Comment Re:Party like it's 1961 (Score 1) 90
Isn't that basically what a Chromebook is?
Comment AI arguments aside... (Score 1) 93
Until someone can really, and I mean REALLY, explain to me what constitutes a token in a way that I can calculate and predict, these sorts of billing models are meaningless. Only then can we evaluate what the costs, risks and benefits of AI use really are in any sort of quantifiable way.
Submission + - Promising process for nuclear fuel re-use and disposal (autonocion.com)
kwelch007 writes: A Canadian lab just ran a chemical process on real spent nuclear fuel and pulled out 90% of the long-lived danger in 24 hours, the part that forces a burial site to last 100,000 years, with the leftovers meant to fuel a reactor
The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, sit them in a pool of water for seven to ten years while the heat and radiation come down, seal them in concrete casks, and look for somewhere deep and geologically dull to leave them for the next hundred thousand years. Canada has been hunting for that burial site since the 1980s and still doesn’t have one in the ground.
A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all.
Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls WATSS can strip 90 percent of the long-lived material out of used CANDU fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn’t a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90 percent figure.
None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem.
The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, sit them in a pool of water for seven to ten years while the heat and radiation come down, seal them in concrete casks, and look for somewhere deep and geologically dull to leave them for the next hundred thousand years. Canada has been hunting for that burial site since the 1980s and still doesn’t have one in the ground.
A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all.
Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls WATSS can strip 90 percent of the long-lived material out of used CANDU fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn’t a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90 percent figure.
None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem.
Comment Re:Only in America (Score 1) 60
We don't have a parliament. We have a congress. That has worked tirelessly over the last fifty plus years to prove that they are so ineffective at doing anything at all that it's just easier to go around them and wait for the courts to step in to decide if it's OK after the fact. And once that started happening, the courts were subverted by the guys with the jackboots so that they didn't make "the wrong decisions," so, essentially, thuggish government officials have no checks and balances.
That's basically correct. The question now is, who's fault is that and who's job is it to fix the problem? I'll give you a hint. The answer to both is "the voting public."
Comment Re:Most users are oblivious to updating. (Score 1) 106
...Most IT departments have no idea how to set up automatic updating properly so that it still gets the job done, but doesn't piss off the users that you can't really piss off (executives, etc.)...g.
Not sure how to measure "most," but "many" is probably accurate. But that's not Microsoft's fault, it's the department/IT's fault. There are plenty of ways to manage updates with varying levels of difficulty relative to control.
Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 109
There's a big difference between how human authors operate and how LLMs operate...
Is there? How exactly do LLM's operate? I don't mean from a theoretical perspective. I mean from a "can you empirically tell me how LLMs generate their output?" perspective.
Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 109
That's not a good analogy. What Google did was more like, they went in to their own corporate library, made copies of a bunch of books, and took the copies into the room next to their own corporate library and studied them. The books never left the building, but the person who studied them did. Without seeing the text of the license Google agreed to (and also probably being a Copyright lawyer,) we will probably never know if Google actually did anything illegal here. Immoral, unethical? Likely, but illegal? That's not always the same thing.
Comment Re:Electricity (Score 1) 226
And I'm looking at that and thinking: Why the fuck hasn't government / the utilities done this for me?
That's all very impressive and commendable! I wish more were as thoughtful and motivated! But your above comment/question is probably the most important part of what you said.
Comment Re:Let's see (Score 1) 77
401k's are not wiped out.
401K' s are agnostic of the status of the employer. They are not a perfect solution to retirement funds, but at least in this respect they are safer than, say, most employer funded pensions.
Comment Re:Reason AI agents want "access to money" (Score 1) 29
I see what you tried to do here, but I have actually read "Ready Player One." It has nothing to do with this, but has much more to do with kids spending all of their their social time in Fortnite.
Comment Re:Why vacant for decades - Toxic waste? (Score 1) 60
You assume someone wants it and it is fiscally viable to rehab/refurbish for some other use. It may or may not be.
Comment Re: Oh well (Score 1) 251
I mean I wouldn't advise a student to go to college for a career with low pay and college debt. So we either need to reduce the education requirements for things like mental health workers, nurses, and teachers or we need to pay them more.
Or, we should not make said requirement so prohibitively expensive that going in to such a profession requires going into unsurmountable debt.
I'm an unapologetic Capitalist, but that doesn't mean I believe we should allow the education system to profit at gouge-level from the system, and it definitely means we sure as hell should not be subsidizing and/or incentivizing the system on both ends.
Comment Re:Now do it for groceries (Score 1) 123
Not defending the ISP's here, but that's not quite how it works in most of the U.S. In most places, it's labeled Sale Price + sales tax. Sales tax is usually predictable based on City/State, but varies amongst them.
Again, not defending the ISP's here, but at most U.S. stores they like to advertise (for example) "$6 pairs of socks for $9.99+tax." The final price, including tax, will vary by City/State. The "+Tax" part is usually fairly simple because it's just one or two percentage-based summed taxes.
ISP's are trying to do the same thing, except instead of just adding the total local/state/fed tax, they're also adding fees such as maybe Pole fees, billing fees, who knows what else. This allows them to advertise "$49.99/mo for 1Gb service" but once all the fees are added up, it's more like $65mo. Not sure what the right answer here is, but what they should have to do is advertise "$49.99/mo+TaxesAndFees for 1GB service" and then publish what those itemized taxes and fees are for all services areas. They don't want to do the latter.
Comment Re:Defy FUD, Meet Expectations (Score 1) 110
leaving a petrol car in gear or putting it in neutral when coasting down hill, I bet they'll give you an answer from the 80s (put in neutral) rather than the answer which has been correct for every car manufactured in the past 20 years.
Please explain this. A car rolling downhill in neutral requires literally 0 fuel. One could turn on the ICE entirely I suppose, really making the point, but putting an ICE in gear could only introduce either acceleration beyond gravity requiring fuel or increase resistance (engine braking.) So clearly putting any vehicle in neutral and rolling downhill is the most energy efficient method. Now, if you're indicating that every car made in the last 20 years is some sort of hybrid with battery regeneration capabilities, I could almost see your argument. Except for that one part, where not every car made in the last 20 years has those features. Not even close.
Comment Re:Suuuure (Score 2) 49
The world would be a much better place if people could learn to recognize sarcasm again.
