You’re really underestimating the contributions of people like the COO (Shotwell, who by all accounts, really reigns Musk in) and the actual engineering talent at SpaceX. Musk is hardly the first to come up with some of the aerospace ideas, but SpaceX is the first to push through the failure to success through a rapid prototype model.

I was actually kinda interested in the upcoming book… Can anyone else confirm if his work is garbage? I’m not super familiar with him.

Always found it interesting that they put a career environmental lawyer as the head of, checks notes, public health.

Feel like I’m the only one that likes the soap opera effect to some extent 🙈

I won't aim to change your mind but I'll add that one of the reasons they're so expensive is, at least in the US, there is simply a struggle to build mega engineering projects. From project management to the blue collar skills required (nuclear isn't the only large scale engineering project with cost overruns). Things were more favorable in the 80s when plants were built somewhat regularly and the country had collective experience completing these projects.

Renewables are similar too on both the installation and design side. More experience in manufacturing, developing, and installing helps to lower costs.

Worth mentioning it's actually quite small by mass (only 1% or so of what goes in), but only a few places actually separate out those isotopes.

That applies to the software itself, sure, but only if you bring your own infrastructure. Large scale FOSS infrastructure services are going to be the exception not the norm.

Nah I'd disagree. Infinite growth motive doesn't necessarily apply to private companies. To suggest there's unbridled greed present in every company is just a falsehood.

If you're not paying for a service, then you're the product. I never understood the expectation that people should just provide you email and storage for free, because?

I’m not really convinced that a GPU backend is needed. Was there ever a comparison of the different CLIP model variants? Or a graph optimized / quantized ONNX version?

I think the proposed solution makes a lot of sense for the task at hand if it were integrated on the pic-rs end, but it would be worth investigating further improvements if it were on the lemmy server end.

Reprocessing already exists and it’s been done for decades. I can’t imagine reprocessing fuel for recycling the usable components is that compelling in the US and it would be more geared to waste reduction. 99% of spent fuel by mass could be reused or otherwise treated differently for disposal as it’s radioactivity is much much smaller than the portion that has been transmuted during power production.

This is really only one facet and not even the main driver in cost. MIT did a study a few years ago looking at this (https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118). Turns out it’s complicated.

In short, in the US, lacked of skilled labor and large scale project management are big drivers also, not just regulations.

That’s a limitation of the secondary power conversion side and is true for any power generation methodology that relies on steam generation. That said, there’s alternatives to the traditional Rankine cycle that could be deployed without modifying the nuclear side of the plant.