compostgoblin

joined 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I work in commercial and institutional building energy efficiency. I notice myself paying way more attention to the infrastructure that normally fades into the background. Stuff like “I wonder how big the transformer for this building is?” or “Ooh, that’s a hefty cooling tower, I wonder how much chilled water they use?”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

No problem, I hope you like it!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Maybe give Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff a try! It’s not a trans-specific podcast, although the host, Margaret Killjoy, is a trans woman. She covers the broad history of good people who fought back against the bad stuff in the world. For example, this week’s episodes were about lesbian mutual aid during the AIDS crisis, and this episode from a while back is about “Great Trancestors of History”. It’s one of my favorite shows, I highly recommend it :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Jasmine Crockett too

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Do you own a sewing tape measure/ruler?

If you don’t, they’re pretty cheap (and worth it, IMO), but you can achieve the same thing with some string and a normal tape measure.

Your waist measurement will be roughly the narrowest part of your torso (kind of near your belly button), and your hip measurement will be the widest part of your torso (roughly at the top of your hip bones). Here’s an article that might be helpful!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Is there a size guide where you can see what measurements correspond to which sizes? That’s how I judged the size to pick mine - I went by the closest waist size/measurement, and it fits pretty well. There may be better methods out there though that I’m just not aware of yet

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

It does! Skirts are so fun ☺️

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

He’s not supposed to be able to. We’ll see if the administration follows his orders or the existing law, or if they’ll listen to court orders. My hopes are, unfortunately, not high.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I learned something today, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Ah, gotcha! What about being covered in polish makes them more brittle and discolored?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Not yet! I’m giving my nails a break from polish for a few days to breathe (apparently that’s good for keeping them healthy?). Soon, though!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We had a family or two of mice living under our kitchen a few months back. We ended up killing 13 total. It was horrible. I hate killing things, even if there’s no better way to deal with them as pests. It just broke my heart every time.

Now their hole is stuffed with steel wool and sealed with foam though, so I think we should be safe from their return.

 
 
 
 
 

A Michigan nuclear plant is looking to make history not once but twice over: First by restarting a reactor shuttered in 2022 and second with newly solidified plans to build the nation’s first small modular reactors.

Holtec International — the nuclear company best known for decommissioning shuttered plants and manufacturing the canisters that store spent fuel — bought the Palisades nuclear plant on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan a month after utility giant Entergy took the financially troubled single-reactor facility offline.

Last year, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office finalized a deal to give Holtec $1.52 billion to bring the 55-year-old, 800-megawatt pressurized water reactor back online. The company wants to plug the facility back into the grid by the end of this year.

Now Holtec plans to nearly double the electricity output from Palisades by building two of its own small modular reactors, or SMRs, at the site.

On Tuesday, top executives gathered at the facility in Covert Township, Michigan, to unveil blueprints for adding a pair of its proprietary SMR-300s and announce Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co. — the South Korean firm already working with the Florida-based Holtec to develop its 300-MW units internationally — as its partner in the debut U.S. project. Completing the reactor would be a first not just for the country but the company. While Holtec has disassembled reactors, it has yet to build one, much less its own design.

“If we can’t do it, I don’t know who else is going to do it,” Rick Springman, the president of Holtec’s Global Clean Energy Opportunities division, told Canary Media ahead of the event. ​“I really think we can be the horse America can ride to a clean-energy future and to enable AI and everything else we want to do in this global competition.”

First, Holtec will need the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval of its reactor design.

So far, the U.S. federal regulator has only approved one SMR, Oregon-based NuScale Power’s 50 MW unit. The first plant designed around NuScale’s reactors, a 720 MW station built on property owned by the Idaho National Laboratory to provide power to ratepayers in Utah, was scrapped in November 2023 amid rising costs.

2024 marked a breakout year for nuclear power in the U.S., as Congress passed new legislation to streamline reactor regulations, Microsoft put up $16 billion to reopen the mothballed unit at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, and SMR developers lined up major deals with Amazon and Google.

Yet no SMR developer got the green light from the NRC to become the nation’s second certified design.

“Most of our competitors are essentially offering the technology but don’t want to take any risk,” Springman said.

In other words, those developers will design and license the technology and make money off the intellectual property, he said, but utilities and construction firms must provide the financing, time, and materials.

“You have this stagnation where no one wants to stand behind the project,” Springman said. ​“Enter Holtec. We can manufacture the parts, build the plant, and arrange the financing for the project. We can also manage the spent fuel … and we can decommission the plant at end of life. We can do the entire spectrum of the project. There’s no U.S. company that can offer all of that.”

 
 
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