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markmassie

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Transatomic Power Co-founder + Chief Technology Officer

http://transatomicpower.com

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physicstoday.scitation.org 7y ago

Tracking the Journey of a Uranium Cube

markmassie
3pts0
blogs.discovermagazine.com 7y ago

Major Ice Ages May Be Caused by Tectonic Collisions

markmassie
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medium.com 8y ago

What's wrong with NEOWISE

markmassie
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pavingforpizza.com 8y ago

Domino's Paving for Pizza

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www.wired.com 8y ago

Inside the Unnerving Supply Chain Attack That Corrupted CCleaner

markmassie
3pts0
www.38north.org 8y ago

Launch of the “Korea Computer Center”: An E-library of North Korean Software

markmassie
3pts0
www.wired.com 8y ago

A Weird MIT Dorm Dies, and a Crisis Blooms at Colleges

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4pts0
aeon.co 9y ago

Is a mission to Mars morally defensible?

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www.theatlantic.com 9y ago

The Demon Voice That Can Talk to Your Smartphone

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3pts0
fusion.net 9y ago

Welcome to the pyramid at the end of the world (2016)

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2pts0
www.recode.net 9y ago

Apple of my ear: The iPhone 7’s missed audio opportunity

markmassie
3pts2
www.washingtonpost.com 9y ago

Abolish the Senate

markmassie
3pts0
arxiv.org 9y ago

WiFi Signals Can ID Individuals by Body Shape

markmassie
3pts0
www.theatlantic.com 9y ago

The Leak Prosecution That Lost the Space Race

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www.newyorker.com 9y ago

America at the Atomic Crossroads

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www.rferl.org 9y ago

Google Maps Reverts to Soviet-Era Place Names in Crimea

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www.washingtonpost.com 10y ago

The syndrome impairing astronauts’ eyesight

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120pts60
archive.wilsonquarterly.com 10y ago

Has Futurism Failed? (2006)

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foundersfund.com 10y ago

A Thought on Thoughts About the Future

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www.wired.com 10y ago

A Cold War Plan to Put a Ring of Copper Around the Earth (2013)

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21.co 10y ago

Sensor21: Earn Bitcoin by collecting environmental data

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www.workingonthemoon.com 10y ago

Working on the Moon

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nymag.com 10y ago

America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny

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5pts0
www.disneyresearch.com 10y ago

Tag-Less Identification of Electrical Devices via Electromagnetic Emissions

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en.wikipedia.org 10y ago

Rocket mail

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www.nytimes.com 10y ago

We’re more honest with our phones than with our doctors

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www.smithsonianmag.com 10y ago

When the Soviets Banned Rock Music, Teens Used X-rays to Bootleg Records

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news.mit.edu 10y ago

MIT scientists overcome key CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing hurdle

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nytimes.com 10y ago

The New Atomic Age We Need

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qz.com 10y ago

It’s completely ridiculous to think that humans could live on Mars

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56pts76

This proposal seems to make a lot sense for deciding what to tax, but I am curious about how this would affect who is getting taxed and where these changes would be felt.

It seems like decreasing taxes on labor (people) and increasing taxes on raw materials (things we dig out of the ground) would simply shift the tax burden away from urban areas (where people are) to rural areas (where the mines are).

Wouldn't this just make things worse for poorest parts of the country, like Appalachia, where the mining industry is typically the only provider of well paying jobs?

BitPay and PayPal 12 years ago

Again, why the focus on the average person? Does the average person actively, directly participate in space industry? No. Has the average person been profoundly affected by the technologies developed by space programs? Undeniably.

It's great that you take such a pragmatic approach!

I recommend this article [0] by Mark Lynas [1] that explains the arguments that convinced him to go from a vocal anti-GMO activist to, what he calls, a pro-science environmentalist. (I think the hip term now is "eco-modernist"). From the article:

What happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

[0] http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/conservation-a...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lynas

Nuclear engineer here. Definitely not in the software industry, but still do a bit of coding, albeit mostly in Fortran because (most) reactor design software stays pretty far from the bleeding edge.

I come to HN for the startup culture discussions. Even though my field is pretty far from the software/tech field, it's pretty amazing how much of the startup experience remains the same.

For those interested, my startup, Transatomic, is developing a molten salt reactor that's cheaper than coal and (hopefully) as cheap as natural gas, just without the greenhouse gas emissions.

We just closed our first round of VC funding from Peter Thiel and Founders Fund a few days ago. More details here:

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2014/08/05/nuclear-waste-start...

Co-founder of Transatomic here.

I'm not sure what you mean with your first point, but your concern with corrosion was solved in the 1970s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where they operated a molten salt reactor for four years. That reactor demonstrated that extremely low corrosion with a high-nickel alloy called Hastelloy-N, which is similar to the metals widely used to handle other high-temperature molten salts in industries like aluminum refining.

You can find more information on corrosion and material compatibility in section 2.5 of our technical white paper:

http://transatomicpower.com/white_papers/TAP_White_Paper.pdf

Probably not. It's commonly assumed that the development of grid-scale energy storage will enable a large-scale transition to intermittent renewables like solar and wind. In reality, it will just entrench the lowest cost energy source. If you can store large amounts of energy, why not use it with a natural gas plant that produces electricity at much lower costs than solar or wind?

The Germans actually lost the air war by themselves despite a huge technological advantage over the Allies. The Germans developed something of a love affair with the dive bomber. They were effective early in the war, but once Allied dog fighters caught up with their German counterparts, dive bombers became obsolete. The Germans continued pumping out dive bombers at the expense of producing more relevant fighters. It ended up costing them the air war.