I’m reminded of the conversations in the late 90s about how North Korea was “still a decade away” from having nuclear weapons.
I believed (not sure why) that atomic bomb tests had a different seismic “fingerprint” compared to regular earthquakes?
IANASeismologist, but off the top of my head, I’d be looking first for the pre-ring.
A nuke will have no pre-tremors, because of course it won’t, and the tremor itself will be a single hard pulse.
A natural earthquake will feature the building of tension and thus lots of little warning quakes as things get tense, and the actual main event will be a tearing, not a single pulse, so there’ll be a wider peak and longer cooldown, and probably more afterquakes as things settle down into a new configuration.
Either way there’ll be echoes and aftershocks, but I would imagine the seismograph readings of an earthquake and a nuke (or comparable conventional explosion) would be distinctive to those who know what they’re looking at.
Which probably explains why we’re hearing this on social media and not elsewhere.
I’m not surprised that NATO has such exercises. I didn’t know they were regular annual events.
It’s good news that molten salt reactors aren’t new “maybe someday(?)” tech - they’ve been around a long time and are pretty well understood. Liquid metal cooled ones are pretty neat too, at least to materials-nerds (or so I hear).
Perhaps the muscle/inertia of nation state-level corps like Alphabet and Amazon can actually break the wheels free for these micro-reactors. Mass production will be critical to getting us over the current hurdle of licensing them on a piecemeal and litigation-throttled basis.
It’s the new hot thing…1)
Amazon makes $500M bet on itty-bitty nuclear reactors to fuel cloud empire
So far Amazon’s partner in this, X-energy2), hasn’t produced anything but hot air, but as we all know by now, in the tech world that’s more than enough for breezing through the first couple rounds of funding.
1) For some meanings of “new”, anyway. NuScale has been at it since 2000.
2) To the best of my knowledge, nothing to do with the microblogging site now known as EGGS or superheavy fireworks, but the choice of name is telling.
From what I understand so far, Kairos Power wants to combine two existing technologies; a small pebble-bed reactor (which are typically gas-cooled high-temerature reactors) and using low-pressure fluoride salt as the coolant.
Which sort of results in a new reactor design that hasn’t been used before in this configuration for commercial power generation.
So, probably still something of a learning curve ahead. Their timeline seems a bit, let’s say overly optimistic to me.
US Supreme Court to hear nuclear waste storage dispute
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-hear-nuclear-waste-storage-dispute-2024-10-04/
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the authority to license nuclear waste storage facilities following a judicial ruling that upended decades of practice by declaring it does not.
[…]
Tech giants set to pay through the nose for nuclear power that’s still years away
Investment banksters are sceptical…
[…]
It’s not just about keeping the chip fabs humming. Cho’s comments come at a time when China’s saber-rattling and military drills have heightened the fear of Taiwan being blockaded from vital energy imports. Unlike the Philippines and South Korea, which are reviving old nuclear projects, Taiwan faces a unique geopolitical challenge in balancing energy security with national defense concerns from across the Taiwan Strait.
[…]
Not to mention that this would hypothetically also be a way to produce fissile material suitable for weapons. Pro tip: skip the U, go for the Pu.
