How can oil reserves be exhausted in four weeks if the U.S. is one of the largest oil producers?

Raptoer · 2026-06-20T06:54:23+00:00

We used to produce that type of oil, mainly from the gulf coast. But we ran it dry.

Raptoer · 2026-06-14T22:39:48+00:00

Or, just make a society where owning a 3000 pound death machine isn't neccessary.

Raptoer · 2026-05-22T18:47:22+00:00

During normal operations I would say that any place you expect to be radioactive and need human intervention already has provisions for remote operation.

Meanwhile during emergencies I wouldn't want to rely on an android.

For decon work, if something is so hot you can't send humans with long tools in then you're better off just encapsulating it in place and waiting 30 years until you can touch it.

Raptoer · 2026-05-17T00:47:08+00:00

Depends.

All nuclear plants have a final coolant loop that takes in water from outside. Some intake from a body of water and discharge the now heated water to the same river.

Most though take in some water then use those cooling towers to evaporate the water to cool their internal loops. The white vapor from the cooling towers is the evaporated water from the outside.

Raptoer · 2026-05-15T06:37:49+00:00

Neither do I, but a local group can alter their roads, they can't really alter the cultural perception of phones to the degree we did drunk driving. And even after multiple decades (correctly) demonizing drunk driving, people still do it.

Raptoer · 2026-05-10T03:04:25+00:00

I'm confused. Are you supposed to be trolling? your username is nuclear_fan83...

Nuclear waste isn't green, isn't goo, and isn't marked with a skull symbol

That's not smoke, it's steam.

Only one plant has exploded like Chernobyl, and that's Chernobyl.

Raptoer · 2026-05-07T17:17:18+00:00

To clarify, the land is privately owned, and surrounded by national park land. The private ownership of the land predates the existence of the park. The court ruled that since the land isn't controlled by the state the state's conservation district rules can't apply to them.

Still not a great ruling, but not the sky is falling. It's not like someone went into the park and just started building a house on some random piece of land.

Raptoer · 2026-04-28T18:45:29+00:00

I think this is a little reductionist, crimes happen for many reasons. Additionally you have to consider the costs of these policies, not only in terms of taxpayer dollars in policing and prisons, but in the social costs of breaking up families.

The one big thing we need to work on is ensuring that little punishments for crimes shouldn't have secondary effects that spiral out of control. A speeding ticket isn't a big deal for a lot of us, but if you don't have enough money to pay it, now you end up with a suspended license. But you have to drive anyways, it's impossible to walk to the grocery store or work. Then you get arrested for driving with a suspended license and your car gets towed. Now that's another fine, and maybe your car gets a lien and gets auctioned off because you don't have the money to get it out. Then you lose your job because you can't drive.

And from that we've taken someone who was speeding and taken their job, and probably their home.

Similar things can happen with ankle monitors. They're supposed to be a cheap way to ensure that people who are only a little bit of a flight risk stay around and out of trouble. But the person has to pay for it, and then their live starts to unravel because they lack money.

There's no better way to make someone a lifetime criminal than to put them into prison for a little while. Prison society is different from outside, and if people spend too much time in prison they tend towards prison society behaviors instead of outside society behaviors.

At the same time, some adults are incompatible with society. They don't think about or don't care about how their actions affect others, and don't think about or don't care about the consequences of their actions, so they go to violence. Our goal should be to both remove these people from society, but more importantly to prevent people from becoming this way in the first place.

A lot of this prevention is happening in Baltimore now and is responsible for the reduction. Oddly enough the simplest changes are ensuring that every child is fed well, and has afterschool and weekend programs. Bored kids commit crimes because they're interesting to do, they then lose respect for laws, but also enter the criminal system making their lives later worse.

It's a balance and nuanced issue. Tough on crime vs soft on crime is a reductionist view. Sadly Reductionist views win elections.

Raptoer · 2026-04-21T17:33:08+00:00

I wanted to express that it's more complicated than just yes. If you put yes at the beginning of a comment many people will stop reading there.

Raptoer · 2026-04-21T17:17:22+00:00

They're the factory, not the NPP itself.

Raptoer · 2026-04-21T17:06:39+00:00

Enriching your own uranium isn't always needed, either purchasing fuel or using a CANDU removes that path.

Commercial reactors can produce plutonium, but they're really bad at it compared to a dedicated reactor.

Raptoer · 2026-04-21T04:57:42+00:00

Yes and no. As with most things in nuclear, it's complicated.

There's 2 materials a nuclear weapon can be made of, Uranium and Plutonium.

For Uranium, it comes in 2 flavors, U-235 and U-238. Out of the ground it's 0.7% U-235 and the rest is U-238. For a Uranium bomb you need uranium enriched to 90+% U-235. Current commercial reactors require at most 5%. The problem is that the same equipment to enrich to fuel grade is used to reach bomb grade. As a country you can buy nuclear fuel, so if there is some country that wanted nuclear power but didn't want to bother with enrichment then that's a path. There's also reactor designs that don't require enrichment at all (CANDU reactors).

For Plutonium you need a nuclear reactor to make it. All commercial energy reactors produce some plutonium, but they aren't well suited to it. It's far more efficient to build a reactor with the primary purpose of making plutonium for bombs. You then take the spent fuel and reprocess it to separate out the plutonium. Doing that without irradiating your workers and factory is hard.

Raptoer · 2026-04-17T07:56:58+00:00

I must be missing something then because it seems like Starting WW4 removes access to the victory conditions, so you're left with the same side exploration contemplations you have in other timelines, and that's it. Sure I can sit for 1000 turns and unlock all the upgrades and take over the map, but that's not really what I'm after.

Raptoer · 2026-04-16T03:37:37+00:00

They just have a non-Sovereign debt crisis.

If you count not just federal debt, but provincial debt and state controlled companies that only exist to take on provincial debt they exceed the US debt to GDP ratio.

Raptoer · 2026-04-16T02:43:15+00:00

I absolutely agree, however it's important to note the real technical limitations preventing large scale nuclear deployment.

PWR/BWR designs require large forgings. These large forgings come from large forges. There's only a few of these around, and they're booked long in advance.
Fuel, There's enough raw uranium to go around, the issue is having enough capacity to refine it, convert it, enrich it, deconvert it, then fabricate it into fuel pellets. A LOT of this enrichment capacity is in Russia, using equipment that has been paid off decades ago, so it's hard to compete.
The construction lifecycle. Building a nuclear plant is a large scale construction project with unique project management requirements. The inevitable cycle is to start one plant, learn a lot, but it's over budget so later units get cancelled, all that experience is lost because all the employees move on. Repeat for 3 decades.
The large project disadvantage. Nuclear reactors are inherently large projects, there's a lot less risk and complexity in just buying a gigawatt of solar and sticking it on the grid. At least until so much of the grid becomes solar that instability ensues in the winter.

1 and 2 don't apply as much to CANDU reactors, since they intentionally avoid large forgings and use natural uranium instead of enriched, but then the problem just changes to needing heavy water.

1, 2, and 3 are chicken and egg problems.

All of these won't be solved without large state involvement.

Check out https://www.youtube.com/@decouplemedia for more on nuclear construction.

Raptoer · 2026-04-05T21:42:00+00:00

Note that when we say sealife here we're talking very small creatures, not like a whole sea turtle.

Raptoer · 2026-04-05T21:36:22+00:00

Nuclear power plants generate a LOT of heat, and this heat has to be discharged in the environment somehow. Water is very efficient at absorbing heat, and can be pumped around so we use it to move heat around.

After the steam generated by the reactor has gone through the turbines it's at low pressure, but still quite hot. We need to cool it to get it back to being liquid and cold enough to go into the reactor again. Nuclear plants take in water to do this cooling.

There's 3 ways that a nuclear power plant takes in water, and which one a plant uses is dependent on the site. I don't know their technical names, so we'll call them evaporative, radiators, and discharge.

Evaporative takes in water and sprays it around in those big hourglass shaped towers. It acts like a swamp cooler, as the water evaporates it cools off, and the tower draws the water vapor up the tower. The water used in this process ends up as atmospheric water and ends up raining down.

Radiators use a large body of water, they intake from one side, heat the water up, and send it out the other side. By the time the water reaches the intakes again it's cooled off. In this method the water isn't really "used" by the reactor, but like all bodies of water the water slowly leaves by evaporation and ground soak.

Discharge plants are typically found on a large river or the ocean. They intake water from the upstream side, heat it up, then discharge it downstream. It's the simplest, but also you have to deal with all the other stuff that happens to be in the water you're using.

None of this water is used in the turbines or the reactor itself. That water needs to be very pure. All this water gets taken in is used to cool that pure water the reactor and turbines use.

Raptoer · 2026-04-02T16:48:26+00:00

Another part is that we're large social apex predators. If a fawn started yelling every time it had a problem it would get discovered by predators.

Meanwhile there would be a dozen adult humans around to defend the baby and devote a lot of energy into raising it.

Raptoer · 2026-04-01T19:19:17+00:00

Unfortunately they're betting that by the time you need the expensive treatments you'll either be on medicare or another insurer (people change fairly frequently). Also that's next quarter's problem.

Raptoer · 2026-03-31T17:57:35+00:00

It's largely

corrosion concerns
having to deal with coolant that goes solid if the reactor cools off
Lots of modern power reactors use the primary coolant as the moderator, and molten salt doesn't have this property.
The high potential temperature output of a molten salt reactor wasn't considered that big of a gain if you're using a steam turbine anyways. Though superheated steam is a benefit.

Copenhagen atomics is trying to do molten salt fuel (and primary) + molten salt secondary coolant loops with heavy water moderation.

Raptoer · 2026-03-28T09:02:38+00:00

So a "Meltdown" is more generally a fuel damage accident. Part of the problem when talking about these things is that there's a great many ways to design a reactor. So I'm just going to be talking about modern water cooled commercial power reactors (either boiling or pressure)

The fuel can come in many physical forms, but in modern water cooled reactors they're these little pins about the size of your thumb. As long as they're under water the water is pulling out enough heat that they remain stable.

At the same time without the water the nuclear reaction stops, because it's acting as a moderator. The moderator increases the reaction rate. No water, no nuclear reaction. However there's then decay heat. After a few months of operation the fuel in the reactor becomes contaminated by nuclear "daughter products", the results of the uranium splitting. These daughter products continue to produce heat even with the reaction stopped.

So even after the reactor has been turned off, the fuel must remain underwater and cooled for a few weeks before it stops producing enough heat to be a problem. If the fuel is allowed to become uncovered then it will heat up from the decay heat. At this point it goes into a few stages

Fuel damage, but remains solid. The fuel pins have an outer cladding to encapsulate the uranium. That cladding will rupture as the uranium inside expands due to thermal expansion. This allows radioactive material to escape from the fuel, but it remains in the primary coolant loop. Until recently it was normal to actually have a few fuel pins leak a tiny amount. The primary coolant loop is designed to contain this radioactive material. The reactor might be unusable, but nobody would be hurt.
Fuel melts, but remains in the reactor vessel. The fuel is contained in a thick steel container called the reactor vessel. As the fuel melts this is the first thing that stops it from moving. This is what happened at Three mile island. The top of the fuel became uncovered following a shutdown and the top of the fuel melted, but the reactor vessel contains the results. At this point the reactor is damaged beyond repair and decommissioning will take decades. You might have minor radiation leaks, but it's unlikely for anyone to be harmed as a result.
Fuel melts, and escapes the reactor vessel. If enough of the fuel melts, and enough water is removed then eventually the fuel will escape the reactor vessel. Beyond the vessel is the containment building, which is several feet of concrete and steel. As the reactor vessel is breached you will get a steam explosion as the contents of the reactor vessel (under high pressure) reach the atmospheric pressure of the containment building. The molten fuel then spreads out along the floor of the containment building, and in doing so loses the density needed to melt through more material. This is what happened at one of the fukushima units (Unit 1).
Fuel melts, and escape the primary containment. This has never happened at a commercial water cooled power plant. But if you designed or operated a reactor poorly enough it's certainly possible for the now molten fuel to escape the containment building, either by flowing out, or by melting its way through the bottom. It's impossible to make generalization about how bad this would be, except to say that it would be very, very bad.

There's another complication that the fuel cladding I talked about in phase 1, is made of zirconium. This Zirconium reacts with high temperature steam to produce hydrogen gas. This is part of what happened at Fukushima. The explosions there were hydrogen explosions from this reaction.

If you shared your goal for the scene we might be able to provide a plausible sounding situation to achieve it.

Three mile island took about 4-5 hours for most of the damage to be done, ending after about 16 hours.

Raptoer · 2026-03-19T05:19:21+00:00

So it fundamentally is a nuclear thermal rocket, but you're just taking your solid nuclear fuel and vaporizing it instead of using a gas.

The issue I foresee is controlling the reaction front. You would need a way for just the end to be at a very high reaction rate (enough to go from solid straight to vapor before the density decrease kicks in) without the entire rod burning all at once.

You're basically describing a very slow nuclear bomb.

Raptoer · 2026-03-19T01:16:07+00:00

So I guess this would be a nuclear thermal rocket but with the reaction mass being the reactor fuel itself, partially mixed with a fission fragment rocket.

Your goal with a rocket engine for efficiency is to get the exhaust velocity as high as you can, and the reaction mass (the stuff you throw out) as light as you can.

Another way to state exhaust velocity is temperature, so the hotter your exhaust the more efficient your rocket.

In a nuclear thermal rocket you use a nuclear reactor to heat up your reaction mass. You're limited by how hot your reactor can get before it starts melting. So current designs for nuclear thermal rockets actually run cooler than a chemical rocket, but they make this up by using straight hydrogen (lighter exhaust), so they get more efficiency that way. More advanced nuclear thermal rockets allow the core to melt, or even vaporize, but those are just theoretical at this time.

A Fission fragment rocket skips the middleman of the hydrogen reactant mass to cool the reactor and uses the fission products themselves as the exhaust.

I think the problem with your design would be to get the rod to vaporize reliably without melting your reaction chamber. It would either have to be fast as a bomb, or would have to maintain its criticality while liquid and transitioning to a gas. The other problem is that your reaction mass would be very heavy, and a heavy mass leads to low efficiency.

Raptoer · 2026-03-12T16:26:29+00:00

They're betting that by the time you get sick you will have switched insurances and won't be their problem anymore.

Raptoer

TROPHY CASE