Electricity use has plateaued because the biggest industrial users of electricity have moved overseas. This includes the manufacture of aluminum and steel....
U.S. steel production has fluctuated in the broad range of 6 million and 8 million tons a year for 35 years and has been pretty much level since recovery from the Great Recession. U.S. primary production of aluminum however has dropped sharply, the large majority of aluminum production is secondary (recycled) aluminum, which uses much less electricity (and even the primary production consumption per ton has been cut with superior technology).
... and uneducated far left wingers continue to make large 1GW nukes far too expensive....
Ah yes the all powerful hippies who crush multi-national corporations under their dirty Birkenstocks! Will their tyranny never end? Will the capitalist never get a break?
The high capital costs of nuclear power plants are, as the nuclear industry's World Nuclear Association says are "In general the construction costs of nuclear power plants are significantly higher than for coal- or gas-fired plants because of the need to use special materials, and to incorporate sophisticated safety features and back-up control equipment."
Cost could be cut pretty much only by cutting out those "sophisticated safety features and back-up control equipment". One argument that proponents of nuclear plants make is their intrinsic safety - that depends on those very features.
Which, of course, will cause the price of gasoline to crash because of the resulting glut.
What glut? EV's driving down petrol sales will be a gradual process, and vehicle fuel plants shift production on a monthly basis. Gasoline production will be adjusted (as is true now) so that there is a razor thin margin of excess supply.
Liquid fossil fuels is a world-wide industry in every respect (production, refining, consumption) and prices are set at the global level and on a world-wide scale U.S. shifts to EVs will have a small effect. And any drop in primary resource prices suppresses high cost fuel production (fracking, tar sands) which compensates significantly.
While it would have been somewhat interesting, the image fill in does not look normal at all. It is blurred, poorly colored, and distorted - like a bad photoshop. If one had been shown a stack of photos that had not been altered, and this one stuck in, and were asked to find the altered photo I don't think you would have had any problem picking this out.
Algorithms and people process images differently. This AI/ML technique creates plausible fill that will fool most people, most of time.
Any Slashdot regular has seen the posting about image manipulation techniques that can fool a neural net image recognition system to think an AK-47 is bunny rabbit, or vice versa. But the manipulated images look pretty much the same to people. Why do the altered images get misidentified? We can;t really say, given that we can;t really say why the neural net identifies an unmodified image correctly in the first place, it just learned to. People on the other had can point out the parts of an AK-47 or a bunny rabbit.
In this case I strongly suspect that no matter how much the fake fill in looks like real data, a suitable algorithm can detect the manipulated part of the image from the original image. There are many kinds of statistical tests that could be performed, and while a clever faker might be able to anticipate and "fix" some of them, it would be another matter entirely to be able to fix all possible ones.
This is similar to the effective impossibility of a forger to write something supposedly written by someone else so that the forgery cannot be detected. You can copy style and language up to a point, but you can't mimic every feature that can be analyzed statistically, nor can you conceal all of you own habitual traits.
It will be a good while yet before images can be altered in such a way that the fact of alteration cannot be detected. And as other note here, embedded cryptographic hashes can make images effectively secure even from that.
The story is different of course if what you are dealing with is the lossy compression of an image.
I know, this is/. where actually reading the summary, or the secondary source used to goose clicks, or the original article is a faux pas. But responding to what the researcher actually said/did - it is a fairly underwhelming conclusion: "Taken together, this work suggests that our reactions to a future confirmed discovery of microbial extraterrestrial life are likely to be fairly positive." hyped by silly references to B-movies.
I have yet to see any movie, or popular fiction, where the discover of non-Earth originating microbes of the non-brain-eating kind leads to mass panic, nor could I see how such a thing could be plausibly proposed. All of the "panic mode" scenarios involve intelligent alien life who are actually contacting us directly, or an alien plague (which is scary like any deadly plague, but from space).
These two types of scenarios, other than involving in some way "alien life", are unrelated.
A tip off about why the "alien microbe" scenario is not a cause for concern for most people is this other bit in one of the studies reported on: "...responses to reading an actual announcement of the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life showed a greater positivity bias than responses to reading an actual announcement of the creation of man-made synthetic life..".
Now that makes a whole lot of sense. It we start making synthetic life here on Earth the possibilities of an eventual harmful result are pretty obvious, and should be cause for concern. The simulated science report of the discovery of "extraterrestrial bugs" (if plausibly written) would not threaten any possible harmful consequence. If you had people read a report that we have discovered the "Andromeda Strain" that will kill us all, expect a different response.
They've remained where they were or gotten worse with no oversight while the cars have improved their position.
Next you clean up the home products and then something else will take over the top spot as the source of pollution problems. no matter how you clean up each industry there will always be one that is not as clean as the rest. the question becomes once you get down to the absolute major source of green house gas or pollution being a natural process do you try to then regulate that. I know already that in humanity's hubris, they would try to regulate a natural process. We're insane.
No, the household products have been improving. If you live in California you have been seeing products being reformulated and many solvent being taken off the shelves for years, and the same thing is happening to a lesser extent in other areas, so your initial claim is false.
Yes, as you clean one source up others move to the top of the list. That is a natural result of regulatory success. It is not a problem.
The clean-up process is being driven by actual scientifically derived standards for safe air - air pollution levels that are not causing measurable harm to part of the population. In many urban areas of the country due to topography and weather conditions and settlement density they already meet these standards and so are not being subjected to the ever tightening regulations that South California faces. About 60% of the U.S. population does not face any air pollution problems, a fraction that is growing, and also the severity of the problem of those who still face some is diminishing. So we are hardly done with the issue yet. In some parts of the problem stationary sources (home heating, etc.) is still significant, and interestingly enough many of the solutions are actually cheaper (e.g replacing oil with gas) which is driving replacement even without regulation.
In the 40% of the country that still has issues we are no where close to the point where natural pollution sources dominate. So you are declaring "we're insane" based on something you are imagining.
While making a lot of fuss about cars, nobody ever mentions that many many American homes are heated by diesel fuel, and many old European houses are heated by coal. This is on par with Nigeria where everyone gets electric power from a private diesel generator.
Solution is to develop power grids and gas lines. Bug no, we must fight private cars and now private house cleaning products.
The air pollution problem is very region specific. This report is about air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin, which naturally has the most serious such problem in the country. No one burns diesel fuel to heat homes in this area, that is mostly in the Northeast (80%) of such homes, and the number is not all that large, 4% of households nationally and declining.
This is an accurate description of what has happened in California. The controls on auto emissions have been very effective and have transformed the natural "smog trap" situation is the Los Angeles basin. In 1968 there were 200 Stage 1 smog alerts and 50 Stage 2 alerts. Stage 2 alerts dropped to near zero in the early 1980s, Stage 1 alerts did the same by the late 1990s. There have been no Stage 2 alerts since 1988 or Stage 1 smog alerts since 2003. And remember this is despite a 50% increase in population.
For years now the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) has been focusing on VOC emissions from household products out of necessity. That is where most the remaining problem is, and is had not been subject nearly as much reduction over the years as vehicle and industrial emission. It is a nuisance for a science/craft hobbyist like myself since many common solvents have disappeared that were useful and superior to their replacements, but it is a price you must be willing to pay to live here. Its not a big price (that be the cost of housing).
It is not the current name of a condition used for diagnosis today because it is split into two more specific conditions: Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) and Dissocial Personality Disorder (DPD). So it the condition is not imaginary nor did it disappear, it is simply not how it is currently classified for the purposes of medical diagnosis.
But unless you are psychologist or a psychiatrist, it is a perfectly reasonable and well understood term for the lay public to use.
Ostensibly, the US brought down their malfunctioning satellite in order to prevent it from becoming a hazard due to a large amount of toxic fuel on board.
Yes, ostensibly is the word. The satellite tank, a very thin shell (like all space fuel tanks) contained 500 kg of hydrazine, could not have survived re-entry intact -- such a thing has never happened before with the many deorbiting launchers and satellites over the years. You cannot get a hydrazine tank from orbit to Earth's surface unprotected with its contents still on board. Indeed even given that the pipe connections to the tank would be broken, the hydrazine would quickly have outgassed even from an intact tank.
And the extraordinary expense on Operation Burned Frost relative to even the theoretical hazard of of 500 kg of hydrazine landing somewhere randomly on the Earth's surface was far out of proportion to how similar toxic hazards are normally handled.
There were two far more plausible reasons: it was an American military reconnaissance satellite and they wanted to make sure the classified technologies on it were destroyed, and they wanted to practice an orbital shoot down. Probably both of these were motivations, the "hydrazine threat" cover story was ludicrous.
Among the five married couples no one shook more than eight hands. Therefore, if nine people each shake a different number of hands, the numbers must be 0, 1, 2,..., and 8. The person who shook 8 hands has to be married to the person who shook 0 hands (otherwise that person could have shaken only seven hands.) Similarly, the person who shook seven hands is bound to be married to the person who shook 1 hand. So that the married couples shook hands in pairs 8/0, 7/1, 6/2, 5/3. The only person left who shook hands with 4 is my wife.
Except that there are two people at the party who shook no hands, apparently the question poser shook none also. So the actual pairings are 8/0, 7/1, 6/2, 5/3 and 4/0. His wife could be either the 4 hand shaker, or the 8 hand shaker, either way the answers satisfy the problem statement.
This logic puzzle requires unstated assumptions to derive the answer - which no logic puzzle should have. The question poser does not state that he is entirely excluded from the handshaking ritual for some reason. So it seems impossible because it is, in the form stated.
For instance, in America teachers say "Show your work".
This was my bane all the way through school, I like numbers and figured lots of mental tricks (natural to me) for solving things, and was familiar with lots of number patterns (like powers of two), and so much of time answers were obvious to me, but I was marked down for not "showing" the work I never did. They didn't want me to know how to find the answer, they wanted me to crank through a rote procedure. As a simple example, if you add stuff up in your head there is no work to show.
This even showed up in calculus when one old instructor wanted me to show my use of the "three step rule" for differentiation. What "three step rule'?! It appears that at some earlier time basic transformations for differentiation, which to me was a simple one step procedure, were divided into three separate "steps" for pedagogic reasons, I guess, which were entirely unnecessary, and not found in any recent text - basically manufacturing unneeded work.
For reference the feed conversion ratios (amount feed energy going, over the amount coming out) for common animals are 6 for cattle, 4 for pigs, 2 for egg production, and 1.6 for poultry broilers. Eating vegetarian is obviously 1 - although the animals raised for meat and eggs also eat waste products like wheat hay, and alfalfa, that humans cannot eat in addition to grains that compete with humans for food.
Although nearly all American cattle finish their growth in the feedlot, eating mostly grain that is not the whole story. The cows are slaughtered at about 10.5 months, after having spent 7 months eating forage (alfalfa, hay) and the 3.5 months eating high energy feeds based on grain.
OTOH some of that forage is stuff like "wheat hay" which is a byproduct of growing grain (in this case wheat).
Right. I have an account to be able to check in with relatives and friends to see something they have posted (and email me about), and there are a couple of organizations I belong to that use Facebook for group activity (messaging, blogging) that I check in with, and a few performers I "liked" to boost their careers. But that is all. I have never posted anything to Facebook, ever.
I want to focus a moment on the idea that, "Each minute of delay will cost lives in a real attack."
Are we sure we can do enough in 20 minutes, to make much difference? I don't mean that Hawaiians are expendable, or that more warning isn't better. However this isn't the 1950's anymore; civil defense measures have mostly been dismantled. It has been fashionable for decades to suggest that "nuclear war isn't survivable, bomb shelters are useless."
You surely have heard of "duck and cover"? There are steps that civilians can take in a matter of minutes that will reduce casualties in large areas affected by the attack. "Duck and cover" is the fastest and most basic, but it can prevent serious flash burns, injury by flying glass and other objects. Getting under cover, behind cover, and so forth take longer and likely needs minutes to accomplish in many cases.
Of course, all this depends on civilians who know what to do. How many is that, at present? But this can be fixed quickly with education.
Amazingly enough the Kilopower family of space power systems are designed to operate in space, i.e. a really good vacuum. How do they do it? The way all spacecraft do, with radiators that dispose of heat through thermal radiation. Thin though the atmosphere is on Mars, it should enhance the performance of these radiators.
Centrifuges are used for enriching uranium. They have nothing to do with any thorium fuel cycle.
We can ship nuclear fuel from Earth quite easily. Due to the high energy density, it is not heavy. The idea of mining nuclear fuel on Mars , and processing it and manufacturing the fuel to the necessary quality standards makes not sense at all.
Thorium seems to have acquired a fandom that imbues it with quasi-magical properties. It is doubly magical if the word "salt" is also used.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing new or original or even particularly interesting about his rocket.
Electricity use has plateaued because the biggest industrial users of electricity have moved overseas. This includes the manufacture of aluminum and steel....
U.S. steel production has fluctuated in the broad range of 6 million and 8 million tons a year for 35 years and has been pretty much level since recovery from the Great Recession. U.S. primary production of aluminum however has dropped sharply, the large majority of aluminum production is secondary (recycled) aluminum, which uses much less electricity (and even the primary production consumption per ton has been cut with superior technology).
... and uneducated far left wingers continue to make large 1GW nukes far too expensive. ...
Ah yes the all powerful hippies who crush multi-national corporations under their dirty Birkenstocks! Will their tyranny never end? Will the capitalist never get a break?
The high capital costs of nuclear power plants are, as the nuclear industry's World Nuclear Association says are "In general the construction costs of nuclear power plants are significantly higher than for coal- or gas-fired plants because of the need to use special materials, and to incorporate sophisticated safety features and back-up control equipment."
Cost could be cut pretty much only by cutting out those "sophisticated safety features and back-up control equipment". One argument that proponents of nuclear plants make is their intrinsic safety - that depends on those very features.
Sorry you can't have safe plants, and cheap ones.
Which, of course, will cause the price of gasoline to crash because of the resulting glut.
What glut? EV's driving down petrol sales will be a gradual process, and vehicle fuel plants shift production on a monthly basis. Gasoline production will be adjusted (as is true now) so that there is a razor thin margin of excess supply.
Liquid fossil fuels is a world-wide industry in every respect (production, refining, consumption) and prices are set at the global level and on a world-wide scale U.S. shifts to EVs will have a small effect. And any drop in primary resource prices suppresses high cost fuel production (fracking, tar sands) which compensates significantly.
While it would have been somewhat interesting, the image fill in does not look normal at all. It is blurred, poorly colored, and distorted - like a bad photoshop. If one had been shown a stack of photos that had not been altered, and this one stuck in, and were asked to find the altered photo I don't think you would have had any problem picking this out.
Algorithms and people process images differently. This AI/ML technique creates plausible fill that will fool most people, most of time.
Any Slashdot regular has seen the posting about image manipulation techniques that can fool a neural net image recognition system to think an AK-47 is bunny rabbit, or vice versa. But the manipulated images look pretty much the same to people. Why do the altered images get misidentified? We can;t really say, given that we can;t really say why the neural net identifies an unmodified image correctly in the first place, it just learned to. People on the other had can point out the parts of an AK-47 or a bunny rabbit.
In this case I strongly suspect that no matter how much the fake fill in looks like real data, a suitable algorithm can detect the manipulated part of the image from the original image. There are many kinds of statistical tests that could be performed, and while a clever faker might be able to anticipate and "fix" some of them, it would be another matter entirely to be able to fix all possible ones.
This is similar to the effective impossibility of a forger to write something supposedly written by someone else so that the forgery cannot be detected. You can copy style and language up to a point, but you can't mimic every feature that can be analyzed statistically, nor can you conceal all of you own habitual traits.
It will be a good while yet before images can be altered in such a way that the fact of alteration cannot be detected. And as other note here, embedded cryptographic hashes can make images effectively secure even from that.
The story is different of course if what you are dealing with is the lossy compression of an image.
I know, this is /. where actually reading the summary, or the secondary source used to goose clicks, or the original article is a faux pas. But responding to what the researcher actually said/did - it is a fairly underwhelming conclusion: "Taken together, this work suggests that our reactions to a future confirmed discovery of microbial extraterrestrial life are likely to be fairly positive." hyped by silly references to B-movies.
I have yet to see any movie, or popular fiction, where the discover of non-Earth originating microbes of the non-brain-eating kind leads to mass panic, nor could I see how such a thing could be plausibly proposed. All of the "panic mode" scenarios involve intelligent alien life who are actually contacting us directly, or an alien plague (which is scary like any deadly plague, but from space).
These two types of scenarios, other than involving in some way "alien life", are unrelated.
A tip off about why the "alien microbe" scenario is not a cause for concern for most people is this other bit in one of the studies reported on: "...responses to reading an actual announcement of the discovery of extraterrestrial microbial life showed a greater positivity bias than responses to reading an actual announcement of the creation of man-made synthetic life..".
Now that makes a whole lot of sense. It we start making synthetic life here on Earth the possibilities of an eventual harmful result are pretty obvious, and should be cause for concern. The simulated science report of the discovery of "extraterrestrial bugs" (if plausibly written) would not threaten any possible harmful consequence. If you had people read a report that we have discovered the "Andromeda Strain" that will kill us all, expect a different response.
...
They've remained where they were or gotten worse with no oversight while the cars have improved their position.
Next you clean up the home products and then something else will take over the top spot as the source of pollution problems. no matter how you clean up each industry there will always be one that is not as clean as the rest. the question becomes once you get down to the absolute major source of green house gas or pollution being a natural process do you try to then regulate that. I know already that in humanity's hubris, they would try to regulate a natural process. We're insane.
No, the household products have been improving. If you live in California you have been seeing products being reformulated and many solvent being taken off the shelves for years, and the same thing is happening to a lesser extent in other areas, so your initial claim is false.
Yes, as you clean one source up others move to the top of the list. That is a natural result of regulatory success. It is not a problem.
The clean-up process is being driven by actual scientifically derived standards for safe air - air pollution levels that are not causing measurable harm to part of the population. In many urban areas of the country due to topography and weather conditions and settlement density they already meet these standards and so are not being subjected to the ever tightening regulations that South California faces. About 60% of the U.S. population does not face any air pollution problems, a fraction that is growing, and also the severity of the problem of those who still face some is diminishing. So we are hardly done with the issue yet. In some parts of the problem stationary sources (home heating, etc.) is still significant, and interestingly enough many of the solutions are actually cheaper (e.g replacing oil with gas) which is driving replacement even without regulation.
In the 40% of the country that still has issues we are no where close to the point where natural pollution sources dominate. So you are declaring "we're insane" based on something you are imagining.
While making a lot of fuss about cars, nobody ever mentions that many many American homes are heated by diesel fuel, and many old European houses are heated by coal. This is on par with Nigeria where everyone gets electric power from a private diesel generator.
Solution is to develop power grids and gas lines. Bug no, we must fight private cars and now private house cleaning products.
The air pollution problem is very region specific. This report is about air pollution in the Los Angeles Basin, which naturally has the most serious such problem in the country. No one burns diesel fuel to heat homes in this area, that is mostly in the Northeast (80%) of such homes, and the number is not all that large, 4% of households nationally and declining.
This is an accurate description of what has happened in California. The controls on auto emissions have been very effective and have transformed the natural "smog trap" situation is the Los Angeles basin. In 1968 there were 200 Stage 1 smog alerts and 50 Stage 2 alerts. Stage 2 alerts dropped to near zero in the early 1980s, Stage 1 alerts did the same by the late 1990s. There have been no Stage 2 alerts since 1988 or Stage 1 smog alerts since 2003. And remember this is despite a 50% increase in population.
For years now the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) has been focusing on VOC emissions from household products out of necessity. That is where most the remaining problem is, and is had not been subject nearly as much reduction over the years as vehicle and industrial emission. It is a nuisance for a science/craft hobbyist like myself since many common solvents have disappeared that were useful and superior to their replacements, but it is a price you must be willing to pay to live here. Its not a big price (that be the cost of housing).
It appears that it means to "gut" or "abolish" regulations.
It is not the current name of a condition used for diagnosis today because it is split into two more specific conditions: Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) and Dissocial Personality Disorder (DPD). So it the condition is not imaginary nor did it disappear, it is simply not how it is currently classified for the purposes of medical diagnosis.
But unless you are psychologist or a psychiatrist, it is a perfectly reasonable and well understood term for the lay public to use.
Ostensibly, the US brought down their malfunctioning satellite in order to prevent it from becoming a hazard due to a large amount of toxic fuel on board.
Yes, ostensibly is the word. The satellite tank, a very thin shell (like all space fuel tanks) contained 500 kg of hydrazine, could not have survived re-entry intact -- such a thing has never happened before with the many deorbiting launchers and satellites over the years. You cannot get a hydrazine tank from orbit to Earth's surface unprotected with its contents still on board. Indeed even given that the pipe connections to the tank would be broken, the hydrazine would quickly have outgassed even from an intact tank.
And the extraordinary expense on Operation Burned Frost relative to even the theoretical hazard of of 500 kg of hydrazine landing somewhere randomly on the Earth's surface was far out of proportion to how similar toxic hazards are normally handled.
There were two far more plausible reasons: it was an American military reconnaissance satellite and they wanted to make sure the classified technologies on it were destroyed, and they wanted to practice an orbital shoot down. Probably both of these were motivations, the "hydrazine threat" cover story was ludicrous.
But that "earning salaries" thing is all important. It does not matter how cheap goods get, if you have no income to buy them with.
This is a major problem for our society, which regards not being employed as a sign of personal failure, from which you should suffer.
Having millions suffer from devastated livelihoods for the "good of society" is a huge problem.
So it matters an enormous amount.
Here is the analysis/answer given:
Among the five married couples no one shook more than eight hands. Therefore, if nine people each shake a different number of hands, the numbers must be 0, 1, 2, ..., and 8. The person who shook 8 hands has to be married to the person who shook 0 hands (otherwise that person could have shaken only seven hands.) Similarly, the person who shook seven hands is bound to be married to the person who shook 1 hand. So that the married couples shook hands in pairs 8/0, 7/1, 6/2, 5/3. The only person left who shook hands with 4 is my wife.
Except that there are two people at the party who shook no hands, apparently the question poser shook none also. So the actual pairings are 8/0, 7/1, 6/2, 5/3 and 4/0. His wife could be either the 4 hand shaker, or the 8 hand shaker, either way the answers satisfy the problem statement.
This logic puzzle requires unstated assumptions to derive the answer - which no logic puzzle should have. The question poser does not state that he is entirely excluded from the handshaking ritual for some reason. So it seems impossible because it is, in the form stated.
For instance, in America teachers say "Show your work".
This was my bane all the way through school, I like numbers and figured lots of mental tricks (natural to me) for solving things, and was familiar with lots of number patterns (like powers of two), and so much of time answers were obvious to me, but I was marked down for not "showing" the work I never did. They didn't want me to know how to find the answer, they wanted me to crank through a rote procedure. As a simple example, if you add stuff up in your head there is no work to show.
This even showed up in calculus when one old instructor wanted me to show my use of the "three step rule" for differentiation. What "three step rule'?! It appears that at some earlier time basic transformations for differentiation, which to me was a simple one step procedure, were divided into three separate "steps" for pedagogic reasons, I guess, which were entirely unnecessary, and not found in any recent text - basically manufacturing unneeded work.
For reference the feed conversion ratios (amount feed energy going, over the amount coming out) for common animals are 6 for cattle, 4 for pigs, 2 for egg production, and 1.6 for poultry broilers. Eating vegetarian is obviously 1 - although the animals raised for meat and eggs also eat waste products like wheat hay, and alfalfa, that humans cannot eat in addition to grains that compete with humans for food.
Although nearly all American cattle finish their growth in the feedlot, eating mostly grain that is not the whole story. The cows are slaughtered at about 10.5 months, after having spent 7 months eating forage (alfalfa, hay) and the 3.5 months eating high energy feeds based on grain.
OTOH some of that forage is stuff like "wheat hay" which is a byproduct of growing grain (in this case wheat).
Right. I have an account to be able to check in with relatives and friends to see something they have posted (and email me about), and there are a couple of organizations I belong to that use Facebook for group activity (messaging, blogging) that I check in with, and a few performers I "liked" to boost their careers. But that is all. I have never posted anything to Facebook, ever.
I want to focus a moment on the idea that, "Each minute of delay will cost lives in a real attack."
Are we sure we can do enough in 20 minutes, to make much difference? I don't mean that Hawaiians are expendable, or that more warning isn't better. However this isn't the 1950's anymore; civil defense measures have mostly been dismantled. It has been fashionable for decades to suggest that "nuclear war isn't survivable, bomb shelters are useless."
You surely have heard of "duck and cover"? There are steps that civilians can take in a matter of minutes that will reduce casualties in large areas affected by the attack. "Duck and cover" is the fastest and most basic, but it can prevent serious flash burns, injury by flying glass and other objects. Getting under cover, behind cover, and so forth take longer and likely needs minutes to accomplish in many cases.
Of course, all this depends on civilians who know what to do. How many is that, at present? But this can be fixed quickly with education.
I, for one, welcome our new genetically engineered Chinese overlords!
Amazingly enough the Kilopower family of space power systems are designed to operate in space, i.e. a really good vacuum. How do they do it? The way all spacecraft do, with radiators that dispose of heat through thermal radiation. Thin though the atmosphere is on Mars, it should enhance the performance of these radiators.
Even so, this slug of uranium has a mass of only 6.5 kg.
The actual uranium mass of the 1 KWe model is 28.4 kg. The reactors thermal output is 4.3 KW.
This is an awfully confused post.
Centrifuges are used for enriching uranium. They have nothing to do with any thorium fuel cycle.
We can ship nuclear fuel from Earth quite easily. Due to the high energy density, it is not heavy. The idea of mining nuclear fuel on Mars , and processing it and manufacturing the fuel to the necessary quality standards makes not sense at all.
Thorium seems to have acquired a fandom that imbues it with quasi-magical properties. It is doubly magical if the word "salt" is also used.
That was before they knew that nuclear powered cars wouldn't use reactors but by Mr. Fusion!