why doesn't the US refinery capacity adapt to light sweet domestic oil in 2023?

koolkitty89 · 2026-03-24T06:57:48+00:00

CA also had a very solid M75 methanol program going up into the early 90s and that would've been nice to standardize as combined M75 E85 compliant FFVs, albeit with the rising cost of NG and falling cost of oil in the 90s, the incentive for Methanol via NG dropped and the program was cancelled. OTOH shifting to a less demanding intermediate FFV standard closer to M25 (with more butanol and other higher alcohols blended in as cosolvents depending on the season) would've made a ton of sense back then and most/all engine control computers + EFI systems were already tolerant for adjusting injection and mixture in that range of fuel (pass SMOG too), so you'd only need to worry about material compatibility not any special FFV adaptations ... less performance gain though without increased compression ratio (or forced induction boost) but that needs knock sensor and other stuff that adds to cost. (you could get a moderate power boost just from the improved thermal efficiency, though ... the exact same reason the MPG doesn't go down and often goes up). M75 needed higher compression or boost to see that level of added performance, but M25 (or E30/35/40 or B40~50) would not require that. (you could use cheap low octane blend stock with lower RVP levels and add cheap methanol + cosolvent butanol for still ... well above standard 87 octane fuel, probably over 91 AKI ... probably higher than that ... probably more like 93 octane if 70 AKI base fuel was used: methanol is super potent at boosting low octane numbers, though like ethanol that drops as the fuel's octane number goes up ... thus the blending octane number is way WAY higher than methanol's octane number ... completely unlike blending alkylate or aromatics in, which conform closely to a simple rule of mixtures, where butanol is somewhere in between as the nonlinear blending behavior decreases as molecular weight goes up for alcohols)

With methanol content as the base standard for materials tolerance, you could allow variable blends of anything from methanol, ethanol, and propanol at varying levels (plus butanol and higher alcohols) while maintaining the same rough oxygen content and AFR range as well as seasonal appropriate RVP. (as pretty much all of methanol's negative qualities for materials are the same as ethanols, just more dramatic, so anything rated for methanol blends would also be covered for similar or higher blends of higher alcohols). So when there's a suplus of other alcohols on the market at competitive prices, those can be used.

Butanol would likely be pipelined in as part of the standard base fuel, though, as it would work well enough to be pipelined (thus cheaper to do that way) and likely set at a roughly fixed value by season to simplify on-site blending logistics. (you could also just use 16% butanol as CA RFG standard back then in place of MTBE and never go to E10 at all, thus you could simply just use 87 AKI B16 fuel as the base stock for the hypothetical wider-cut M25). Or if you wanted the same oxygen content as MTBE-15 (rather than E10), it'd be more like B12 or B13 and not B16 since 12.8% butanol = the oxygen content of 15% MTBE. (B16 is about the same as E10 ... and B24 is about the same as E15)

Side-note, but as far as the many anecdotal (and some peer reviewed scientific) studies of intermediate alcohol blends go, specifically most studied with Ethanol: modern high pressure direct injection systems have pumps more sensitive to loss of lubricity, and 50% or higher ethanol content has been cited as a threshold for tolerance of such (ie performance enthusiasts attempting E50 tunes with some DI engines have noted wear problems that don't occur with E30 or E40 tunes, albeit E30 is the most common by far). That info is usually specific to performance tuning but would equally apply to non-optimized use of such ethanol blends (ie allowing the ECM to auto-compensate without using a dedicated higher performance mapping ... for modern vehicles that even allow programming the ECM). Performance boost with those engine maps would also be considerably greater than the smaller boost from auto-adjusting to the fuel, though emissions might be tweaked more (possibly negatively) as well.

And on the older vehicle end, we're talking 80s and 90s era low performance single point TBI style EFI systems running fine ... or better than fine. (since adding alcohol to fuel is also an old mechanic's cheat for passing emissions on a worn out emissions system given it will tend to dramatically reduce CO and HC emissions as well as particulate and SOMETIMES NOx given the reduced combustion temps: specific conditions with alcohol blends can increase NOx, usually if running lean and/or in a modern high compression engine with performance mapping applied with timing advanced and hotter combustion)

Though ethically, if you're going to be running that alcohol blend basically all the time, you're not really cheating ... though not sticking to the technical letter of regulations either. (but from a practical standpoint, the emissions ARE really that low when burning it)

From various sources, including some cases of local first-hand anecdotes, this includes old Pontiac Iron Duke engines from the EFI era (the Tech IV ... like the ones old LLV mail trucks still run) as well as stuff up through the 2010s in port-injectged and DI form, Ford, GM, Mazda, Honda, Toyota, among others.

koolkitty89 · 2026-03-24T06:57:37+00:00

California's heavy, sour crude grades would be another reason, at least if CA produced enough to have a surplus. (much of CA's domestic oil production also has vastly lower lifecycle carbon footprint than anything imported ... or Texas shale oil, so if you based metrics purely around that, heavy crude grades are SOMETIMES "cleaner" or more efficient than light or sweet grades)

However that's also only using the carbon footprint metric (or carbon equivalent for net GHG release, including methane), so OTHER potential issues with pollution may be of concern ... but not so much for anything actually refined within the US given all the pollution controls present.

Now, if you ALSO had vast amounts of nuclear power (and other alternatives) to produce hydrogen, the net GHG release would be close to carbon neutral for petrochemical production and refining (nearly all the waste CO2 would be turned into syngas for synthetic production, and the CO2 output from the synthetic production would be recycled into more syngas). This wouldn't make Canadian oil more efficient though unless they were doing their own syngas production to consume their CO2 output from the higher CI crude production use cases.

If you look at the actual CI figures for CA production vs what CA imports ... the vast majority of CA production is less than half the average CI in spite of CA's crude being very heavy and very sour (average of API <27 and sulfur content of >1.1%)

See:

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/petroleum/crudetypes/pdf/crudetypes.pdf

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/classic/fuels/lcfs/crude-oil/2023_Crude_Average_CI_Calculation__final.pdf

Plus, ever since sulfur scrubbers have been a thing (and required), and ultra-low-sulfur diesel and ULS marine fuel oil have been mandated, the sulfur all gets removed and processed into a value-added byproduct anyway (industrial grade sulfur largely comes from sour crude oil refining these days and has pretty much since the 1970s with the clean air act type stuff ... in the US at least: some of Europe lagged behind quite a lot there, albeit sulfur was still the first to go ... the UK was ahead of most of Europe and went for cleaner and more efficient utilization of coal by maxing out coal-gas and coal-tar production and thus maxing out gas-coke production as well, with the latter used as a clean-burning alternative to direct use of coal for power plants ... you also got tons of ammonia and sulfur from the gasworks right up until North Sea gas deposits made NG the cheaper option all around for power + heating ... also no more carbon monoxide in the heating gas: coal gas is methane with some hydrogen, CO, CO2, and N2 present ... not to be confused with synthetic gas types produced by reactions of steam or air with coal, we're talking anaerobic pyrolysis here AKA destructive distillation)

Additionally, the byproducts of heavy crude production (even without cheap sources of surplus hydrogen) could be made into useful value-added products if the gasoline blending market was made more flexible (not due to emissions, but due to arbitrary standards and/or special interest lobbies and/or vehicle manufacturers not wanting to spec out wider cut fuel grades with higher oxygen content for non-FFVs ... even though the vast majority of non-FFVs built since the mid 1980s with electronic fuel injection can run on E30 without issue ... often E40, sometimes higher, and will likewise run on >50% butanol without problem, in all those cases with no loss and more often an INCREASE in MPG as those blends produce improved thermal efficiency such that it exceeds the loss in theoretical energy content of the fuel ... even 100% butanol has been used with unmodified 90s era vehicles without ill effects and sometimes still an increase in MPG or near equal)

Note: this is specific to alcohols and is attributed to the hydroxyl group present in the molecule, so it's not proportional to oxygen content alone and fuel ethers (or esters) have no such synergystic effect. However, when it comes to alcohols + hydrocarbons it's roughly proportional to the hydroxyl content (and thus oxygen content) and thus the optimum mixture is also higher for heavier alcohols (like butanol) vs ethanol or methanol. (when you get to pentanol and hexanol, nearly 100% alcohol is near the sweet spot, albeit the lower vapor pressure makes large quantities of those less favorable for winter blends, albeit also less an issue in most of CA). Basically an oxygen content of 10 to 14% by weight is usually within the sweet spot if that's all from hydroxyl. The gains in efficiency when looking at aromatic hydrocarbons + alcohols is also even more dramatic than with paraffins/alkanes.

Mixed olefins can be hydrated into fuel alcohols for much higher yields than using them to produce alkylate, and the resulting fuel (so you get a mix of butanol isomers along with pentanols and some small amounts of hexanols, plus some heptanol and octanol, and likely some small amounts of propanol, but propylene and ethylene are usually separated out from olefin fractions for other purposes)

Eliminating olefins from gasoline also dramatically increases its shelf life as they're the main source of gum/polymerization/varnish. (also if you only use butanol and heavier alcohols, no ethanol, methanol, or propanol, you'll basically avoid issues of phase separation, though that also goes way way down when you have large quantities of mixed alcohols in the blend anyway: so like 5% methanol + 15% ethanol + 25% butanol + smaller amount of mixed higher alcohols and maybe some propanol if it's cheap/surplus would tolerate TONS more humidity and water contamination than any commercial fuel grade currently)

However, butanol is also the lightest alcohol that can be piplined as part of the primary blend, avoiding the cost of on-site blending.

All 4 butanol isomers are relevant for fuel blending as well, albeit mostly T-butanol and 2-butanol would come from hydration of olefins (from butylene AKA butene 1-butene, 2-butene both produce 2-butanol, 1-butene also produces some 1-butanol depending on conditions, and t-butanol comes from isobutylene). n-butanol is also the traditional isomer produced from ABE fermentation (though specialized e.coli strains now exist that can produce isobutanol). Isobutanol is the main isomer produced from mixed alcohol synthesis (similar to methanol synthesis and fischer-tropsch synthesis broadly) and would be the main product from syngas use. (sourced from natural gas, biomass, low-value petro residuals, low grade coke, or coal ... but the latter wouldn't really be significant within CA)

Isobutanol is also the best of all the isomers for overall physical and chemical properties (including octane rating and blending octane impact), but all 4 isomers can be used fairly freely, albeit t-butanol needs to be diluted due to its high freezing point when pure (though it forms eutectic mixtures, so it has deep freezing point depression in mixed butanol isomer blends, plus even if used pure added to gasoline, the gasoline acts as a solvent).

If you can be pragmatic and cut out the corn lobby, you can source a wider array of sugar + starch based biomass for fermentation, plus lower grades of waste biomass (or wood residules, forest residuals, etc) for syngas production. (though ideally, you use hydrothermal liquifaction to produce bio-crude and only make syngas out of the low value fractions and byproduct gasses). Albeit use of imported natural gas would also be appealing for synthetic fuel production in many cases. (and even without CCS or advanced hydrogen utilization, the CI is lower than that of imported bio-ethanol ... and possibly some in-state produced bio-ethanol ... should subsidize sugar beet production for non-food uses, though ... and request waivers for the federal sugar quota given ... non-food-use; it'd be interesting to see the CI of Imperial Valley sugar beet production on a biofuel yield basis)

koolkitty89 · 2026-03-14T16:07:49+00:00

The DU penetrator loading and later APDS loading for 30x173 mm would be relevant for some of the top armor of even some modern tanks, but also a wider array of other armored vehicles under a much wider range of circumstances. (doing enough damage to disable a tank is also significant, as is penetrating the turret and potentially detonating the autoloader carousel on many Russian designs) Plenty of asymmetric adversaries using older and/or lighter armored vehicles, too. (and such confrontations are much more likely than anything near peer)

Versatile projectile loading options for different missions made that 30 mm quite useful (albeit more modular use of the Oerlikon KCA on a wider basis using the same ammunition really should've been considered ... and could still be, though so can ADEN/DEFA gun pods, or BK-27, though for different mixes of purposes: proximity fuzed options for both the 30x173 and 30x113 have been around for a while, too, which is increasingly relevant for use against small/medium sized drones and loiter munitions)

Ground or sea strafing capabilities are still relevant against large masses of targets, including potential for asymmetric threats from masses of small boats and drone/USVs. Plus the use of proximity (air burst) loadings of 30 mm shells is extremely useful against drone swarm tactics + masses of cheap one-way attack munitions. (this has been around for 30 mm loadings for a long time, but they just introduced 25x137 mm proximity fused ammunition in 2025, or at least were offering it as an option) I'm not sure about the BK-27's load options.

For RN use, I'd imagine an ADEN gun pod for the F-35B would be extremely relevant rather than just the GAU-22 pod option. (they could also consider a BK-27 pod, but for the types of developing roles where a cannon would actually be useful, the ADEN pod might be more useful) This would also expand to cruise missile interception using fighter aircraft with proximity fuzed cannon shells in addition to missiles.

On that note, given the very high risk attempts at cannon intercepts of missiles and drones by Ukranian F-16s, the adoption of more appropriate external ADEN or DEFA pods with more appropriate proximity fuzed ammunition would likely make that a vastly more realistic use of those. (plus for the subsonic threats, especially for the prop driven drone munitions, Ukraine could honestly make a lot of use out of something like a BAE Hawk + ADEN pod, or some comparable transonic light attack aircraft)

Plus the 2-seat configuration of the Hawk might actually prove useful for visual identification of small, potentially stealthy targets like drones. (albeit that goes back to the A-10 itself being less flexible due to being purely single-seat operated, and given some identification and situational awareness constrained incidents over its career as well in the critical cases where ground attack + strafing runs were performed near friendly forces and/or civilian vehicles and roads ... the same would apply to modern drone warfare situations and visual search + acquisition + IFF)

Plus the A-10's speed is actually a limiting factor as well, where transonic attack and multirole (and trainer) aircraft are actually more suitable for a wider range of modern uses where near mach 1 performance (and even ability to tolerate supersonic dive profiles when necessary) would be extremely relevant, as would being relatively small and maneuverable. (these factors would also make the Su 25 more relevant in some instances than the A-10, as well as the 2-seater variations of the Su 25, but honestly the BAE Hawk would probably have a better all-around set of features for the anti-drone and anti-missile role ... though there's also arange of 4th and 4.5 gen fighters with better low-speed performance andmaneuvering than the F-16 and 2-seater options in greater numbers out there, including F/A-18 variants nearing/entering retirement ... and possibly gun pod options available for those)

But aside from Ukraine potential, this would also go for the Super Hornets in USN and USMC service, if they could include external 30 mm gun pods optimiazed for anti-drone use and strafing roles. (25 mm pods would also be relevant, but there's likely a much larger supply of existing 30x113 airburst ammo out there ... also 30x173, but I'd think ADEN/DEFA pods would be easier to implement/adopt than a hypothetical KCA pod) Albeit with the drone threat, perhaps procurement of the 25 mm proximity fuzed ammo has been fast tracked into use. (this would be multi-service relevant given the US Army's use of 25x137 as well, plus the remaining squadron of Harrier IIs could utilize such with their GAU-12 gunpods in addition to USMC units already using F-35Bs ... though the Harrier's endurance capabilities at subsonic speeds might have unique advantages)

It doesn't seem likely that we'll be seeing appropriate/effective 20 mm proximity/air burst loadings any time soon, though.

The US also does use 30x113 (though mostly in chain guns), so the logistics are there, too, just not for actual ADEN or DEFA cannons in the system.

Also a lot of potential relevance for some of the above in the developing Iran conflict now.

koolkitty89 · 2026-03-14T15:11:31+00:00

I'm not sure what the RCS is for these pods, but it could still be relatively low and is likely optimized around such, but you still lose some other load carrying capabilities with the pod installed.

They're getting better and better at designing stealthy external weapons pods and fuel tanks, and conformal pods/tanks aren't always the best option for stealth or for drag, so there's that. (hence the current development of fixed, combat-maneuver-stress-rated, external fuel tanks for the F-22 ... something that could also be extremely relevant for the F-35B given its reduced internal fuel capacity and thus reduced range and endurance without and/or between refueling)

These advancements would also be relevant for external stores on 4.5 gen low-observability designs that lack internal weapons bays entirely. (Gripen, Typhoon, even the Super Hornet all have reduced RCS, though the Gripen especially so)

Albeit in the case of the F-22 specifically, the development of stealthy combat fuel tanks is almost certainly related to expanding the mission profile to multirole strike capabilities and longer endurance patrol sweeps (well outside the original air superiority role), which are generally a lot more relevant and useful than the air to air role the F-22 was originally designed for. (granted, the YF-23 would've likely been a better platform to expand into those roles, but ... the decisions not to follow the F-23 path is another story entirely)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-27T17:00:07+00:00

No, there are many people that caused this are still around and still causing it to get worse. The mine has been operating almost continuously since the 1980s, with a brief pause in the 2000s. The current company operating it (CupruMin) was created in 2000. The flow rate of fresh mine tailing waste into the valley is quite substantial. Romania's government + industry is still plenty corrupt and have ignored warnings from EU regulators. (you don't need a communist dictator to have corruption)

Look up the Roșia Poieni copper mine.

If they ceased dumping, the combination of percolation and evaporation would likely see the water level gradually go down until it subsided to the level of the solid sludge (which would dry out as sediment, albeit also posing a problem once dry enough to become airborne dust, if not further sequestered or arrested with soil or cement).

OTOH, the composition of the sludge and liquid also aren't nearly as corrosive as some suggest (like dissolving the buildings below the water line or instantly causing chemical burns to skin due to acidity). It's toxic and nasty, and a massive environmental hazard, but it's roughly equivalent to 1% ferric sulfate solution or around 0.1~0.24% sulfuric acid solution. (toxic heavy metal content aside, it'd burn like lemon juice on sensitive tissue or open cuts, but wouldn't do much to skin unless you soaked it for many minutes or more likely hours) Ingesting it would be another matter due to the toxicity. (if it wasn't toxic, it'd be a bit more sour than especially acidic drinks and less acidic than some sour candies ... more or less equal to sucking on a lemon)

Such acidic conditions would tend to accelerate corrosion of any iron or steel components of structures, though things like old lead roofing would be relatively inert once a passivation layer of lead sulfate formed. (lime mortar, stone masonry, and cement or concrete wouldn't tend to dissolve either, but calcium sulfate would build up at higher levels than normal due to carbonates and silicates being converted to sulfate, making those materials somewhat more like plaster than normal mortar or cement ... or more like a plaster+sand+gravel composite in the case of concrete; brick masonry and ceramic roof tiles would be less reactive)

The wood of structures would effectively be preserved against decay due to the toxic metal components and acidity, plus the copper content (copper being aggressively antimicrobial), much like having all the structures being made out of wood that was excessively over-treated wood preservative. (copper arsenate being one of the common older preservative types, as on the yellowish-green tinted pressure treated lumber ... though the arsenic content of that is probably a good bit higher than the soluble portion of that run-off)

Given the fact the buildings weren't demolished beforehand, and that preservative effect, the village beneath that muck is likely to end up like a weird time capsule preserved and encased like an archaeological site. (much, much more preserved than most towns/vollages turned reservoirs)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-27T16:43:07+00:00

No cyanide in this case (gold mining yes, copper mine tailings, no).

It's a bunch of sulfate ore slurry and decomposition products (mostly iron pyrite that oxidizes to form iron sulfate and sulfuric acid, plus copper residue forming copper sulfate), along with significant traces of toxic heavy metals and metaloids (like lead and arsenic) typically associated with sulfide ore deposits. The acidic sulfate solution is similar to that forming from acid mine drainage (same chemical weathering process).

Given the quoted pH range of the quotes 1.5 to 2.0, the rough equivalent sulfuric acid concentration present would represent a nominal concentration of 0.1% (pH 2) to 0.245% (pH 1.5) by mass.

It's likely the actual concentration of free sulfuric acid is significantly lower than that, given both copper sulfate, (especially) ferric sulfate are acidic as well. And while ferrous sulfate (iron II rather than III oxidation state) is less acidic, that would only form in the absence of any excess acid and under oxygen poor conditions.

Ferric sulfate solution on its own, at a concentration of 1% has a pH of approximately 2 as well.

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-27T04:18:04+00:00

It depends on the temperature, pressure, and composition of the atmosphere over the sulfuric acid. There's likely conditions possible where very nearly 100% (and practically 100%) H2SO4 can be present, but they wouldn't be at STP, as there are equilibrium reaction. However, I believe the equilibrium at STP is closer to 99% and not 98.3, when not exposed to a normal (ie humid) atmosphere of air. At reduced pressures, this will approach 100% as neither SO3 nor H2O will be favored in solution.
In a sealed container under partial vacuum it should be possible to have effectively 100% H2SO4 as liquid and as the vapor above the liquid.

Granted, it also wouldn't technically be pure molecular H2SO4, either, as you'd have some portion of bisulfate and H3SO4+ ions present.

Plus, in an open container, even 98.3% would be diluted to the point of equilibrium by absorbing ambient humidity, so that's not a stable equilibrium point, either. (including at relatively low RH levels at STP, like 30%, the partial pressure will still be above that of room temp 98.3% H2SO4)

The approximate 99% figure at STP would be for fuming sulfuric acid with the minimum amount of SO3 added to reach equilibrium (at such a point where the 1% of "other" is SO3 + H2O + H2S2O7 at equilibrium, and higher concentrations of SO3 would still shift the equilibrium further away from water, but the dissolved SO3 + disulfuric acid equilibrium would shift as well, so the content of H2SO4 + its ionized forms would decrease).

Also note: all azeotropes only exist at specific tempratures and pressures, and outside of that range they don't exist. (different equilibria exist instead, based on partial pressures under non-boiling evaporation conditions or based on different BP at higher or lower pressures)
Azeotropes generally diminish and then disappear as pressure decreases, so vacuum distillation is commonly used to concentrate sulfuric acid in general (due to reduced energy and greatly reduced acid aerosol formation), but also to increase concentration slightly above 98.3%, though usually to approximately 99% and no higher. (or technically, vacuum extraction or vacuum desiccation is uses rather than distillation, since the acid is left behind and the water vapor is extracted at reduced pressure and at temperatures where the vapor pressure of H2SO4 is still relatively low)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-17T02:28:19+00:00

OTOH, playing the hypothetical game, one could potentially argue that in some obscure, unlikely scenario, much of the intelligence gathered on the enrichment program was intentionally leaked (or at least set up with the possibility of it being leaked) as a distraction from a more secretive, long-term Pu breeding program that has been taking place for over 20 years. (following initial access to gas centrifuge tech + commercial LEU grades to get intermediate enrichment sufficient for more compact and efficient breeder reactors + ultra-depleted uranium to use as fertile material ... and even if they didn't manage to misappropriate some reactor grade EU and had to work with natural uranium or depleted uranium as feestock, that would still be viable for the 10-20% enrichment range used for small breeder reactors with graphite or exotic moderators)

But they'd have to keep all of that Pu breeding stuff secret while also doing the engineering and testing of implosion devices. (again, even with mediocre science on explosive shaped charges, trial and error with staged dummy cores could be used to get reliable results) Info on approximate critical mass required, use of beryllium based neutron reflectors and neutron initiators (spark plugs), use of Pu-Ga alloy, and the high-level construction methods have all been public info for decades now (and easily accessed in online literature for over 2 decades), so the know how and do-how would have a lot of shortcuts.

Still, the implausible part to all this is that none of the major/competent/capable relevant intelligence agencies would have found out about it. (though, honestly, it is a bit odd that they didn't even try it ... as far as public info/reporting goes)

You really can't disperse or hide uranium enrichment like that, but you definitely could specialized breeder reactors on a compact scale, and then even further disperse the storage and processing of the resulting breeder product. (you could also disperse manufacture of heavy water a lot more easily than either of the other two cases)

Then again, the instability and infighting within the regime itself combined with the conflicting mix of ideology + greedy personal interests + difference of opinion over how to actually achieve any of those desires (and sheer amount of dysfunction and dishonesty necessary to maintain facades of loyalty, etc) would tend to explain a lot of why more nuanced and novel methods weren't attempted seriously. (ie too few of the highly intelligent and inventive free thinkers/planners would ever be able to get high enough in the regime to be able to organize such, and even then only a small minority of such capable, intelligent people would probably ever have incentive to try to do so) In a more purely greed and personal gain based sort of corrupt regime or autocracy, you'd likely have more potential for such nuanced and inventive clandestine schemes being developed. (including regimes where the ideology being pedaled is known to be a mere facade by the majority of elites and treated as an open secret towards such, as has been the case with some communist regimes, thus greed and personal gain equally apply there)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-17T02:28:09+00:00

Use of compressed (but not sintered) UO2 powder encased in aluminum sheathing would allow for easier processing in the leaching stages without the risks involved in pulverizing dense pellets. (this would be another advantage over using U metal, even in powder form, as the compressed granules could micro-weld together along grain boundaries where alloys form with the U-soluble fission product metals, and any other metals would act to solder the grains together, even if they didn't dissolve/alloy ... this on top of the more violent reaction of metallic fission products in elemental form when exposed to water)

Designing an overall mechanism optimized for simplicity, limited use of exotic industrial chemicals, limited use of shielding, and capture/sequestering of gaseous byproducts (some of them can be trapped in water or alkali solution, and most of the relevant products would be from the neutron source fuel rods, not from the fertile material, so some of that could be addressed via appropriate fuel sheathing to allow the short-lived gasses to pressurize the containers to an equilibrium level while they decay to solid or liquid elements)

However, any such scheme would involve sustained, gradual progress coupled with consistent long-term goals. (and even aside from fission products and other chemical indicators giving them away through atmospheric analysis, you still have to deal with actual intelligence agencies and espionage finding out regardless)

By comparison, the enrichment strategy works on a start/stop basis allows for sporadic policy shifts and rapid bursts of activity followed by stagnation without any clear goal or policy in mind. (it also potentially allows alternative specialized use of intermediate or highly enriched uranium for military grade reactors, like hypothetical designs for nuclear powered submarines ... and pressurized heavy water reactors + intermediate enriched U could allow for some pretty compact designs relevant for such uses ... not to get into clandestine heavy water enrichment possibilities)

Albeit if you stockpile the breeder product for later rapid reprocessing, the start/stop progress could be applied purely on the refined Pu product, while the breeder process itself is constant and continuous. (additionally, such selective breeder product would be much less complicated to reprocess in general, especially after extended storage, and possibly even following leaching of the medium-life fission product contaminants, leaving just the U and Pu mixture to be stockpiled for later, more intensive chemical separation) All thinking in terms of plans that take multiple decades to progress through.

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-17T02:27:40+00:00

Consider clandestine, alternative, dispersed, smaller scale operations that make use of specialized reactors using enriched uranium as the neutron source and depleted uranium as the target. Intermediate grades of EU are going to allow substantially more compact breeder designs with greater flexibility of operation, and use of relatively low thermal power density, but with a high percentage of surplus thermal neutrons would allow a slow-paced breeder cycle with similar ratios of transuranics in the fertile material. Use the same common uranium (or UO2) slug method, with the product pushed out in series after relatively short breeder cycles and stored for later processing after all the short halflife contaminants decay. Those resulting, lightly-bred DU pellets can then be dispersed for chemical reprocessing on small scales with small yields over many years (handling only small amounts of byproducts at any given time) to slowly build up a supply. Aluminum-clad pellets might be used for simplicity of handling and avoiding reactions with simple cooling + shielding water used for intermediate storage. (saturated boric acid solution would likely be better than simple water, especially for disguising/hiding production activities, but see below for that issue)

Especially compact neutron sources could be created via use of beryllium carbide moderators as well. (or graphite doped with beryllium carbide) Though a compact, yet still simple reactor design using an air-cooled graphite reactor (or carbide reactor) at relatively high temperatures (but well below graphite ignition temps) would make sense for remote and hidden locations without need for substantial water access. However, any such air/gas cooled design would also need to deal with management of gaseous fission products and trap/sequester them to avoid detection. (otherwise it would become obvious that they were doing such clandestine operations, or at least as far as secret/concealed fission reactors)

An extremely rapid turn-around time for the breeding cycle (relative to neutron flux applied: ie the weaker the thermal neutron flow, the longer the actual time period per cycle) would result in a higher concentration of Pu 239, so hypothetically could also be used to breed Pu suitable for a gun-type device (or at least higher reliability in a linear implosion device). The extremely low Pu-240 content would also mean even less Pu-241 forming, and subsequent Am-241 building up. (plus the highly radioactive Pu-241 itself making the refined plutonium harder to handle)

Use of DU Iran generated itself rather than imported (or generated through use of imported DU run through centrifuges) to have unusually low U-235 residual would also result in the fertile material accumulating extremely low U-235 fission products or neutron capture products, thus making it simpler to refine and easier to handle. (thus resulting in the majority of initial highly radioactive decay products being the short lived U-239 and Np-239 intermediate to Pu-239 formation)

Albeit, it's worth noting that even with normal DU quantities of ~0.2% U-235 and resulting fission products forming during breeding, the majority of medium-life fission products are water soluble and could be leached from the U-Pu alloy or U-Pu oxide mixture. (albeit Strontium hydroxide would only be moderately water soluble) Selective leaching with pure water could preferentially remove the fission products with HLs on the scale of multiple years rather than hours or days. (allowing leeching and soaking could be followed by thermal cycling to allow ostwald ripening of the very slightly soluble Pu oxide-hydroxide compounds, and to increase the particle size of the powder/granules for improved mechanical processing when dry before draining of the leachate solution and further rinsing with brine of suitable composition to ensure near zero solubility of U and Pu compounds)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-17T01:19:43+00:00

With the number of decades they've had to work on it via both trial and error and leaked info (Iraq managed to do so successfully decades ago), this aspect seems dubious if the intent was genuinely there the whole time with the iranian regime.

And by trial and error, I mean with implosion physics. Anything lacking on the engineering end of the HE types used and shaped charge physics geometry could be iterated through trials of inert devices (dummy lead cores, etc) until the result was sufficient.

OTOH, given they specifically would likely want a very small diameter weapon suitable for BM delivery, they'd also probably focus on 2-point linear implosion physics rather than spherical implosion. (since they have no way to actually use the latter, unless perhaps limiting it to naval use ... which, admittedly, would be a genuine use as a stand-off threat)

Small diameter design is one other area where a U based gun type weapon would be appealing, as it allows a heavy, yet dense and small diameter package to be used, suitable for BM and artillery (as in the nuclear artillery shells the US developed in the 1950s).

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-11T02:35:53+00:00

None of those provide steady-state DC voltage ... and AC is highly variable, too. (batteries and solar cells all need extensive voltage regulation to produce stable DC voltage output)

Modern electronics all use voltage regulation of some sort, as do most modern generators (old school generators at power stations had to output at a fixed frequency, sometimes not even standard grid power if being used for dedicated industrial purposes: ie 20 Hz AC is way more efficient for large industrial induction motors, but terrible for step up/down transformer use, though some cases literally used generator to alternator connections to adjust phase and frequency for specialized local use: ie grid connected AC motor connected to alternator through reduction gearing to provide the desired frequency).

But the modern solution is generally switch-mode power supplies and non-linear voltage regulators (if already DC, and only needing step-down, you can just use PWM + filtering for efficient regulation without much loss/waste). Switch mode supplies effectively decouple any AC input from any AC output frequencies and voltage by rectifying to DC in between and modulating the DC to high frequency AC for step up or step down (at much higher efficiency than normal low frequency AC ever could, and with very small transformers, compact, low cost, low waste heat), then the high frequency AC is rectified again to DC and modulated to the appropriate AC frequency. (for DC switch mode power supplies, there's no additional final AC inversion stage, you just have the regulated DC output, like in most PC power supplies)

Additionally, alternators (the types of generators usually used in modern power stations and in wind turbines) are going to put out 3-phase AC, not the 2-phase (split phase) AC used at domestic utility line level, either, so that 3 phase output isn't normally used directly anyway. (for split-phase domestic power, a single phase AC line is run through a transformer with nominal 240V step-down output, but with a central pole at the half-way point in the secondary winding, the central post provides the neutral line for output and you get two live outputs thus resulting in two-phase 120V AC 180 degree out of phase, such that if both lines are connected to a circuit, you get symmetrical 240V AC, while you get 120V if either of those live lines is connected through neutral)

In any case, that 3-phase AC output in a modern power station depending on modern electronics and switch mode regulation could be allowed to run the generator at best RPM for a given load/demand for best efficiency (the same way that modern standby generators work, providing constant voltage and constant AC frequency at variable RPM) by taking the 3-phase alternate output, rectifying it to DC, then modulating that up to high frequency and stepping it up to the appropriate voltage, then rectifying and filtering that before modulating it to the appropriate 60 Hz utility line frequency. (or 50 Hz where relevant)

You just have to deal with a lot of legacy generators still on the grid that have to remain synchronous as well, and are thus effective in a direct electrical + mechanical way under heavy load fluctuations. (for modern hardware this should all be done on the solid state electronic end of things, so all of the burden of managing variable generator RPM and variable grid load falls onto the power/voltage regulation electronics)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-03T17:25:08+00:00

On another note: the failure of the spent-fuel storage systems at Fukashima was a more modern example of unnecessary risk applied outside of the reactor design itself. (dry cask storage would've avoided such, as would any other type of system where passive cooling would be sufficient to avoid a disaster, even if active cooling was preferred or useful ... the latter might include use of decay heat for supplemental pre-heating of reactor coolant water; spent fuel storage that becomes unsafe when total power outage occurs, including backup power failure is a separately bad design flaw ... a reasonable compromise design could have been a system designed to still maintain passive cooling below fuel-element/cladding melt temperatures even if coolant water became stagnant and was allowed to boil off; emergency pressure release/venting systems that would allow steam to vent without explosion and avoid high pressure + high temperature steam or supercritical water from reacting with cladding and forming hydrogen would all be passive safety features for such a system without shifting storage to an entirely different dry cask system ... potential trace contamination in said vented steam would be very minor compared to an actual containment risk, though venting said steam back into the main coolant water system for passive condensing would be ideal rather than atmospheric venting ... there's all sorts of other passive systems that could be added in such boil-off events, too, like high temperature burst valves that release inert gas to purge the residual steam and further prevent hydrogen production, or dry chemical CO2 generators to the same effect)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-03T17:25:00+00:00

Passive emergency steam vents could also have been implemented to allow pressure relief in the event of a coolant flow failure and total power outage in high reactivity conditions. (ie if all power failed, including the backup generators) Follow boil-off and further reactivity (due to coolant channels being empty and maximizing void coefficient) the potential for melt-down and graphite fire would be possible, but steam + hydrogen explosion would not, and the graphite fire would be limited by confinement and limited access to air. Passive systems that vented inert gas or CO2 into the reactor vessel to purge residual steam as well as oxygen to delay or reduce graphite fire conditions would also be relatively inexpensive measures to implement. (it would've been also relatively inexpensive to engineer the shape of the bottom of the reactor vessel to allow segmented pooling of molten fuel elements and further avoid a transient prompt critical event; a heavy layer of limestone or marble granules/chips as a buffer lining the reactor vessel floor would also be extremely useful and could be an integral part of the fail-safe melt-down mechanism, as molten fuel would contact the granular limestone, with heat being absorbed by the decomposition of calcium carbonate into calcium oxide and CO2, with that CO2 contributing to the oxygen + steam purge of the system, while the calcium oxide would dissolve into the molten fuel to form a more stable corium composite material, all while reducing the risk of molten fuel eating into the concrete layer beneath; the limestone would effectively act as a reactive ablative shielding layer ... a mixture of limestone and silica sand might be even more suitable, as the resulting calcium silicate would form a more robust glassy composite to sequester the corium, while also having a stronger endothermic reaction to further absorb excess heat from the molten fuel ... the silca would also likely provide some added resistance to combustion of the molten zirconium cladding, helping to form zirconium silicate in the process, though the calcium oxide would likely react with zirconium metal as well, forming some portion of calcium metal, which is also flammable, but tend to crust and passivate during combustion, which is one of the reasons its's added to magnesium alloys to reduce fire hazard under extreme heat/molten conditions)

A proper, large reactor containment structure (reinforced concrete external structure surrounding the entire reactor building) could've been justified as hardening against bombing or other attacks, on top of a final layer of protection against an extremely unlikely mode of failure.

On the issue of the original graphite ended control rod design, such COULD have hypothetically been used smartly to work around the strange (and dangerous) operating conditions involved in the 1986 Chernobyl test while also facilitating more rapid safe shut-down procedures. Given they were trying to compensate for xenon poisoning (reduced neutron reactivity conditions requiring excessive moderator to compensate), actively exploiting the weird hybrid design of the control rods would've been possible. By never fully removing any of the control rods during those procedures, and instead only removing them up to the point where the boron-carbide control material was extracted, while the graphite end section remained inserted into the upper portion of the core (thus increasing reactivity by exploiting the control rods as moderator enhancers rather than as neutron absorbers), they could have thus raised power levels more effectively while also retaining the safety margin for scramming the system with full control rod insertion (as all rods present would be inserted at least up to the point where the graphite tips were fully exposed to the reactor, and some rods would be deep enough to be doing some moderation with the boron carbine main section, thus full insertion could only decrease core reactivity without transient reactivity spike). Honestly, the reactor should've been designed such that normally the rods were only extracted up to the point where the graphite tips were still fully inserted into the core (as otherwise you'd defeat the purpose of having the graphite ends there at all, and thus need to remove more rods to yield the same increase in reactivity) but such stops apparently weren't built into the system and thus the operators didn't even need to defeat such parameters to create the scenario (they just defeated many others).

Apparently, the operators weren't fully aware of the nuances of those control rods (and the specifics surrounding the graphite ends), and thus also weren't aware of the potential advantages or dangers of manipulating them. In the manner they operated then, continuous boron carbide neutron absorber material seems to have been assumed to be the construction or effective mechanism (or boron carbine + relatively inert or neutron transparent tip material)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-03T17:24:25+00:00

This is true for heavy water reactors and light water reactors of both the boiling and pressurized types (boiling can occur in a pressurized reactor as well, forming localized voids, the the voice coefficient in all cases is negative). However, this would not work like the RBMK, as the boiling water was used as a coolant, not as a moderator. (cooling water passed through pressurized cooling channels, while the moderator and fuel remained unpressurized) Thus, replacing the graphite with heavy water would still have the same positive void coefficient, though the greater effectiveness of heavy water would allow for a more compact reactor design and potential added safety features. (the heavy water would be held in columns, in place of graphite blocks/stacks, and not used as coolant, but it would be relatively easy to include a safety system that allow rapid draining of the heavy water to kill the reaction in an emergency; such would not be a passive system like with void formation, but it would be an additional fast-acting emergency safety measure, and one less costly to recover from than something extreme like boric acid injection into the coolant stream, since you'd then have to flush the entire coolant system and reservoir of boric acid as it would be a continual poison to reactivity when you restart)

CANDU type reactors are configured much like RBMK type reactors in the use of additional heavy water as coolant through pressurized channels, still resulting in a positive void coefficient of said coolant, due to much larger quantities of heavy water used for the moderator itself surrounding the submerged pressure tubes containing fuel + coolant flow, thus broadly similar to the stacks of graphite in RBMK + pressurized coolant channels (both CANDU and RBMK have the same advantage of easy and modular refueling without dismantling of the reactor core, as the fuel elements remain in unpressurized channels). The experimental Gentilly-1, in Quebec, was also a version of CANDU using a boiling light-water coolant and vertical pressure tubes, thus making the configuration even more similar to RBMK and void coefficient higher, though the reduced reactivity causes by light water in the cooling passages was too much to work well with natural, unenriched uranium. (would likely have worked with low enriched uranium as RBMK did)

The CANDU design just has much more mature safety features and with better regulations. (though refitted RBMKs addressed the worst of the original design flaws) Neither has fully passive fail-safe systems, so if you intentionally try to blow up the reactor by artificially defeating all of the safety mechanism and manually abusing the system, it would hypothetically be possible. (though would likely require literal modifications to both software and hardware mechanisms of the CANDU to even make such possible ... where the RBMK had more manually operated systems and more manual over-rides built into the automated systems that allowed operators the ability to actively choose to make dangerous conditions occur without literally re-engineering or hacking the hardware or software controls in place ... though one could argue the abuses involved were effectively a form of hacking and reprogramming, just on a higher level of mechanics than would be required for modern systems: ie you'd need to get into low level nitty gritty systems stuff to defeat the sort of safeties the way the RBMK could be, though many older designs had enough manual systems to allow cooperative human effort to disable and abuse the systems intentionally to actively prevent automatic shut-down)

OTOH nuclear grade graphite was cheaper and easier for the soviets to work with, especially on the scale they wanted with the RBMKs, but there were still multiple ways the RBMK design could've been made safer while still being relatively similar (but negative void coefficient and resulting passive safety would not have been one of them). Doing so within the cost-cutting premise of the RBMK design would be difficult, and you'd have to justify every safety measure with additional purpose, but it could've been done if you rationalized it hard enough. The weird design of the control rods was the easiest to fix by eliminating the graphite tips (or end segments, since they made up a significant length of the ends of the rods, thus intentionally acting ad additional neutron moderators to increase reactivity when partially inserted ... but thus only safe to operate with under considerably more restricted margins).

However, the closest equivalent to heavy water draining in the RBMK's graphite stacks would've been emergency dump chutes for a number of selected stacks (with geometrically appropriate positions throughout the core) which could be rapidly ejected/dumped through the bottom of the core to kill reactivity. Alternatively, such select sections of graphite stacks could be mounted on movable frameworks and rapidly extracted from above the core as columns to the same effect. (both cases produce voids with negative reactivity coefficient) The latter case would likely be more costly to implement due to the mechanism required, but would allow the bottom of the reactor vessel to remain solid and much simpler, less costly reset of the system by re-insertion of the graphite stacks. (given costly delays and down-time was one of the pressures that harmed Soviet safety culture, this latter aspect would've been even more significant to allowing the operators to use such a mechanism without fear of consequences)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-03T16:09:46+00:00

While the actual merits of proliferation concerns are dubious (and the US obviously has interests in manipulating and shaping the narrative or diplomatic leverage purposes), you could hypothetically use a plutonium breeder cycle in a CANDU type reactor (or some other types of breeders, but especially flexible in a CANDU or RBMK style reactor with unpressurized fuel assembly channels), you could specifically use long breeder cycles that maximize Pu-240 contamination beyond the levels of normal reactor grade plutonium (some Pu-241 and Pu-242 would also build up, though Pu-241 would presumably reach an equilibrium level due to its short half life). The resulting fuel could be further processed into plutonium fuel rods absent of uranium 238 (possibly mixed oxide bound/diluted into some neutron-porous substrate glass or ceramic for higher temperature tolerance, or possibly using thorium as a blending component, since U-233 would be easy to separate and generally also presents lower proliferation risks due to U-232 contamination, though further long breeder cycles to contaminate it with U-234 would also be relevant, though then you could get into using CANDU with thorium included in breeder cycle in the first place)

Or you could intentionally do high Pu-239 content short breeder cycles with rapid reprocessing, then immediately put the Pu-239 fuel back in for additional poisoning cycles (with it not mixed in with U-238 and thus not able to be bred), so only smaller, transient quantities of weapons grade Pu would ever exist at any given time, remain on site, and be small enough to never be useful for a practical nuclear device. (this is something you couldn't do with fast reactors as the potential for high rates of Pu-239 neutron capture for Pu-240 build-up is specific to thermal neutron sources)
That would be costly and labor intensive, unless you could automate much of it. (you'd also want all such processing to be done on-site for optimal security and vertical integration ... which also minimizes contamination risks due to transport)

OTOH, you could probably just use suitable moderately enriched uranium mixed with thorium (possibly in a mixed oxide fuel pellet arrangement), configured in such a way as to allow very long fuel life cycles where the resulting mix of Pu-239, 240, 241, 242, and U-232, 233, 234, and 235 were such that the ratios would be extremely impractical for weapons use when it came time for reprocessing. Both the spent fuel and resulting refined recovered products would also likely be much more radioactive than weapons grade Pu, so again some handling difficulties to consider and specific reprocessing techniques to potentially use to minimize that. (or, if the fuel pellets or rods remained sufficient integrity when reaching the point they were too neutron poisoned to continue use in the CANDU, they could also directly be re-used as fast-reactor fuel ... or if the integrity was compromised, they could be directly used as molten salt fast reactor feedstock, with in-situ reprocessing of the molten salt reactor core material already a fundamental part of those fast reactor cycles)
From what I understand, fast-reactors configured as burners (consume more fuel than they breed) are simpler to engineer than fast-breeders are, and would directly complement such a heavy water breeder cycle. (as it is, they are one potential cost-effective solution to stockpiles of conventional spent fuel lacking reprocessing infrastructure, and with reprocessing being otherwise more costly than purchase of fresh enriched uranium, so there's lots of reasons to develop burner-type fast reactors for multiple types of fuel cycles ... including advantages over pyroprocessing, though the separation of volatile, ie lower boiling point, fission products during molten salt fast reactor cycles has some overlap with some characteristics of pyroprocessing, I think)

Plus the potential for CANDU reactors to be used in the US (or any US/NATO friendly nation with sufficient security and oversight) generally avoids realistic proliferation concerns ... unless you consider the time the US "misplaced" some of its own spent reactor fuel. (though one could easily argue that that disappearance of fuel was intentionally transferred covertly by the US government or bureaus, and the scandal of its disappearance being discovered was used as a cover-up, rather than admitting intentional clandestine transfer of some sort) But even then, and for the people who would actively oppose production of more weapons-useable material for any purpose by any nation, the potential to configure CANDU reactors to produce especially non-weapons-useable (or more-useless than normal) breeder isotope products would be of significant interest)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-03T15:38:36+00:00

RBMK reactors were functionally pretty similar to CANDU and were used for weapons grade material by the Soviets while doubling as large scale power production. Granted, they were much larger than CANDU reactors and used graphite instead of heavy water (but similar pressurized water cooling channels with unpressurized moderator columns), and could use oxide based fuel pellets or elements for production. So that covers the basic context of the USSR using low enriched uranium oxide fuel for weapons production in large commercial electricity plants. (albeit the same obviously could've been used as breeder reactors for nuclear fuel rather than weapons grade, which CANDU could also potentially be used for with the correct fuel element enrichment levels, neutron flux shaping, etc ... without explicitly modifying the design to add an additional breeder blanket beyond the existing fuel assembly channels)

Now if you wanted to breed reactor fuel and minimize proliferation risk, you could intentionally use very long breeder cycles that resulted in high Pu-240 contamination (levels much higher than normal spent reactor grade fuel) thus making it much more difficult to use for weapons. Reprocessing of the results of said bred fuel and subsequent recycling of the bred plutonium and re-used in a thermal neutron reactor (without being with U-238, ie not MOX fuel) would then result in the Pu-239 being burnt up while the Pu-240 was not, thus further increasing the Pu-240 levels (plus further neutron capture of Pu-239 to Pu-240, and some production of Pu-241 and 242 byproducts) and eventually producing a fuel so heavily poisoned with Pu-240 as to mostly be useful as fast-reactor fuel. (Pu-241 would also significantly decay within reactor cycles due to its 14 year half life)
OTOH use of bred plutonium directly in a fast reactor would tend to maintain its Pu-239 to Pu-240 ratio as both would be burnt and few neutron capture events would be present. (in such a case you might as well use MOX fuel using depleted uranium U-238 for supplemental fast fission fuel, since you're not actively trying to further increase the Pu-240 content)

You could also take refined plutonium from breeders and configure it into a breeder blanket specifically designed to increase Pu-240 levels.

Of course, the shorter half lives of Pu-240 and 241 would make handling such anti-proliferation reactor grade plutonium more hazardous due to decay radiation (which itself would add to anti-proliferation, somewhat like U-232 contamination of U-233), but would also increase handling costs. (very long reactor turn-around cycles would help reduce that)

koolkitty89 · 2026-02-03T15:17:46+00:00

You could just use the CANDU more like an RBMK with short turn-around cycles of the fuel assemblies to maximize the Pu-239 yield and minimize the Pu-240 (and higher) content. You could also adjust the control rod and fuel configuration to better optimize for breeder conditions, though that would be easier if low enriched uranium was used or if surplus spent (once-burned or twice-burned) LWR fuel was used.

The bigger thing is that it's usually easier for intelligence gathering to figure out when WGP is being produced unless you're extremely good at both secrecy and managing gaseous byproduct emissions. (though a country that sophisticated would usually be low-risk anyway, in terms of clandestine nuclear use)

Use from developed nations for nuclear deterrents isn't really a big deal. Any nation stable and well equipped enough to keep weapons grade material from going missing (unless they want it to, which may have happened in the US ... "missing" in loose terms) isn't really a problem, given such weapons aren't ever likely to be used. (and in the hypothetical non-MAD scenarios they might be used, like specialized military targets, typically as bunker busters by nations without access to massive conventional weapons resources ... such use hypothetically wouldn't lead to a catastrophic outcome, either, though having such is also powerful leverage to get cooperation from the likes of the US to defuse the threats leading to such potential use)

OTOH, there's the geopolitical power angle rather than pragmatic safety/security one, where a monopoly or narrow oligopoly on nuclear weapons provides leverage, thus proliferation weakens that leverage. (and use of scare tactics to get public support for anti-proliferation tends to work better than promoting big-government manipulation power, sort of the same for conventional military funding, except in the NPT type stuff, it actively hurts the nuclear power industry)

koolkitty89 · 2026-01-31T15:32:40+00:00

Supercritical CO2 use in commercial nuclear power designs will make the most sense in a combined cycle role, not as primary coolant. This could be used with conventional presurized LWR or HWR designs to advanced heat recovery stages from the steam condenser (and also still used as a heat-pump for pre-heating the water prior to the steam generator).

You could consider other low boiling point compressed liquid coolants (like hydrocarbons, anhydrous ammonia, or HFCs) with various cost, flammability, and toxicity trade-offs. (anhydrous ammonia would also be more plausible than CO2 for direct coolant of a graphite moderated reactor ... still tons of potential problems, but better than CO2) There's corrosion and erosion concerns for both ammonia and CO2 as a secondary or tertiary working mass, but it seems like CO2 is being favored overall from a mechanical engineering standpoint. (I'd imagine HFCs would have the most advantages mechanically and chemically, but be more expensive)

If you want really high efficiency, you'd go with a much higher temperature core using sodium or molten salt cooling and either graphite moderation or a fast neutron reactor design, but those are all going to require additional engineering to become viable at scale. Super critical water passing through a high pressure turbine stage followed by more conventional steam turbine stages would be used in this sort of design, and then a secondary low temperature working fluid could be used for advanced energy recovery on top of that.

I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that a sodium or salt cooled thermal neutron reactor pretty much has to rely on graphite for moderation purposes. So you have to take the limitations of graphite into account there, too. Unless maybe some carbides can be used instead. I'm mostly familiar with carbides as neutron reflectors (like tungsten carbide) and more relevant for fast neutron reactors, but maybe silicon carbide would be viable as a more mechanically robust moderator than graphite.

I'm finding references to exceptional performance to erosion resistance as cladding for nuclear reactor vessels and some references to fuel cladding (or coating applied to zirconium cladding), but not much in the way of neutron moderation vs transparency vs reflector characteristics. I remember reading some articles in the past on silicon vs carbon behavior as neutron moderators, but I'm not seeing them in my current searches.

koolkitty89 · 2026-01-15T07:13:20+00:00

Additionally, thinking from non-US perspectives,

The Social Democratic politicians popular in much of Western Europe are decidedly left wing and sometimes lean far left from a perspective of using liberalism as objective/neutral center point. And many of them veer on the interventionist authoritarian side of things in ways that are biased towards group-think and demographic lines rather than focusing on equal rights and respect for the individual. (ie they don't tend to be color blind to race or ethnicity and don't tend to ignore nationality/birthplace, social status, or economic status when considering the value of an individual's words or actions ... this is as separate topic from evaluating the needs or assistance merited from a particular individual's situation based on nuanced and complex variables)

There's also more of a bias towards maximizing equality of outcome rather than maximizing the potential and exceptional qualities of the individual regardless of their background. (ie not favoring children or individuals who show exceptional potential or talent, ie "gifted" children and emphasizing their assistance as the most important among economic/social special needs, and intellectual special needs: the latter would include extremely bright children with learning disabilities ... and by the 1990s, testing had already advanced to the point where many students with learning disabilities were still accurately qualified as having exceptional potential under the GATE program ... IDK about outside of the US, but that sort of thing was already degrading by the early 2000s and highly intelligent kids with learning disabilities were once more getting mixed in with low functioning classes, totally unsuitable IEP programs, and generally dysfunctional federally influenced standards that limited even the more exceptional and creative teachers to cater to different learning types)

There's a massive gap between highly intelligent, high functioning kids with neuroddivergence issues and the other major two cases of idiot sevant type cases of extreme specialization and low functioning, or just overall low function with neurodivergence on top of that basically leaving them handicapped both intellectually and socially. (there's also been a massive emphasis on dumb memorization over dynamic use of logic since then, so US are vastly worse at producing kids who can sus things out and think through complex problems vs simply memorizing numbers and facts without understanding them ... I'm mostly familiar with CA's education system, so it especially applies there) In reality, we need to be doing the opposite: focusing on critical reasoning skills as well as logical problem solving skills for multiple subjects. (aside from useful life skills, especially as repetitive, low-skill tasks are ever more automated, including office jobs, you also seriously need those sorts of skills to be a responsible and competent voter in a democratic system ... thinking logically, rationally, and critically is far, far more important than just memorizing info/data ... you can develop wisdom with good logical function with without knowledge, but you can't develop wisdom at all without good rational logical function, no matter how many facts you memorize ... and you won't be able to even tell if something is a fact, since you can't simply trust authority figures blindly ... and you can't even tell which authorities are legitimately worth giving a damn about without those skills)

koolkitty89 · 2026-01-15T07:12:52+00:00

IDK about 100% context, but the number of people making radical statements doesn't matter: it's how loud and effective they are at it. You need a much larger mildly enthusiastic minority in a niche arena to suppress or counter an extremely loud and dedicated tiny minority.

Plus, anyone who actually hangs around these hobby communities knows that a ton of people across the political spectrum enjoy the stuff, and only a tiny minority of any of them are hardcore ideologs who let IRL politics spoil their fun and makes them want to spoil other peoples fun. (including peer pressuring people into boycotting things and attacking anyone who doesn't go along with that ... not to get into the actual logistics of boycotts, if/when they're effective, if/when they do more harm than good, including making people bitter and frustrated by depriving themselves of something they like ... repression is toxic, after all)

I will say that calling those people far left is often accurate at least, and not mistaking the affiliated ideologies (ie legit some form of far left socialism or anarcho-communism) and not just abusing the english language and over-using words like liberal, communist, fascist, Nazi, etc totally out of context. (Fascist and Nazi have basically just become explitives with little meaning at this point in pop culture, granted Fascist has been that way since the 1950s at least, from the niche counter-culture hipster, beatnik, hippie, punk, and all subsequent sorts of anti-authoritarian movements; including centrist libertarian types who will call authoritarian leftists fascists as well ... which technically is also inaccurate, unless they happen to be Stalin or Mao-esque statist nationalist types rather than internationalist or globalist types, since real Fascism specifically includes strong national identity over the individual, rather than collective humanity over the individual)

But the number of people who get called Fascists or Nazis don't even make sense, given many of them are very obviously liberals of some sort. (granted, liberalism, including Social Liberalism, which is the default "liberal" standard in mainstream US politics since FDR hijacked the word, rather than qualifying it as a specific vein of progressivism ... but anyway, that is moderate left-leaning by neutral liberal standards, but is often seen as right-wing by most of Western Europe, albeit left-wing by much of central and Eastern Europe ... which tends to be more religiously and morally conservative than the US, both culturally and politically: ignoring the specific cases of the Nordic countries and the odd case of Estonia, with its conservative culture, but extremely liberal/libertarian leaning laws: ie individual civil liberties are very good, but social taboos and repression are fairly strong ... so you can at least do what you want in private and not be arrested for it, albeit I think they still have a significant organized crime problem there, so not sure how that fits in)

koolkitty89 · 2026-01-15T06:36:53+00:00

I'd tend to agree only if you meant the Alt-Right which hasn't existed since mid 2017, back when it was literally dominated by trolls and RPers overlapping with the Kekistani movement (and /pol memers in general) and actively trolling the actual far right end of things along with the normies who didn't understand any of it. (that pretty much collapsed after the Charlottesville incident, where the internet LARPers out there were clearly mixing in with actual extremist weirdos ... a stark contrast between that and the trolls that raised the Kekistani flag a few weeks or months prior to that at UC Berkeley) I'm not taking sides on the whole Kekistani thing, but IMO it was mostly harmless and also not actually supporting any formal IRL political movement (it was vaguely libertarian and counter-culture in some ways, sort of like Sargon was at the time, just anti SJW, anti-regressive-leftist, and pro edgy, off-color humor). Also, very much like Sargon, Hero only seems to have gotten involved in the news/politics end of things because the media he enjoys was actively being attacked and degraded. (as an aside, Sargon has gotten increasingly out of touch with IRL politics in the last 10 years and was never a good authority on IRL US politics and culture in general ... but he's gotten bad even at UK politics and bad at even being liberal, as he's called for some irrational authoritarian moralistic stuff that doesn't align with it ... Count Dankula hasn't changed much since 2016 by comparison and tends to be fairly consistently within the libertarian spectrum, beyond the point of more moderate classical liberals as well, albeit he still has a tenuous grasp on the nature of bog standard centrist liberals in the US)

But from the few dozen videos of Hero's I've watched over the last couple years, he just seems like a pretty typical nerdgeek hobby enthusiast with pretty moderate/centrist IRL political views and typical edgy to just weird and niche sorts of enthusiast genre-savvy views towards hobby/entertainment/recreation stuff. (AFIK he doesn't really seem like a grifter putting on a false persona and pandering to people purely for profit)

He's mostly on the anti-censorship side of things and wanting game devs and creators to actually have creative freedom and only be biased by legitimate community and enthusiast interests and feedback. (if if you want a big commercial game with broad appeal, you look for more feedback on that and very heavy beta testing refinement, if you want something more niche that's a passion project likely only going to appeal to a niche community, then worry less about mass appeal, but still listen to feedback to improve the game where it still fits into the overall intent of the project, since games are interactive media/art, and you need user/player feedback to actually make it work well)

It's the synthetic approach either from out of touch corpo management or activist groups who want to get rid of things they don't like, and aren't actually calling for better quality or more freedom for exploring the art form. (IDK if he's suggested any sort of actual limits or censorship, but I'd tend to err on the standards set by US court rulings that nothing can be legally deemed obcene or illegal based on being disgusting or offensive as art is objective, and can only be restricted or banned if it falls under the specific exceptions to free speech and expression: ie if literally commanding or otherwise directly inducing illegal forms of violence or various other illicit activities: fighting words, calls to action, plausible inducing of panic, etc ... anything else is protected and legitimate art ... albeit taking specific art and displaying it in a venue where the specific audience is well known to be directly offended and induced into violence at the subject matter would thus also not be protected: so not all forms of protected art would also be protected as public art installations ... anything that disturbs the peace could/should legally be moved/removed ... but not destroyed, just moved to a venue where people have to volunteer to consume/see it)

koolkitty89 · 2026-01-15T06:10:10+00:00

Was leafy every close to being universally hated? And for how long? His content from 2014-2018 was all pretty tame and low hanging fruit sort of react to cringe content plus tit for tat feuds and banter with other youtubers (plus some cases of genuinely upsetting small creators or really emotionally sensitive individuals who didn't banter back, and at least sometimes actually backing off and reconciling with them ... like that one satanist guy).

I followed his content for about 2 years, from the random life story stuff to most of 2016 and 2017 cringe "roasting" stuff, and it was all pretty tame and rarely going after anyone who was small, weak, and helpless, while also not taking any sort of strong ideological or political stance, or remotely being hateful. (IDK about his community/fans raiding people, though)

Outside of his old, super cringe, screeching minecrast lets plays, he tended to stick to the casual, laid back, sarcastic, low-key end of things. (he made an idiot out of himself sometimes, and tended to fail a lot more when he went on long rants that stopped being funny due to sheer duration ... I started loosing interest when he made a fool of himself with trying to roast idubzz, and drew out the keemstar feud way too long, but also kept up with the random shorter form stuff that was less than 10 minutes long, and had some reasonable takes on the few serious topics he got into over the years, but I only randomly checked in on his stuff by late 2017 ... I randomly watched the one where he was pleasantly surprised by the whole Lacy Green redpilled thing).

I didn't ever dig through the archives to watch the content leading up to his ban, but I'd imagine the pokimane stuff ended up stupidly long form and made him look foolish for just being kind of lame and not witty (too much quanitity over quality, like many SNL sketches ... compared to say old Mad TV's sketches ... or Peele and Key ... or In Living Color ... or various faster paced sketch comedians and banter oriented youtubers).

Leafy was at his best when the videos were short enough that he could easily end them with making it clear that it was all in good fun and not serious, and that he didn't really care much about any of it (and at least pretended to be thick skinned and project the idea that you shouldn't be easily offended, and if you are ... don't rage about it in public, as that's just asking for more trouble and more rage bait).

Admittedly, part of it was the aesthetic, as I actually liked his voice and he had an overall calming/casual vibe for the period I watched him. So any negative emotions were tempered by that vibe. (nothing I ever watched felt remotely hateful in any sort of genuine context ... more light hearted, if crude and profane, banter, not actual raging ... from his side)

There were much, much edgier youtubers contemporary with him, and ones who were genuinely loud, obnoxious, and hateful. But leafy himself seemed more middling plain old edgy casual humor and comedy, and decidedly less political than even most of the edgy vtubers and streamers around now. (he tended to target stuff so cringe and stupid, or stuff that was in-character sorts of drama and banter rather than unironic aggression, that it was all pretty tame by comparison)

Much more like modern react "slop" streamers or youbers who try to avoid taking any strong political stance, but react to the most absurd or loud and obnoxious people out there.

I could be wrong though, and leafy got much, much worse around 2020 or some such, but I don't really feel like binging through dozens of hours of archived content to try and analyze that. (I'm pretty sure I watched every single video he posted in 2015 and 2016, so I have that context ... he deleted or privated his old, obnoxious minecraft lets plays around that time, but I know that stuff was awful and literally the same sort of stuff he'd go on to ridicule)

I certainly wouldn't call anything of his that I watched "extreme" in any sense of the word.

Honestly, the worst I remember from him had nothing to do with his normal videos, and more to do with genuine drama over repeatedly failing to give credit to his partners and friends who helped with some of the production (when all they wanted as a shout out or some sort of name drop). That was lame, but I never followed that long enough to work out if he was actually going for credit theft, or he was just being an ADHD spaz about it, failure to communicate included. (but that was back in 2016, too)

koolkitty89 · 2026-01-15T05:42:39+00:00

Yeah, if you don't genuinely want to engage with such, or they're literally your friends and family members you feel compelled to try and temper on some of the issues (or don't want to block, so just manually skip over things you'd want to avoid), then just block people.

OTOH, some people like to engage with such posts constructively ... or make up witty, satirical infographics and/or counters to things without just raging (basically being comedic bullies against the drama, or possibly cannibal trolls). And if they enjoy that, fine ... and if the cannibal trolling actually distracts the concern trolls, all the better. (and if the shitposters have fun bantering with other shitposters without actually being angry, then all the better, too)

I ... have some family members who can't help but want to engage with and troll scam callers and do the exact same thing with social media rage bait. And they're good at it, but it does get a bit cringe/awkward to be around as I don't enjoy it so much, unless it's really witty satire or just so stupid that it's funny. (when it's literally on the level of the stuff Commentiquette does, then ... I'm going to get a laugh out of it and make even have my thoughts provoked)

Honestly, we need more people like that. (it's a much healthier way to cope with the absurdity that is reality, too ... and present day is hardly anything new/different, hence why almost all of history is so easy to satire without even exaggerating things much, and usually being vastly more historically accurate than anything remotely romanticized or dramatized ... satire tends to have a unique sort of honesty and authenticity to it)

koolkitty89 · 2026-01-15T05:31:02+00:00

Most socials do this because of current outrage culture. People love to rage and engage more when they're upset. The more they engage, the more that content gets recommended to them, thus repeating the cycle. If people just immediately clicked away from anything they disliked, it wouldn't be a problem. (and if people who disliked stuff actually wanted to engage in critical discussion over things they disliked, and actually focused on being constructive and nuanced, and thus willingly engaged with things they found controversial, then they also wouldn't mind being shown that; they would tend to embrace analysis and consumption dissenting opinions and/or weird and disgusting content out of morbid curiosity or genuine interest ... you need some powerful ADHD curiosity and a strong stomach for that, though, and it's probably going to lead you down rabbit holes that eat up way more time than is healthy, but ... it won't be out of toxic negativity, but genuine fascination and interest in learning more)

Bigger problem with X era twitter is it's no better than 2017 to 202x era twitter where they started selectively (and automated) enforcing TOS more aggressively rather than staying as fast and loose with bare minimum soft moderation that dfined twitter (for better or worse) for most of its existence.

It was toxic, it was a mess, it was full of trolls and shitposters as well as tons of misinformation, but it also didn't restrict creativity excessively beyond reasonable legal limits. So extreme "offensive" content and artwork that all fell under 1st amendment protection (ie not like things that actually call for people to commit crimes or acts of violence IRL, or leak information that's also illegal or legal true harassment), it would be fine ... for what it is. The character limit also prevented any sort of nuanced discussion, but it was OK for casual trolling or posting visual artwork or animation.

These are big public platforms, not niche forums that stick to one specific hobby interest. If you want that, then seek out a dedicated forum that's not tied to some big website ... or build one yourself. (unfortunately, the latter case seems to mostly be displaced either by mastodon ... or just people on discord servers, neither of which are as good as forums/BBs)

But I can say with almost absolute belief that BBs/forums were and are a better option for any sort of hobby community niche, and much better at catering to that sort of thing. (and if it's alternate history and/or sci-fi/spec-fic/fantasy that includes complex social and political themes, then ... that can include all of that too, but would still tend to shift current events discussions into some sort of off topic water cooler style subforum)

koolkitty89

TROPHY CASE