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I've worked on a few big EPC projects in a specialised industrial sector, including some in the UK. Three things drive the first digit of cost, assuming you've hired relatively competent engineers and constructors:

1. (Design) Building floorplate and architectural complexity (i.e., divergence from 'big box')

2. (Construction) Schedule adherence. Almost any one-off expense to stick to the schedule is worth it, but to your point, these are often challenged or delayed. Building and testing equipment on skids off-site is almost always worth it.

3. (Design/Commissioning) Schedule adherence. For commissioning this is typically driven by design choices (did you pick a high-TRL process, or if not, do all the work required to mature it in parallel to construction?) and by building the right commissioning team (knows their job, knows the plant).

If more expensive plant & equipment gets you ahead on any of these 3, 99% of the time that is an overall optimisation.

Lime takes a while to set (a few days?)

Up to 30 days to set, and depending on the type of lime (hydraulic or non-hydraulic) and form/process (putty, hot mix, etc.) up to a year to reach full hardness.

One thing I do miss from the early internet was less anonymity being the norm on Usenet/forums/etc. Discussions tend to stay more civil when both parties know there's a "real" person on the other end.

Otherwise, my memory of early 90s internet supports exactly your conclusion. There may have been better opportunities for small discussions, but big ones devolved the same way they do today.

Yes. It's a little different between England & Wales, Scotland, and NI, but public rights of way (footpaths and bridleways) are very much a thing.

My experience is that it works well in general, but some landowners are better than others, and some highway authorities (which enforce the laws) are more zealous than others. Most of the issues I see around me is farmers allowing crops to grow through low use footpaths such that they become impassable.

The other tricky bit of PRoWs is that any path used by the public for 20 years continuously, without force, secrecy, or the landowner's permission, is legally presumed to be a public right of way, even if it isn't shown on the definitive map kept by the local authority. That can lead to legal fights e.g. [1] and [2]. There are also 'permissive footpaths' where landowners have agreed to allow the public to pass, but not become a PRoW. There are also s106 agreements (planning obligations) where developers must allow the public to use land as a footpath. The Thames Path has a mix of these.

In Scotland, there is a more general 'right to roam' which allows anybody to access most land (excepting buildings and their curtilages, military sites, and other obvious exceptions), but there are affirmative duties to maintain PRoWs that don't apply to open access land making them still relevant. England and Wales have some limited open access land as well, but much much less of it. NI has no open access land and (subjectively) fewer public footpaths.

[1] https://www.ramblers.org.uk/news/ramblers-win-court-appeal-1... [2] https://www.ube.ac.uk/whats-happening/articles/pippa-middlet...

No, it isn't. It is called 'City of London Corporation' in the sense of being a municipal corporation, but effectively it's just a local authority... except that businesses still get a vote along with citizens.

There's a (fairly basic but extant) English language requirement for naturalization, so it doesn't seem inconceivable that could be applied to a visa.

Don’t forget extremely expensive vitamins!

Their SNM license was for “up to 93.5% enriched”[1] and their decommissioning plan describes them as MTR-type Al-clad plates. So I’d take a reasonable guess that these are at 93% nominal enrichment, like ATR and HFIR fuel plates.

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0900/ML090080661.pdf

[2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0816/ML081690374.pdf

Respectfully, have you ever actually read an NTSB report? They're incredibly thorough and consider both causes and contributing factors through a number of lenses with an exclusive focus on preventing accidents from occurring.

Also, they're basically inadmissible in court [49 U.S.C.§1154(b)] so are useless for determining financial liability.

I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme

It absolutely isn’t. There is very little crossover between the RR SMR (which is 470 MWe, not really an ‘SMR’ by IAEA definition) and a submarine reactor core. Sub cores are smaller and optimised for different conditions. They’re vastly different tech. The teams at RR working on these are totally distinct with no crossover.

RR just got £9B for sub NSSS work. They don’t need a back door subsidy when they have a big cheque coming right through the front door!

If anything, UK govt is prioritising domestic technology, whether or not that’s the best from a purely economic point of view.

The parent's point is that these kind of systems can be implemented by postal services seamlessly, but not on a month's notice. I don't see how the form of the tax is material to the point being made.

Los Alamos is an NNSA lab; NNSA is a semi-autonomous component of DOE and its weapons activities budget is distinct from the general DOE budget. NNSA’s nonproliferation budget has been cut but they’re still very well funded on the weapons side even if they’ve lost quite a lot of people in the last few months.

The national labs are organized under the Office of Science (17 labs), NNSA (LANL, LLNL, Sandia), the Office of Nuclear Energy (INL), the Office of Environmental Management (Savannah River), Office of Fossil Energy (NETL), and Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (NREL). Some offices are doing better than others re: funding in the current environment!

As a nuclear engineer, it's hard to use these kinds of intro tools without shouting things at your monitor. For this, it was the omission of xenon when discussing simulating reactor transients.

I get that it's meant to be overly simplified, and it's a neat idea that is probably helpful for communicating some key concepts.

Offset financial years mean your finance people aren’t working furiously between Christmas and New Years getting the EoY stuff done. I feel bad for the ones in my company every year.

Yes, essentially this happens. PWRs and BWRs have operating limits on their power shape derived from doing those kinds of analyses.

They’re tend do be more physical than “arbitrarily xenon-poisoned” but represent a variety of extreme and nominal states to form an operating envelope, and then healthy margins are applied on top of that.

Well, context matters in looking at defamation claims.

Let's say you were involved in a freak hunting accident and shot somebody, but you were never charged with any crimes.

If the Fox News "hard news" program (if such a thing exists) said "skrebbel is a murderer" that is more likely to be understood to be a statement of fact, asserting something in a legalistic sense. [IANAL, but I think even this is unlikely to be defamation, although there is a somewhat similar case where ABC settled with Donald Trump over saying he was "liable for rape"]

If somebody on Tucker Carlson Tonight said "You can't trust anything that skrebbel guy says, he's a murderer!" that is more likely to be understood as an opinion based on disclosed facts, not a fact. That person isn't asserting that you committed or were convicted of a specific crime of murder, but rather that you killed somebody and it might be your fault. On a show were people are arguing and exchanging opinionated views, viewers should understand that these things are opinions. And therefore that's not defamation, because it's an opinion.

What Fox News argued was a bit more nuanced than that all of Fox News isn't news. Rather, "Fox successfully argued that one particular segment on Tucker Carlson’s show could only be reasonably interpreted as making political arguments, not making factual assertions, and therefore couldn’t be defamation."[1]

That feels like a fairly reasonable assertion for anybody watching Tucker Carlson.

[1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/fox-news-v-fox-entertainment-...

It’s Nebraska.

I would bet a few dollars that no Facility Security Officer (the name for people who manage security programs for defense contractor, despite sounding like a Sunday name for ‘guards’) in the entire NNSA complex has ever read Arms and Influence. That’s not quite their demographic profile.

Vultr has OpenBSD images too.

And his recording of the Cuban numbers station, if you want to hear what these sound like: https://www.mattblaze.org/private/17435khz-200810041700.mp3

Here's a sample of the referenced "Linconshire Poacher": https://priyom.org/media/247818/e3.mp3

In the UK, it’s a civil matter in almost all cases.

If you use non-cloudflare DNS, it should work.

Microsoft bought th handsets division of Nokia. The part that makes carrier equipment is still very much an independant Finnish company…

But... the length of a coastline is famously not definitively measurable. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox)

https://archive.is/2023.12.22-160602/https://fortune.com/cry...

several other huge fraudsters here (eg Caroline Ellison) get to walk

Caroline Ellison pleaded to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Looking at the Federal Sentencing Guidelines[1], even accepting for her being a cooperating witness, she's very likely going to prison too for a fair amount of time. Just for (probably much) less time than SBF.

[1] Run your own calculations: https://www.sentencing.us

Nuclear has a useful role to play. But it is in decline.

In the US, absolute nuclear generation has been relatively stagnant over the last 10 years as plant shutdowns have been compensated by uprating other plants[1]. About 2.2 GW are coming online via the Vogtle 3 & 4 units, more updates are coming, and the Palisades unit may restart… so I think you’ll see that number creep up a bit. Existing nuclear is economical to run today and I expect basically every operating unit will try to get a further life extension to 80 years.

Worldwide, we’re in a nuclear boom as plants are being built in Europe, North Africa, S America, and Asia, and Japan is finally shifting back to a pro-nuclear stance and getting reactors back online. (I wish fewer of those new plants were VVERs, though.)

This is all before we see any major work starting on SMRs or advanced reactors—-some of those will certainly get built too.

[1] https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...

They've had to change safety tests and infrastructure tests so the order plans would pass inspection.

It's interesting to square this sentiment with the people a few comments away claiming that over-regulation is killing this industry.

(Working in nuclear, I find neither sentiment particularly true nor totally false.)

The Guardian comes with a certain bias for disaster-mongering, especially (but not exclusively) at the expense of Tories; all of those things are real problems, but take it with a grain or two of salt.

Source: I live in the UK and still eat fresh veggies.