is that SUBSAFE is about never ever having a reactor accident, at least partially for PR reasons. It wouldn’t surprise me if there simply are not procedures to deliberately put the reactor in a dangerous state.
The Navy may have done the math and determined the loss of a boat to the enemy is a less bad thing than the loss of a boat to a “nuclear accident”.
I desperately hope for and welcome anyone with experience in the space to correct me.
Wouldn't a nuclear powered ship sunk by enemy fire be a nuclear accident on its own? There would be a nuclear reactor on the seafloor, possibly a turned on one, surrounded by failed systems. I don't think it ever happened at war, but while I was looking for [1] I found a number of other incidents. I list them below
The ship can operate for a bit on decay heat. And they have battery banks to run major systems until conditions allow running at snorkel depth on the diesel engine.
And rumor has it some of the nuclear subs may work with a Stirling engine which can operate systems on heat alone.
out of curiosity, where's the heat for a Stirling engine coming from, or what would be the thermodynamic advantage if you were already collecting decay heat from the reactor? People breathing hotly in a tube?
AIP range is still limited though, especially at fast speeds. Thats why even the newest 212CDs still have have snorkels for their diesel and diesels are loud. SSNs are much better for global power projection.
Fine for running electric power for a time though. Which is probably what you'd use it for on a nuclear sub. Assuming you can spare the space/weight in your design.
Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.