muthas's comments

I've found a mixed approach works best, given the dev inventory I run:

- a good supply of passive SMT books from the usual suppliers (mainly the "notebook" style ones with cut tape in the pages)

- various larger SMT & PTH parts, connectors, switches, etc in modular parts boxes (Eclipse Tools #900-041 mainly; larger in #900-039). These boxes stack nicely, are adjustable, are pretty cheap, and can be found at Microcenter (though ordering direct from Eclipse Tools is cheaper in quantity). I keep things in them in ESD or small zip bags, with those labeled as they get allocated. I try to keep each box assigned to a type of component then label the front of them ("Toggle Switches", "Motor+Stepper Ctrl", "Gaskets & O-Rings").

- even larger parts end up in plastic boxes from IRIS or IKEA, in 3 standardized sizes.

Key to this plan was buying bins in bulk (qty 10 or 20 pcs minimum) since they store well empty, can be used as replacements when lids/bases break, and inventory always tends to grow. Plus, wire shelving is easy when everything is standardized... "buy once, cry once" and you can't count on the same cheap bin being available in 10 years when current extras are out.

Starting to look into setting up a database tool to keep track of stock - partsbox, inventree, google form+sheet, ??? - but not there yet.

Fascinating stuff:

> ...but at that time we were mostly worried about whether the reactor was still working. That is, was it generating short-lived radioactive isotopes...

> ...the most precise information about the state of the reactor was gathered from the ratio of short-lived and long-lived isotopes of iodium 134 and 131. Then, by making radiochemistry measurements quite quickly we established that no short-lived iodium isotopes were being produced and hence the reactor was not operational and was in sub-critical state.

I wonder where and how they were able to do the radiochemical measurements so quickly - did the facility have that sort of capability on-site, or were samples repeatedly flown to a research institute that had the appropriate gamma spectroscopy equipment to analyze?

I wonder to what extent nuclear would be an option, given the relative abundance of previously-enchriched fuel now sitting around as waste, and an post-apocalyptic willingness to engage in high-risk, high-reward behavior... I suspect that there would be people and places that would be OK with the impacts of leaky, poorly shielded nuclear piles if it meant seemingly-endless sources of high heat independent of the need for piles of charcoal.

At the very least, in the right hands that idea could probably make for an interesting short story.

After a recent discussion with our home heating oil provider, seeing this post got me thinking - could a similar system be applied to the exhaust of a household furnace that is burning No. 2 heating oil?

A typical household in my part of the country runs around 1000 gallons of oil per year (which I realize is less than 10% of a typical long-haul truck annual usage) but for larger sites like greenhouses/breweries/etc that have both heating and CO2 needs, I could see there being significant gains to having an on-site capture system.

Even at the household side, it would be great to capture this tailpipe waste as a marketable resource... with the benefits of grid power and less concern over the size of storage/compression/regen equipment, I could imagine that the break-even point might be favorable.

I don't know if I'd agree its something you can't make useful, but trying to use inflation as a means of macroeconomic policy - rather than an indicator of the success/health of the overall economy - seems utterly dangerous.

I heard an interesting podcast a little while back that conjectured the typical way to get inflation going (so-called "helicopter money" to the spending population) is far and away the least predictable way to do things. Specifically, the speaker argued that compared to large banks and investing entities, people might do things like pay off debt or save the cash for a rainy day... neither of which are inflationary.

That isn't to say that handing out wads of cash wouldn't eventually lead to inflation, but that the systemic lag and second-/third-order effects might make the process so unpredictable that by the time inflation begins to tick up, the central bank would have no way to provide effective control.

I support a group called ERDG (Ecological Research & Development Group, https://www.horseshoecrab.org), which focuses on improving the state of the four remaining Horseshoe Crab species.

For those who don't know - despite being a critical part of our medical infrastructure (their blue blood is the current source for the reagent LAL, which is still used to test most pharmaceuticals & devices for bacterial contamination) they are in steep decline.

A couple items to note here:

- while agreed that a trap should help contain gasses, in order to cure the resin involved they have to inject high-pressure steam into the piping... possible that it could cause bubbles to pass through functional traps

- even if the trap system worked perfectly, the fumes from the cure process get vented to the local atmosphere through outlets set up during the CIPP process. This exposes workers to the largest amount of byproduct chemical vapors, but it's entirely reasonable to think that it could get accumulated or trapped in buildings as well.

The CDC has a good article about this very topic: https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2017/09/26/cipp/

Based on how we humans use melanin, I would believe that this is a case of having these environmental-stress-reduction "tools" basically already in play (to deal with UV, free radicals, background radiation, etc.), then capitalizing on their functionality when a new source of stress (ionizing radiation) enters their world.

Not to suggest that the melanin with these particular fungi wasn't a wee bit unique to make it better at dealing with converting ionizing radiation usefully, or that natural selection hasn't taken place to improve the existing melanin for even better utilization of this abundant, high-energy source! I just don't think that the fungi created this from scratch after the exposure began.

...with the corresponding scientific name would be "Brucea Banneriolus".

To put it another way - from an "immediate risk" point of view, the largest danger from critical-capable amount of fissile material is the prompt radiation emitted during a criticality: the pulse of neutrons, gamma and x-rays thrown off during that period the unit is sustaining a chain reaction.

For relatively brief power excursions like this one (which Slotin himself stopped by removing the reflector), the prompt burst was well over a lethal level but the radiation dose-rate from fission product decay even a tiny time later would not be immediately hazardous.

For those looking to learn more, Los Alamos has a great writeup of every publicly-known incident (in the US, USSR, and elsewhere) that details just how many times similar incidents happened: https://www.orau.org/ptp/Library/accidents/la-13638.pdf

This is fascinating to me, because if the primary use of fossil energy at these plants is in process heating... why use electricity here at all? Seems to me like there are a variety of renewable options that could generate process heat at scale without involving the electrical grid at all.

Small-scale nuclear comes to mind first - after all, for every MW of electric a typical plant generates 2-3x that in thermal power, and removing the turbines+generators seems like a good way to lower complexity of an installation.

Solar-thermal might also be a viable option to explore in low latitudes with abundant sunshine colocated with existing oil reserves and processing plants. Even wind-powered heatpumps exist, though I doubt there is sufficient energy density for the levels of process heat needed for many refinery operations.