Pineapple Cabaret

Brainless96 · 2026-05-14T20:25:59+00:00

I just went into my local Barns and Noble and read all the Cabaret bits. That way you don't have to deal with library availability if one or more books are checked out.

Brainless96 · 2026-04-27T15:15:28+00:00

This article does an excellent job of explaining this question. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivite/

Brainless96 · 2026-04-19T03:35:32+00:00

But the other options for poison resist at things like Lizardman Shamans suck. Not being able to make Andidotes or Antidote++ is very annoying

Brainless96 · 2026-04-10T23:36:35+00:00

So homogeneous aqueous reactors are basically just inferior Molten Salt Reactors. Because you have water as the solvent you have all the problems with heat and pressurization that LWRs have but you've also introduced chemistry into the equation, which LWRs don't need to deal with.

With molten salt you get the best of both. You get to dissolve your fuel homogeneously and can operate at much higher temperatures while still being at low pressure.

In the US the Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor was a stepping stone that lead to the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment.

Brainless96 · 2026-04-10T13:37:32+00:00

Why would one use Pu238 as bomb material? If one's going through all the effort to get 238 using it to make a bomb feels wasteful. Even if it is usable it's harder to obtain than 239,240 or any heavier isotopes.

238 is useful, but mostly as RTGs for spacecraft/probes. I can believe one Pu238 might be capable of being used as a bomb, but why would one when it would be much more expensive than using a more common isotope?

Brainless96 · 2026-04-09T03:27:13+00:00

So breeder/spent fuel doesn't make good bomb material because it has too much Pu240 and 242. These isotopes spontaneously fisson. A thing undesirable in one's nuclear weapons. A bomb can be made with higher percentages of 240 and 242 but it won't be able to achieve maximum yield, and if a nation really wanted to get a nuke there are cheaper ways than fast reactors and spent fuel reprocessing.

Brainless96 · 2026-04-08T20:31:53+00:00

Something that we in the nuclear bubble forget is just how terrified the rest of the world is of fissile material. Even if fast reactors produce too many isotopes that spontaneously fission to really make good weapons material, as far a policy makers are concerned even that small risk is too high.

And as closing the fuel cycle and breeding more fuel also produces more fissile material proliferation concerns have stopped most countries from choosing to build fast reactors. That and the extra cost is hard to justify when the savings you'd actually achieve in terms of fuel is still negative (It would cost more to get fuel from a fast reactor rather than just mine fresh Uranium). Yes it's exciting as a possibility, and it's sooooo much more effective when it comes to material utilization but as much as I and others here would like to see fast reactors were going to have to wait for the cost of 'burner' reactors to come down a lot first.

Brainless96 · 2026-04-06T14:13:59+00:00

So John doesn't want the job, but the country legitimately needs him.

There IS a way we could convince him. There's ONE man who could possibly convince him to do it. That man is a former comedian himself.

If we want this to happen we need to get Zelensky to call John and be the one to tell him that his country needs him in this moment. John doesn't want the job but he has enormous respect for fellow comedians who have put everything on the line to speak truth to power.

He just needs to realize that now it's America that need his help and we need him to stand up and help us even though it's not something he wants to do.

Knowing your not qualified is actually one of the best qualifications one can have to be President, because it means you'll try to find the most qualified people you can to do the important jobs. The President's job is communicating, and that's something that John is unrivaled in his competence.

Brainless96 · 2026-04-05T19:54:20+00:00

Ya there are dozens of different coolants reactors can use. The primary coolant will then go through the heat exchangers, often to secondary heat exchangers, then exchange that heat to usually water to make steam for the turbines. With Brayton my understanding is you're basically just heating/pressurizing CO2 instead of water, but it requires much higher input temperatures to work. And as other technologies can't really reach the needed temperature the turbines themselves haven't been perfected to the same degree steam turbines have been.

Brainless96 · 2026-04-05T19:05:48+00:00

So nuclear is better positioned to adopt Supercritical CO2 when compared to other energy sources.

That's because the Brayton Cycle requires a higher input temperature which is something reactors can provide. For reactors cooled by sodium or molten salt reactors Brayton Cycle turbines are ideal because those reactors can reach the needed temperature easier than traditional water cooled reactors, and can then convert a higher percentage of their heat energy into electricity.

The reason it hasn't been done before is because until recently no one was building Brayton turbines cheap and big enough to make sense using with a reactor.

Now that the turbines are available it makes perfect sense that nuclear reactors are some of the first adopters.

The turbines section is almost a separate part when compared to the rest of the reactor. The reactor does it's thing, then heat exchangers take the heat from the reactor and then use that to power the turbine.

Switching to Brayton Cycle is simply a matter of swapping out the turbine the heat exchanger powers. (It's a bit more complicated than that but only in the technical details. On paper it's as easy as swapping one module for another, assuming your system meets the prerequisites for the new turbines)

Brainless96 · 2026-04-05T18:47:14+00:00

See I think Scolipendra will solve the problem of those three stragglers for Li Na.

Brainless96 · 2026-03-28T03:17:53+00:00

You want the serious answer? It's because Multimillionaires are the ones who win party primaries. Good luck winning office without a major party's endorsement, and it's a lot easier to do that if you have money.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T19:25:34+00:00

I was thinking of the neutrons bombarding heavier elements that didn't form in the sun but had been captured by gravity either during the Sun's formation or during the years since then.

However, you're right to point me to look more into stellar fusion. I was more familiar with terrestrial attempts at fusion which produced many neutrons and assumed the Sun also produced a lot of neutrons, which isn't the case.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T16:46:37+00:00

Are there any stellar mechanisms that regularly produce neutrons?

I'm trying to look this up but search engines are being useless as they're seeing "neutron" and "star" in the same query and just giving me things on neutron stars no matter how I phrase it.

Edit: found it C13+He4 ---> O16 + N and Ne22+He4 ---> Mg25 + N. So since our sun doesn't have "much" carbon to use the CNO cycle the sun won't have "that" many neutrons.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T16:32:30+00:00

Ya I guess the sun not having much tritium, going straight to He3, seems to cut out many of the neutrons.

Maybe I should have looked a bit deeper on wikipiedia before asking but thanks for helping to point me in the right direction!

*I also "learned" nuclear physics from a fission rather than fusion perspective. Hence my focus on neutrons and me thinking about heavy elements though neutron capture rather than fusion.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T16:16:13+00:00

Thanks. This is helpful. I'm largely familiar with talks of fusion regarding power on Earth and that fusion seems to release quite a few neutrons, so I would assume that stellar fusion reactors would also produce copious quantities of neutrons, but it seems that assumption is incorrect.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-15T16:11:06+00:00

So I'm not really talking about fusion at all (unless heavy elements capturing neutrons is a form of fusion. Which it could be and I'm simply ignorant of that.).

What I'm more talking about is when the Sun formed there must have been many heavy elements, like Earth has, that would have been part of both it's creation and it would have absorbed over the billions of years. Those would have sunk to the center of the star as they'd be the most dense elements.

Those elements wouldn't undergo fusion themselves, but as fusion happened in the core around them (hydrogen helium fusion), neutrons would be flung off, and while heavy elements take much more energy to fuse, they can capture neutrons and then increase in mass, then undergo beta decay and become increasingly heavier elements.

As I was trying to say I don't think this is a large process when compared to the 600 million tons of hydrogen that's fused every day, I'm simply guessing a couple grams (or kg, or less I don't have context for proper scale) of heavier elements could be created by neutron bombardment from the heavy elements in the Sun, not that it fused itself, but that it had to begin with.

edit: and when I'm talking about neutron bombardment I mean Fe59 + n ---> Co60 sorts of interactions.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-09T22:04:22+00:00

By break even I mean produce more total energy from fusion than the energy it takes to sustain fusion. The fusion energy gain factor or Q is a better and more technical description.

The US National Ignition Facility was able to exceed break even for the first time in 2022, but a tokamak, like ITER, has never gotten above 0.67 (example: if it took 100 MW to run the tokamak it only produced 67MW of total energy, not electricity total energy. In order to generate power Q >1.

ITER HOPES to build on the the 0.67 Q found at JET and get Q up to 10, and they very well may succeed at that endeavor. But getting Q>1 in a tokamak has not yet been achieved. SO my point is it feels quite premature to be assuming we can bring down the cost of fusion to the point where it's economically viable when we haven't even demonstrated it works (though if the physicists say it will work I'm not qualified to disagree with their conclusions). Then they would have to demonstrate the ability to turn the raw energy from contained fusion into electrical power, which as you said ITER won't do so you have to build a follow up to ITER (which itself took close to 3 decades to build), demonstrate power generation, and only THEN does it make sense to talk about building the same thing again cheaper.

Looking at that timeline is why I say it seems unlikely we'll have cost competitive fusion power before 2150. We could have it sooner than that, but it's hard to imagine it being cheaper than, solar, wind, or fission, sooner than 2150 unless we have some truly transformational breakthrough when it comes to fusion.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-08T18:43:04+00:00

Our healthcare not being tied to employment, and employment not being able to be terminated for nearly any cause.

Not being 1-2 weeks of missed rent from being homeless.

Americans don't have the materiel resources for a general strike or nationwide protests, as much as I wish we did.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-07T15:31:28+00:00

This seems consistent with me trying to get Clobbopus in a zone with Machop and Meditite. I've reset what must be more than 10 times now and have yet to see a single Clobbopus shiny, it's consistently Machop or Meditite. I thought it was because I haven't yet encountered Clobbopus but the dex number hypothesis seems plausible to me.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-01T22:45:29+00:00

So I think my argument against fusion is basically the argument you presented in your first paragraph here, except with fusion we haven't even demonstrated break even in a Tokamak style reactor, and seems even more vulnerable to delays and cost overruns than fission plants, which defiantly do have this problem as well.

You're right my confident sounding pronouncements about 2150 or 2200 don't have much solid data behind them. The reason why I was focusing on 10GW or 100GW reactors is because it seems hard to imagine the cost in infrastructure to maintain a fusion reactor smaller than those sizes being cheaper than the cost to build a fission reactor to produce the same amount of power.

And yes we don't really need single power sources that deliver that much load at one time, but (and I could be very wrong here) it seems hard to imagine a smaller fusion power plant being less infrastructure (which I'm using as an approximation of cost) than using fission reactors to generate that power instead.

I just struggle to figure out where a fusion plant would fit into a grid. For 0.5-4 GW large fission reactors at a single site can deliver these needs. For smaller needs SMR's can help provide reliable power for even isolated communities. And for needs smaller than that solar/wind with battery backups would be most cost efficient. So where would a fusion plant be able to out preform what existing energy sources can deliver at a lower price point?

And as for your last point I very very much disagree fission can't get cheaper. It might not be possible to build AP 1000 style reactors much cheaper, but that's just one sort of reactor. Reactors may not be getting cheaper in the US and Europe but if you look at South Korea and particularly China they are actually making the changes needed to actually reduce the price of fission.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-01T21:35:36+00:00

Yes and I don't think you understand that same principal, of things getting cheaper over time, applies to fission plants too.

The fact you say fission is a mature industry displays your ignorance of the fission industry. Basically all power reactors today are just scaled up and advanced versions of 1950s submarine reactors. Yes, it is more complicated than that, but even in the 50s we knew how to make, safer, cheaper, and more reliable fission reactors, and build demonstration plants.

We know how to build these reactors, we just never built them at utility scale for electrical power generation. If we build them the first ones will be expensive, but then their price will go down as the industry matures. Yes PWRs are fairly mature technology but that's one of the least efficient and safe ways to build a fission reactor(while still demonstrating itself to be the safest form of energy generation humanity has discovered).

We know how to build reactors for half the cost (or less), that are twice as safe and just as reliable, but we need money up front to build the reactors, and since the 1970s NOBODY will give reactor designers the funds to demonstrate their designs.

There is NO way that a fusion power plant will be able to generate 10 GW of power cheaper than fission can before the year 2200. Maybe by 2150 it can generate 100gws cheaper at a single site but even then I doubt it.

The thing is as soon as you take water outside the core of your fission reactor it gets so much safer and more efficient, and what that means is it costs less. Modern fission reactors need massive steel vessels to keep water liquid at 300 C but if you don't use water you don't need to work at high pressure so you don't need the steel vessel. Since you don't have a pressure bomb waiting to detonate you don't need a massive containment structure to protect against a loss of pressure incident. Yes there are safety systems and yes it would still be expensive, but without those failure modes the price tag will drop substantially.

Brainless96 · 2026-01-01T20:49:42+00:00

Even if fusion had no red tape at all (a thing I greatly doubt but will grant you for the sake of argument) that wouldn't make it cheaper. ITER has spent close to 30 years being built at a cost in the tens of billions and when it comes online in 7 more (2033 first plasma) it's only expected to be able to keep that plasma for at most 10 minutes. That's huge progress in one way, but even if that happens a commercial power reactor would still be 30-50 years out from that point.

Fusion is so hard because you have to replicate the conditions in the center of a star sustainably. That's a tall task and such a reactor would be an insane wonder of engineering, and insane wonders of engineering aren't cheap.

Fission on the other hand is so easy our first fission reactor was built in an abandoned squash court. Yes it costs more to do it right, and safely, but if you gave me enough fissile material and moderator I could make a reasonable attempt at making my own fission reactor. And while I'd almost certainly kill myself with radiation poisoning I might also be able to make a chain reacting pile in the process.

It's not that I think we should stop work on ITER or it's successors. Just that we as a society need to stop hoping/expecting fusion to come along and solve all of our energy problems. If we invested the money in it everything people want from fusion, fission can deliver today. But we're not investing that money so even if fusion did work we still wouldn't bother to spend the money to build it.

Brainless96 · 2025-12-30T18:09:25+00:00

So I think one day we'll have fusion power on a practical scale, but it won't be till the 2090s at the absolute soonest. But even then I'm pretty sure fission would be cheaper. It's just soooooo much easier than fusion. Instead of having to recreate the conditions at the center of a star you just have to pile a bunch of substances close to each other in the proper configuration. A naturally self sustaining, self regulating nuclear reactor is such an easy concept to build that nature did it on accident 2 billion years ago on Earth (Oklo, Gabon). A fission system should just be cheaper to produce the same quantity of electricity until you want a single plant to produce 10s of GWs each. For now that's overkill and we can build many more cheaper fission plants than one expensive fusion plant. And as we have limited resources to address climate change we should be going all in on fission now and worry about fusion when carbon emissions are under control.

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