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[ChairmanPoo]

I have a pic of Scriver's mom

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Il Palazzo]

I have a pic of Scriver's mom

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Is that Mr Hasselhoff in scriver's mom?

[Greiger]

One of my nephews once was messing around in my old car and asked me why I had 3 pedals on my car.  I (not realizing he was serious) told him that it was a manual power petal that I need to press down on now and then to keep the headlights, radio and AC powered.

He believed me.  My sister accused me of becoming that uncle that says that old pictures are in black and white because color wasn't invented yet.

[LordBaal]

Hahaha.... you became that uncle.

[scriver]

I have a pic of Scriver's mom

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Is that Mr Hasselhoff in scriver's mom?

Of course he is, he is my father

What does it do

I mean I definitely didn't forget to mention that it was the parking break switch that was the switch and make the whole post pointless, I would never do that

One of my nephews once was messing around in my old car and asked me why I had 3 pedals on my car.  I (not realizing he was serious) told him that it was a manual power petal that I need to press down on now and then to keep the headlights, radio and AC powered.

He believed me.  My sister accused me of becoming that uncle that says that old pictures are in black and white because color wasn't invented yet.

The best kind of uncle.

[LordBaal]

And speaking of not using it in emergencies.... but but but they totaly use it on the Fat and the Rummius movies to make the car do backflips and mortals.... thats how it works in real life rigth?

[hector13]

It is also called the flip lever, yes.

[methylatedspirit]

I was logging onto my university's student* page to manage some stuff. Since this is the first time I logged on, I went to the first-time logon page. First off: unencrypted connection; it's using HTTP instead of HTTPS. Second, it sends you your password to your email. It sends your password. If you don't know, this is an incredibly bad sign. It means that they're storing your unencrypted password on their database. Warning bells should be going off right now. Since I apparently don't have a choice in the matter, I put my email in, and... the password is literally my ID card number. Really? They're not even trying now.

Edit: The login page is unencrypted, but the page after you log in is encrypted? The hell?

*I don't think I said a thing about this, so this will be news to all of you: I'm a college student now. I haven't actually taken a step onto the campus yet, but I've already registered, so I'll be in college soon enough. I'm taking a Diploma in Actuarial Science. It's basically Math: Finance Edition from what I've heard.

[scriver]

You're in a collage now
Woo-ow
You're in a collage -- now

[Lord Shonus]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/

According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total. Further exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time.

Just math. The estimated known and unknown reserves account for 230 years of fuel at current rates of consumption. That's also 10% of current electricity generation. So if we went 100% nuclear and all the unknown reserves were suddenly revealed to us, then it would only last 23 years, about half the expected lifetime of any of the existing plants.

If you go on a "this is the tech we have now, these are the uranium deposits we know about now" basis then you can't actually build that many more nuclear plants before they're using up the uranium faster than you can find it. At 100% nuclear, known deposits would all have been mined out after 8 years. Uranium could maybe be stretched to 20% of world consumption (known deposits all exhausted after 40 years, the lifetime of the plants), but not really any higher than that without being left with a bunch of expensive doorstops and companies fighting over the scraps of uranium.

So nuclear is good, but it's one of those things that's only good if nobody else is doing it.

There's three massive holes in this argument.

1. It is very unlikely that we've found all of Earth's uranium. While the study you're referencing does try to account for this, we've found so little that we don't really have a strong basis for calculating unknown reserves. Uranium prospecting didn't become a major thing until the 40s and especially the 50s, while the anti-nuclear movement took flight in the 70s after Three Mile Island and weakened the market a lot.

2. Natural uranium isn't the only potential fuel source - transmuting thorium to uranium is straightforward science. Not only is thorium thus a viable fuel source by itself that is difficult to weaponize (thorium transmutes to Uranium-233, which can technically be made into a bomb but is poorly suited to it), but converting weapons-grade plutonium (the disposal of which is an important step in the reduction of atomic weapons that we really need to be doing) to thorium is also straightforward.

3. All existing reactor designs (except possibly some of the experimental military ones on ships) are incredibly inefficient because the designs are sixty years old (as well as concerns about proliferation). Something like 1% of the usable fuel is actually consumed, the rest is waste.

[Naturegirl1999]

Why is the rest of it waste? Do we not currently have the means to use some the remaining g 99%?

[Iduno]

Why is the rest of it waste? Do we not currently have the means to use some the remaining g 99%?

It's somewhat difficult to thread the needle between "out of control reaction" and "we stopped the reaction prematurely", and obviously we lean towards the second, and add in safety factors on top of that to account for human error. We also don't recycle the material in the US, because that process looks a lot like making weapons-grade material, and the US is a well-known treaty-respector the US doesn't have/want nuclear weapons reasons.

[Lord Shonus]

Part of it is proliferation issues - the US (and other reactor-using nations) does not want civilians to have access to fissionables that could be used to make bombs, no matter how trustworthy those civilians are. If nothing else, there is the risk of "indigenous resistance fighters" attacking a shipment to a disposal facility and making off with bomb-making material to sell on the international black market.


More of it is the reactor design itself.

Reactor designs are currently split into 4 generations:

Generation 1 are the designs directly inspired by the original Manhattan Project and the Russian equivalents. These were very crude and have almost all been dismantled, and operated from the 40s to the 60s
Generation 2 are the first commercial reactor designs. 90% of civilian nuclear plants fall into this category, and the designs date to the early 70s.
Generation 3 are much improved designs that started going into service in the late 1990s. Ten such plants have been built or are under construction.
Generation 4 is the absolute cutting edge. Several designs have been operated with great success as demonstraton models, but zero are being built for proper use (on the civilian end). Compared to existing plants, Gen IV designs are projected to create 100-300 times as much energy from the same fuel.

[Naturegirl1999]

Why aren’t we building Gen IV? Are we able to? I imagine taking apart a non used Gen II could allow for parts for the construction of a Gen IV

Disclaimer: Am not an engineer, construction worker, nuclear engineer, or any other applicable fields, I am a college student, these are guesses

[Egan_BW]

Building a nuclear reactor out of pieces of used 50-year-old nuclear reactor sounds questionable from a safety perspective. And I'd guess it wouldn't save too much in terms in terms of construction, because you'd have to be more careful taking apart the old one, catalog all the parts, etc.