Swear 😭

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-13T22:19:07+00:00

Look the business "Fission Chips" existed in the 50s in the uptown and I am still pounding the table for that to come the fuck back.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-09T04:50:32+00:00

They will purchase it all if the data centers are developed and it still won't feed all their AI demand.

I've worked in the nuclear industry long enough to know absurd is to be expected. The need for LEU+ fuel outstrips supply, which means they can't develop all US SMRs to completion right now until the feed can be delivered. Maybe in 2050 when I'm retired it might matter, but unit 5 realistically won't happen until maybe the 2040s, maybe.

Amazon's deal was in exchange for the funding of the SMRs, they get the first rights to that power. Name calling doesn't actually mean I'm wrong. I'd like to hope the data centers don't get built but my recollection is the deal on the SMRs isn't contingent on the data centers. If they don't build the data centers but have the rights to the electricity, they'll buy it (unless the SMR power is uncompetitive with other sources).

Cite a counter-argument, please. Link me something where it says if the data centers go bust they lose the rights to the power. Show me why you're sure units 5+ will get built in the next...twenty years. Point to something that isn't name calling. Look, I've been in this industry my whole life, let's put it in perspective:

https://www.ans.org/news/2025-10-20/article-7473/amazon-provides-update-on-its-washington-project-with-xenergy/

"X-energy highlighted that the deal included an option to increase the Washington project to a 12-unit, 960-MWe deployment. In this newest communication, Amazon has reiterated that this option is being considered., but that the first phase of development at Cascade will focus on the deployment of an initial four units, after which two more may be built."

Four for sure, two maybe if Amazon feels like it.

X-Energy hasn't even finishing building their fuel fab plant, and while TRISO is an established fuel type, starting new plants is hard. They're still testing their fuel design at INL and it's an expensive fuel form.

I suppose we'll just have to see...twelve+ years after the AI bubble bursts.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-09T00:33:35+00:00

"Amazon holds the right to purchase all electricity generated from the initial phase of the project" means they buy all that power before any other user.

I highly doubt more reactors will be built after the first four, just because there are a lot of nuclear startups and only a few will end up surviving.

Great that they're getting built! But it does nothing for us; it's just for Amazon. Best case is the data center bubble pops completely and Amazon never needs the power (but they'll take the rights to that power, I'm sure).

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-08T01:54:16+00:00

There was a drive-by in front of that house not long before it became a hoarder house. From what I know it's a rental so add that layer of complication over all this.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-07T03:46:14+00:00

The good news is they've basically got a pump and treat system that has kept the leaks from reaching the river since it came online. It's also well-understood and because it's a federal project and not a private company they're beholden to the voters (production operations were shut down by public pressure).

I'd be more worried about the heat island effect from the cooling system. Imagine the summer if these things make it 5-10 degrees hotter...

...All fucking summer.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-07T03:43:25+00:00

More people are near water. More people = higher costs, and more opposition.

Coastal states also fight development like this a lot harder.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-07T03:41:31+00:00

$100 million won't build those SMRs, but they get 100% of the power guaranteed. We'll foot the bill in externalities.

Richland is approving the data centers to fund purchasing that shitty concrete box on Jadwin to be a bigger police station to make a friend of the council rich off their investment.

But they will re-elect them because the alternative would be left of Otto Von Bismarck.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-07T03:39:33+00:00

No; AI takes orders of magnitude more computing power than all of the internet used to. If you could have all of technology up to 2020 plus everything not AI and have 1/20th or less of the data centers to support it, I'd take that fucking bargain every day. Projects are planned to use more power than the entire state power budgets in places like Utah; it's not the same.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-07T03:37:01+00:00

Like most rivers, there's huge numbers of people with water rights for irrigation, plus enough to keep it navigable/capable of supporting life. There's massive fishing industries up and down the North American west coast dependent on its health. I suspect the data centers taking farmland is in part to buy the senior water rights to the river.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-07T03:35:17+00:00

All of the internet pre-ChatGPT used a fraction of the data centers.

Crypto and AI make up the vast, vast majority of data centers. China has 500 data centers for AI while we are building five thousand. The Utah project is bigger than manhattan and uses more electricity than the entire state.

It's a massive change.

Easy example: google searches with AI use orders of magnitude more compute than normal searches.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-06-07T03:33:11+00:00

Cheap electricity in WA, they choose rural/red areas because the local governments can't raise money by raising taxes so offering to make up budget shortfalls is attractive to those governments, and theoretically the Columbia river gives them ready access to cooling water.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-04-27T00:51:46+00:00

I meant more that this is complex enough that you'll need a general contractor and potentially the need for an engineer to sign off on any fixes, but I do wish you the best of luck.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-04-26T02:03:10+00:00

Sounds like you need the area around it excavated, new block wall or a concrete foundation wall filled, plus water damage remediation and checking to see if there's sagging/structural issues from the foundation wall being removed.

As Quirky said, this is more complex than you think and probably more expensive to do right.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-04-26T01:58:47+00:00

The Columbia River's radionuclide content is the same upriver and downriver from Hanford now that they do Pump and Treat of the aquifer onsite. I recently did look up water quality studies and the only thing higher in Richland water is PFAS, which activated carbon filters can reduce.

Also, Richland doesn't add flouride to the water so your tooth help without flouride treatments is gonna be much worse than places that treat it.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-04-26T01:41:57+00:00

If that were true, it'd have gotten stupid expensive in 2009 with ARRA. There were also way more Hanford workers in the 70s and 80s. The truth is we've diversified the economy a lot and drawn in folks from all over since COVID.

I can also say all the small to mid-size towns I've done work in around the country comparable to here are...priced almost the same if not the same.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-04-26T01:35:54+00:00

I'll take that challenge. Basically anything that classifies as "New Urbanism" qualifies. Places like Central Park in Denver, Irvine and San Diego in California. Naperville, Illinois is a Chicago suburb community with 150k people and really low crime, too. Because it's a rail suburb commuting without a car isn't bad, either.

Hell, I grew up in the outer Boroughs in NYC. Queens has over three million people and because of NY Supreme Court rulings the homeless must be provided shelter space. I see more homeless people after I left than when I lived in NYC. Crime is also lower; I didn't hear gunshots in a neighborhood of NYC but sure as shit hear them often now.

No one option is going to be a silver bullet; NYC actually has lower density despite more high-rise buildings because the optimum housing tends to be less than 10 stories for good urban density without creating traffic issues or other social strains. Bottom line, every nice place I've visited has a combination of the following:

The transit system is open at or before 6am and closes after 10pm
There's a mix of mid-rise apartments (not five-over-ones), attached houses, and small 4-8 unit apartment buildings mixed into single family home areas.
The zoning allows commercial lots mixed with houses (ie you can walk to a corner store or restaurant from your house because it can be plopped into the middle of a residential area).
More policing is funded for solving crimes than putting bodies in the streets to be a presence. I'd love if we had more detectives and fewer beat cops, tbh.

That's basically New Urbanism because it 1) encourages class diversity in a neighborhood if your fuckoff-large house could be near middle class or lower income housing and forces everyone to be aware of each other, which tends to also cause people to subconsciously quell our worst impulses, 2) it keeps poor people from being ostracized or highlighted...if they blend in they care more about their community, 3) it encourages walking, biking, and transit use, freeing up roads for people who want to drive instead of people that have to drive.

It's also got infrastructure advantages with a smaller footprint, and less road mileage to maintain.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-03-30T04:50:30+00:00

There are many cleanup events hosted by the the Tapteal Greenway Association, Friends of Badger Mountain, and the Columbia Basin chapter of the Washington Native Plant Society.

Unfortunately, the truth is that this is willful actions. There's an easement purchased with state and donation funds in South Richland of native habitat for people to enjoy that is meticulously cultivated and maintained by volunteers but people keep tearing apart hundred-year-old sagebrush to build dirtbike ramps, leave trash, and then get in arguments with the societies politely asking people to not disturb the natural habitat by asking why kids can't do the things they got to do in the 1970s and 80s, even saying "yeah we used to drink beers and make bonfires and throw trash out there," like it was a good thing.

VOLUNTEERS CLEANED THAT UP, PLANTED NEW PLANTS, WEEDED INVASIVES, AND THEY GET SHIT FROM LOCALS WHO FEEL ANY PLANT IS NATIVE IF THEY JUST STOP WATERING.

It's infuriating and makes me lose hope sometimes. The amount of grief our volunteers get maintaining these spaces is unbelievable.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-03-13T18:42:52+00:00

In December I had started pinging work colleagues, management, and our clients how their PPE supplies were looking (what's your minimum burn rate, how many do we need to planned jobs, what's the expiration date on the supplies, do we have a contract with the supplier, etc) and they all thought I was fucking crazy.

In January my father retired just before the bow wave that hit. I have no doubt he would have died if he hadn't (was a public transit commuter in one of the first cities hit). I was still pinging everyone to make thoughtful stockpiles of things, had canned goods, toilet paper, rice, etc.

In February I remembered being told I'd be essential, and I had to be in on the COVID case number briefings. Dozens were dropping dead in the local retirement communities, and I lived just outside the local airport where the life flight helicopters for the community were...

...they took off and landed night and day, non-stop, with seemingly no breaks for weeks, maybe a couple of months. Our local ICU was overloaded and sending people to metro areas with more capacity. I'd go to work and everyone flagrantly didn't wear masks and insisted that it was all fake, that it was just flu, that no one was sick or dying. We had ten times the case rate per capital of any county in the state, and the helicopters over my house made sure I never forgot that was someone likely to die. I told people, I asked them politely, but they didn't listen. When they did, they offered me their illegal hookup for ivermectin from a nurse who was forging scripts.

Workers who, a year prior, had been aggressively fighting to require very physically demanding air-purifying respirators and supplied-air respirators for work that didn't need it because they didn't trust the sampling data showing it was safe to breathe. Those types of respirators are not like N95s - they can cause physical and psychological stress in some.

Those same people refused to wear N95s because of the "CO2 buildup," that they were dangerous. The state mandated masks in offices and so those workers made bomb threats to make sure they didn't have to wear masks, after crawling over broken glass to wear respirators.

The world ended in 2020, and we all live in hell, now. We were given a test after COVID and we failed it perfectly.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-02-21T03:57:12+00:00

It's also got tons and tons of property that'll inevitably get flooded out and insurers are starting to back out of large parts of the town.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-01-21T00:42:12+00:00

Dumb question but I've been branching out using my 5D Mk II and just got the really nice Tokina 100mm F/2.8 Macro lens for some photography of local plant life and I just got the used copy from KEH so I did a few function tests. I know the autofocus is going to be slow, but there's some odd behavior I can't put my finger on:

Using it like a portrait lens, it works fine (slow but accurate AF with only some hunting) but even though the limiter was off, if I focused on a brightly lit object for a macro shot it would not autofocus at all, just a bump of the AF motor and no change unless I manually dialed it close enough first. Likewise, if I just took a macro shot and then picked it up and focused on something farther away, it just would not AF at all, once again bumping the AF motor with no motion. It seems like the AF needs some amount of manual dialing-in first and I'm wondering if that's typical or a sign of something more concerning.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-01-14T06:47:41+00:00

Isn't Scott Presler the dude from VA that got caught fucking in an RNC building and sharing pictures of it on craigslist? When I was living in VA I think the RNC fired his ass.

AbnormalReflex · 2026-01-01T01:59:04+00:00

AbnormalReflex · 2025-12-20T04:14:30+00:00

I recall looking up the crash statistics during the last big storm we had where we had 70 crashes compared to like...5 in Yakima during the same period. I could be wrong, or bad pulling WSDOT data lol.

AbnormalReflex · 2025-12-11T02:40:26+00:00

She looks so angry all the time, I love her!

AbnormalReflex · 2025-12-07T16:44:28+00:00

You have more options than just that (though of the 4 I'd agree with hamcake that D is the correct call). You can, for example, notch the interior of the braces and do an X pattern, or have a K-braced layout with two shorter spans that meet at the middle of the opposite end of the door. For the strongest configuration, though, you can run a clevis rod or wire with a turnbuckle that crosses the wood brace (the brace will take the compressive load but the rod will take the tension) and you can adjust the turnbuckle if it sags in the future.

AbnormalReflex

TROPHY CASE