BMan posted:

not saying this is definitely impossible for all time, but the physics of flying is heavily against this

mystes posted:

how about the physics of not flying

rotor posted:

theres an easy solution and we all know what it is but everyone is too afraid to say it, so I will:


AIRSHIPS NUCLEAR REACTORS

rotor posted:

the physics of just getting on a loving boat

rotor posted:

theres an easy solution and we all know what it is but everyone is too afraid to say it, so I will:


AIRSHIPS

BMan posted:

Sapozhnik posted:

i did a back of the envelope thing a while back and if you took enough jet fuel to fully load up a 787 and burned it in an electric power plant then it would produce enough electricity to power all of new york city for several hours. the entire new york subway, every skyscraper's hvac system, all of the lighting and computers, all of it.

commercial airliners use a crapload of energy

Spazzle posted:

You are almost certainly totally wrong.

TheFluff posted:

that owns

the first commercial nuclear reactor in sweden was also primarily used for district heating. they just built it inside of a mountain a few kilometers from a newly constructed stockholm suburb. it was only in operation for about 10 years, 1964-1974. i got to visit it about ten years ago, before they finally started dismantling it. it was almost entirely intact still, at that time. here's an old imgur album from that visit

Trabisnikof posted:

thanks for sharing, those photos are cool! those old tiny nuclear plants are always interesting

Jonny 290 posted:

bout 1200 MWh in 220,000 pounds of jet fuel . nyc is 5k-10k MWh for a day. So yeah

Jonny 290 posted:

100% agree hell yeah

remember when there was a bunch of hubbub about pebble bed reactors? what happened there

Jonny 290 posted:

bout 1200 MWh in 220,000 pounds of jet fuel . nyc is 5k-10k MWh for a day. So yeah

Spazzle posted:

You are almost certainly totally wrong.

Spazzle posted:

Edit: Stop confusing power and energy.

rotor posted:

if we simply all accept that things will move a little more slowly, we can all enjoy a much better environment.

so much technology is just "X, but faster" that gains early adopters a short-lived adantage until everyone adopts the new tech, then we're all back to where we were to begin with until the cycle begins again.

Jonny 290 posted:

remember when there was a bunch of hubbub about pebble bed reactors? what happened there

quote:

It was decommissioned on December 1, 1988... During removal of the fuel elements it became apparent that the neutron reflector under the pebble-bed core had cracked during operation. Some hundred fuel elements remained stuck in the crack. During this examination it was revealed that the AVR was the world's most heavily beta-contaminated (strontium-90) nuclear installation and that this contamination was present as dust (the worst form).[17]

Localized fuel temperature instabilities resulted in heavy vessel contamination by Cs-137 and Sr-90. The reactor vessel was filled with light concrete in order to fix the radioactive dust and in 2012 the reactor vessel of 2,100 metric tons (2,100 long tons; 2,300 short tons) was to be moved to intermediate storage until a permanent solution is devised.

Spazzle posted:

I'm seeing that NYC uses 5500MW (not MWh) on average. 1200MWh is about 20 minutes at that rate, and any power plant is going to be I dunno, 50% efficient, so maybe 10 minutes of actual power?

Edit: Stop confusing power and energy.

rotor posted:

if we simply all accept that things will move a little more slowly, we can all enjoy a much better environment.

so much technology is just "X, but faster" that gains early adopters a short-lived adantage until everyone adopts the new tech, then we're all back to where we were to begin with until the cycle begins again.

haveblue posted:

what's the problem, we've got more than enough hogs

Shame Boy posted:

i'm the million tons of bacon that europe was apparently using to run power plants in 2006 for some loving reason

Radia posted:

feels like there's a lot more cops than that

aardvaard posted:

work just handed me a magic leap devkit and said "see if you can make some sort of demo using this." oh my god this is such a garbage piece of technology. why yes, for my AR headset i would like a 45 degree field of vision. this is what i want.

Elder Postsman posted:

yeah

i'm big on slowing everything down, not needing all these 9s of uptime, shorter work weeks, etc, but lol, lmao @ that happening

mystes posted:

Just imagine the swine flue

rotor posted:

yes let me just put a steam engine in my airplane

FMguru posted:

the pebbles crack and shift around and shed intensely radioactive dust and cant be monitored or controlled

the prototype in germany:

it was such a contaminated mess that the best solution they could come up with was "fill it with concrete and then leave it cool off in the woods for a couple of decades until someone figures out how to deal with it

germany built an actual production unit, which also failed in hilarious ways. the wikipedia article on it is p lol, heres a typical sentence: "Pebble debris and graphite dust blocked some of the coolant channels in the bottom reflector, as was discovered during fuel removal after final shut-down. A failure of insulation required frequent reactor shut-downs for inspection, because the insulation could not be repaired"

the fuel would literally crumble and clog up the coolant channels

china just built one, maybe theyve got a design that fixes or avoid these problems. i hope so but i reserve the right to be skeptical

Shame Boy posted:

i read a fun study about pebble bed reactors that basically estimated what would happen if air got into the thing, since everyone always focuses on how they're ~not able to melt down~ but that's only one possible horrible failure mode

the study concluded that if you had a breach that let air into the reactor, all the incredibly hot graphite moderator cladding of the pebbles would immediately burst into flames, the expanding gasses would gently caress attempts to contain it up, and you'd wind up with another chernobyl without it even needing to melt down or anything