> Their water use is mostly for cooling needs from the heat produced from their electricity use.
You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US:
> The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total.
Well yes, Russia is Russia. The RBMK with its well-known design flaws could never have been certified/built in the West. Yes, these design flaws were well-known long before the Chernobyl accident.
In his posthumously published memoirs, Valery Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK had significant design flaws. Legasov's suicide in 1988, following frustrated attempts to promote nuclear and industrial safety reform, caused shockwaves throughout the scientific community.
However, the units that are still operating were modified after the accident to remove at least a few of the elements of the accident chain that made the reactor inherently unsafe.
Still no containment, and still not anywhere close to the requirements for Western reactors, but they seem to be operating reasonably safely.
The subject was modifications made to reactor types that had major accidents, and specifically the RBMK-1000.
Last I checked, the VVER-440 is not an RBMK-1000, did not explode at Chernobyl, and has not had a major accident.
"The two VVER-440 units in Loviisa, Finland have containment buildings that fulfil Western safety standards.
A typical design feature of nuclear reactors is layered safety barriers preventing escape of radioactive material. VVER reactors have three layers:
1. Fuel rods: the hermetic zirconium alloy (Zircaloy) cladding around the uranium oxide sintered ceramic fuel pellets provides a barrier resistant to heat and high pressure.
2. Reactor pressure vessel wall: a massive steel shell encases the whole fuel assembly and primary coolant hermetically.
3. Reactor building: a concrete containment building that encases the whole first circuit is strong enough to resist the pressure surge a breach in the first circuit would cause.
Compared to the RBMK reactors – the type involved in the Chernobyl disaster – the VVER uses an inherently safer design because the coolant is also the moderator, and by nature of its design has a negative void coefficient like all PWRs. It does not have the graphite-moderated RBMK's risk of increased reactivity and large power transients in the event of a loss of coolant accident. The RBMK reactors were also constructed without containment structures on grounds of cost due to their size; the VVER core is considerably smaller"
It also appears that the VVER-440 does have a containment building, and older variants that had problems with said containment building were forced to shut down.
"One of the earliest versions of the VVER-type, the VVER-440, manifested certain problems with its containment building design. As the V-230 and older models were from the outset not built to resist a design-critical large pipe break, the manufacturer added, with the newer V-213 model, a so called Bubble condenser tower that – with its additional volume and a number of water layers – aims to suppress the forces of rapidly escaping steam without the onset of a containment-leak. As a consequence, all member-countries[citation needed] with plants of the VVER-440 V-230 type, as well as older types, were forced by the politicians of the European Union to shut them down permanently. Because of this, the Bohunice Nuclear Power Plant had to close two reactors and the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant had to close four. Whereas in the case of the Greifswald Nuclear Power Plant, the German regulatory body had already made the same decision in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall."
Europe managed to get off Russian Gas, but didn’t manage to get off Russian uranium industry. You correctly identified the chokepoints and Russia can’t be replaced fast there.
It's not the 20x efficiency of harvesting technology compared to what agrarian societies that make them make sense. It's the productivity of the other 95% of the population that makes their labor cost so high that such expensive machines make economic sense.
Economic viability depends on many things, lithium prices have been pretty volatile in the past, battery production in Europe as customers are just scaling up.
It’s not 100% of oil production capacity that is lost, but 20%. You need to cut demand by that, so electric cars can help extremely, because most oil is consumed during car use, not production.
They were saying, if you want to see the end state of lack of oil. Like how would it look if your oil spigot were turned off? A lot of people haven't thought about it.
I think you cannot take the step from any turing machine being representable as a neural network to say anything about the prowess of learned neural networks instead of specifically crafted ones.
I think a good example are calculations or counting letters: it's trivial to write turing machines doing that correctly, so you could create neural networks, that do just that. From LLM we know that they are bad at those tasks.
You should also include the water needed to produce the electricity, which is the biggest water user in the US:
> The three largest water-use categories were irrigation (118 Bgal/day), thermoelectric power (133 Bgal/day), and public supply (39 Bgal/day), cumulatively accounting for 90 percent of the national total.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-water-used-people-united-...
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