Graphite reactors are not a good idea because they inherently have, well, graphite. That can burn.
The worst possible case for water-moderated reactors is uncontained meltdown. And it's not _terribly_ horrible. You will get contamination with volatiles, mainly cesium. But there's not a lot of it in the reactor, so it'll affect only a small area around the plant. Some fuel might get initially mobilized by steam explosions, but again, only a fraction.
The worst case for a graphite reactor is an uncontained core fire. That can burn for weeks and spread a significant part of the fuel as particulates over large territories (Chernobyl).
Is it likely? Nope. But there are black swan events: earthquakes, mega-hurricanes, meteorite strikes, Godzilla attacks.
I do. I have a small safe deposit box in my local branch for about $1 a year.
It's great if you want to store some documents. But don't expect _real_ security. It's guarded by a minimum-wage employee, and the keys are usually laughably insecure. Banks know this, so they cap their liability for the loss of the deposit box at around $1000.
So don't even think about storing gold bars there, like they do in movies.
There _are_ companies that provide safe storage for high-value items, but they are pretty exotic.
It's the most baroque protocol that is still somehow surviving from the initial Internet. There are so many weird limitations, like not being able to use CNAME for apex zones. Or the entire DNSSEC fiasco.
Surveilance means stealing intellectual property of surveiled people. If you're a TRUE libertarian, then you need to make sure that you arrange some kind of a contract with the people you surveil.
It's just remarkable how they keep shooting themselves in the foot. Their hardware is great, but their software just sucks. And for no real reason, as far as I can understand. They technically do have a cloud subscription that needs to lock out users, I guess?
For example, they don't have handwriting recognition for non-Latin languages. They don't even have on-screen _keyboards_ for non-Latin languages. Their note-taker sucks. Their "remote whiteboard" feature doesn't work reliably. Etc.
Just open source it all, and allow people to fix it. It's clear that your in-house developers can't do that.
I've got a reMarkable 2 whose USB-C port just decided to break one day. Tearing the unit down, I see the USB connector puts all of its strain on some very tiny pads. The pads were torn off. Apparently this is a common problem.
Based on this, I don't think their hardware is great, either.
Yeah, that's a known problem The solution is to get one of those usb-c to qi adapters, keep it always plugged in, and use a qi charger to recharge. This minimizes insertion cycles and stress on the connector.
I like handwriting, and reMarkable feels closest to actual pen and paper. It's also as thin as it can be (although it does cause the USB-C reliability issues).
Yeah. But then people are not going to buy their hardware. I have a reMarkable from 6 years ago that I'm using to run Toltec and koreader, but I'm not going to buy any new hardware from them.
Was comparing the remarkable with the kindle scribe and the boox note 5c - and settled on the 5c - though the battery life trade-off is significant (I end up charging once every 3-4 days, with 2-3 hours of daily use - writing and reading) - and I am really happy with the device. Fantastic hand-writing feel, very good on-device hand-writing recognition, and decent to very good integration with google drive, notes export, etc. May be worth considering if you are looking for an colour e-ink device that you can write on (notes, thoughts, journalling), as well as run android play store applications, including the kindle app.
I tried Boox (Note Air 3 Colour) but it wouldn't run the one 'android' app I needed - O'Reilly bookshelf. Returned it and got an iPad instead. Seemed ok but only half supports apps. I didn't have it long enough to suffer pen accuracy or general performance, but the colours were muddy.
Hydrogen containment: you might want to look at topping up hydrogen along the way. Have a small compartment inside the gas bag with lithium shavings and a small servo that can release water into this compartment.
You'll get about 1/15-th of the lithium+water mass as hydrogen. So if you want to replenish 1 m^3 of hydrogen at STP (or around 1/8-th of the gas bag volume), you'll need around 600 grams of reagents.
It actually doesn't even have to be a servo. Just have a water container that slowly releases water through a capillary tube/wick into the gas bag, "moisturizing" the gas inside.
Lithium will then scavenge all the moisture from the gas inside the bag, releasing hydrogen in the process.
I think that the answer is the death of democracy and the golden age of corruption in poor countries. During the 80-s and early 90-s, the Western world was still trying to defend nascent democracies. It was lampooned by everyone ("Team America: World Police", anyone?) but it _did_ work to some degree.
Around 2000-s the West switched into the "whatever you do, we don't care as long as you stay inside your country" mode. Moreover, the West made it easy to expatriate money. You could earn your fortune in Russia by stealing money from schools via various corrupt schemes, but once you crossed the border of Russia, you instantly became a respected businessman who should be treated with respect.
The last year's Nobel in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu for his work on extractive versus inclusive institutions ("Why Nations Fail"). And the West unwittingly (?) recreated the same conditions that resulted in development gaps during the early colonial era.
And yes, the West is to blame here. Not China. Pretty much nobody in, say, Congo is abusing child labor to get money to emigrate to China. But I bet that quite a few people from Congo now have very nice properties in London.
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