Acdtrux posted:

i think i discovered this by accident but scihub works best if you paste urls into the search bar instead of searching for article titles

you can just paste the doi onto the end of the sci-hub url. Ganbatte

liceo posted:

a number of us are co-reading max ajl's a people's new green deal which is available here: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/48775

otherwise re-reading écrits and fucking hell lacan is so great

Bumping this recommendation. Short and packs a lot of punch, a great contribution to Marxism and Third World-centered environmentalism

babyhueypnewton posted:

Look at bayarea415,

Catchphrase

Scientists in China are about to turn on for the first time an experimental reactor that's believed by some to be the Holy Grail of nuclear energy — safer, cheaper and with less potential for weaponisation.

Construction on the thorium-based molten salt reactor was expected to be finished this month with the first tests to begin as early as September, according to a statement from the Gansu provincial government.

Thorium is a metallic element with radioactive properties, close to uranium on the periodic table, which was considered as an alternative fuel source when the US was first developing nuclear energy technology in the 1940s.

The Americans even developed an experimental thorium-based molten salt nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, but the US shut it down and abandoned thorium in favour of uranium in the early 1970s.

The new reactor, built at Wuwei on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China, is an experimental prototype designed to have an output of just 2 megawatts.

According to a paper published in the Chinese scientific journal Nuclear Techniques by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, the longer-term plan is to develop a series of small molten salt reactors each producing 100 megawatts of energy, enough for about 100,000 people.

Molten salt plants don't use water for cooling like traditional nuclear power plants and so can be built in desert areas, the paper says, such as China's sparsely populated western regions.

anyway digging around a bit more from that one led me to this one

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.59

To summarize, a properly designed (readily maintainable) molten salt fast reactor isobreeder represents today's “best” Gen IV option because:

• Its compact size and simplicity relative to alternatives invoking solid fuels and/or moderators (all of the other GIF candidates) means that it should be relatively cheap to both build and operate (less metal needed to fabricate/maintain and no initial fuel fabrication, handling, durability, shuffling, transport, reprocessing, or fuel refabrication costs).
  
• Its fuel cycle is genuinely sustainable – no fuel shortages “forever”.
  
• Radwaste management should be relatively simple/cheap.
  
• Operation would neither generate nor require huge amounts of transuranic elements.
  
• Its ˜700°C operating temperature and high heat capacity working fluid translates to higher electricity generation efficiencies and more direct process heat applications.
  
• Its nonreactive, high-boiling, working fluid reduces both the probability and consequences of accidents (spills, etc.).
  
• When steady state is attained (˜100 years) they would obviate the need/rationale for either uranium enrichment or uranium mining.
  
• Fueling them would generate far less environmental impact (e.g., mine tailings, etc.) than would any of the nonbreeder Gen IV reactor concepts.
  

This scenario's primary drawback is that it would require virtually everyone involved with researching, implementing, regulating, or “helping” the USA's nuclear power industry to embrace a massive paradigm shift. The reasons for this include:

• The nuclear industry's current business model is already profitable, firmly established, and primarily cost-plus which means that most of its leadership resists change.
  
• The USA's political system strongly caters to established (moneyed) interests and has become virtually incapable of addressing any politically sensitive and/or nonimmediate national problem (e.g., climate change) regardless of how important it might be from a “technical” point of view.
  
• Its leadership has supported (via earmarks) a series of long-winded, multi $billion, boondoggles (e.g., the Savannah River Site's MOx plant, LLNL's “National Ignition Facility”, SANDIA et. al.'s Yucca Mountain studies, Hanford's “Waste Treatment Plant”, the Idaho National Laboratory's “steam reformer”, etc.) that have served to convince many people that any sort of US nuclear renaissance is apt to be risky, environmentally impactful, and prohibitively expensive.
  
• The leadership of the USA's national laboratories is no longer able to make tough decisions or authorize the sorts of “messy” real-world experimentation required to develop an unfamiliar reactor concept and then demonstrate its viability (currently, if a proposed project can't be almost 100% proven/completed with “paper studies”, it won't be undertaken). The Nuclear Regulatory Commission possesses the same mindset.
  
• The leadership of most of the world's environmental organizations does not realize that a properly implemented nuclear renaissance represents the most reasonable way to serve their cause and therefore continue to resist anything that might lead to one.
  

i appreciate this retired scientist's candor, but i imagine that the last few years have probably shown him that our inability to address national problems is not just limited to the "nonimmediate"

Edited by Constantignoble (Aug. 31, 2021 16:25:24)

Acdtrux posted:

In 2004, it was found that job applicants to a Hooters in West Covina, California, were secretly filmed while undressing, prompting a civil suit filed against the national restaurant chain in Los Angeles Superior Court. The company addressed the incident with additional employee training.

This never would have happened if not for a lack of training