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.
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.
It is all about having the workforce able to deliver on the military ambitions.
This has been well known for a while, and western governments have started to say the quiet part out loud to justify the insanely large handouts required to build civillian nucleaar power.
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.
I found this interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59hVaIjxMIM but people say it does no longer work on recent Windows version. Also I don't like to install random binaries from Mega or similar.
In the end a realistic reactor simulation would probably to complicated for the layman, anyway.
try Nucleares (on Steam), it's a heavily gamified one but does cover various important aspects, including Xenon poisoning. You can find some play videos on YouTube.
Xenon-135's huge neutron absorption cross-section and its buildup/decay dynamics create the "xenon poisoning" effect that makes power changes tricky and can even prevent reactor restart after shutdown - a critical aspect of real reactor operation.
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.
Well, 52 weeks is 364 days, and a calendar year is 365.5±0.5 days, so if you are doing “years” by whole numbers of weeks and don't want to get more than a week out of sync with the regular civil calendar, you are going to need a 53 week year every few years, regardless of your start date.
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.
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.
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.
Search as I may, I can’t for the life of me find the reason why. Does the robocalling industry have particular pull in Nebraska for some reason, or as far as we can tell are they just wanting to go their own way?
The explanation someone gave me years ago was that midwesterners can speak to northerners and southerners without needing a translator, and the cost of labor in rural Nebraska and Kansas (which also had a ton of call centers at the time) is low.
[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0900/ML090080661.pdf
[2] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml0816/ML081690374.pdf