Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Today's picture depicts astronauts on the Tiangong space station, guaranteed 100% free of Nazis. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
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Never forget what was taken from you.
This is a Soviet self-propelled atomic power station. In the format of a tracked heavy truck. From the 1960's.
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That's really cool, but how often do you need to move a power station?
I think the point is to be able to construct it in an industrial facility and then move it to a remote area where it can provide energy for both industrial and civilian use
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/View-of-the-self-propelled-vehicles-with-a-control-panel-and-a-turbogenerator-The-tracks_fig2_361599813
That’s pretty cool. I was looking into nuclear powered cars, and the issue was with miniaturization. Tons of aerospace and defence companies are making something similar currently.
FYI, the Soviet union’s space program cost a tenth of the US’s
Did this really work? I didn't realize it was possible to safely perform nuclear fission in such a (relatively) tiny space
It did work. The technology was lost alongside the USSR (yes, it is possible to lose technology). Rosatom is currently fiddling with floating reactors, in the format of a cargo boat
Can you share some sources for this? This sounds both amazing and extremely tragic.
For the reactor itself? The link is in the post. For the floating one? I can offer wikifedia
https://hexbear.net/comment/3789012
Someone else posted an authoritative looking PDF that says that the technical plans for the thing were declassified a few years ago. I don't see any basis for describing the tech as lost, actually kinda concerning nobody else called that claim out.
Like don't get me wrong I share the sense of grief for lost potential (esp wrt space exploration) but let's stick to reality
Don't give the dolphins access to nuclear power. We've been warned about this already!
If u read the link it says the whole plant takes up 4 separate platforms like the one in the picture. So not that tiny.
This would be great to power small villages and outposts in Siberia.
Not just there. Think about every town and city in the global south suffering from water shortages, electricity shortages. You could power water desalination plants with these. Heck, if you have a small, modular reactor (small enough to be put onto a tracked chassis), you could just make them stationary and have a lot of them. The potential is immense
water shortages
Have you read the article you cited? IT NEEDS 320 TONES PER HOUR OF WATER. OVER. THREE. HUNDRED. TONES. PER. HOUR. And because of the horrible thermal efficiency of this thing (~17%) the heated coolant water will be some ~20K hotter after the cooling cycle, so you can't reuse it that much, and will lose it to evaporation.
It's a nuclear reactor on wheels. That is kinda doomed to cause problems. I also do have questions about how it would be economically viable when compared to other available means of mobile power generation. It takes some really well trained people to safely operate this thing, and a natural gas/diesel generator can be used with barley any training and is both safer and cheaper, and on top of this has more capacity. That's not to say that this was a bad thing, the fact that they managed to build this thing, and at least according to the source i found it was also very stable and reliable, it was simply always doomed to not be very useful. But well, nuclear reactors use a lot of water, and well, mobile reactors on ships make a lot more sense, both because of this and because putting shielding on those is a lot easier. Ship based mobile reactors also can handle far higher capacities then land based ones. The only places where something like this might be useful is after natural disasters that destroy large amounts of infrastructure. That is mostly A) Earthquakes B) Tsunamis. Both of which also damage the streets that this thing would drive on, and well, after quakes and further flood waves would block practical operation for both of these. And well, there is diesel. It might not be as eco friendly as a reactor, but that just doesn't really matter here. You can carry a small diesel generator and anyone can use them. They are also a lot cheaper to make. And those are just things seen from the perspective of back then. Today we have mobile solar and wind generators, better batteries, and if you really want that mobile multi-megawatt power plant, use natural gas or hydrogen generators. Mobile nuclear reactors are just to expensive to make sense on a scale you can fit on a car. On a ship? sure. that works, that's why swimming nuclear plants exist. On land? no. It will always loose to other methods of power generation, both because you certainly can't make that thing very efficient power wise, and it will be pretty expensive as well.
There is also the problem that this thing probably, i can't find any non-Russian sources on this and don't speak Russian, this thing needs a lot of water for cooling. At least all other reactors do, and i don't see a way they could have gotten around that. This makes this thing useless in a lot of environments.You can also simply consider this: The soviets agreed with me, they gave up on it.
Perks of working at the Union is that I apparently get to watch the documentaries they make as they launch. In a few weeks I will watch a documentary about Colombian syndicalism and violence against activists. I will see if I can link the doc to here somehow.
TopXi is live! (Just Chatting, Forkknife, Among USA, Whole Process People's Democracy)
Is it weird that my life has become being excited for economic summits
I like how Republicans completely stopped giving a shit about Hawaii once they found out that it's a blue state. I guess outrage over poor responses are only for other people in the tribe.
As I remember something similar happened during the winter storm in Texas in '21. Turns out politicians suck.
me irl after going through a federated post and updooting all hexbear commenters
I went out drinking with my friends a few nights ago and some of them said Meloni was based 💀
I wish that was the case. It was in the context of Italy's government, and other governments. Apparently Marine LePen is too extreme, and Macron is too left wing, but Meloni is just right.
What kind of world is your friend living in where Macron is "too left wing"?
They live in a predominantly white upper middle class suburb outside of a major city.
They have muh “socialist” healthcare and a couple vacation days. AOC’s always praising them, must be radically leftist.
I’m not exactly sure. I heard people speak positively when I went to France, and it’s certainly better than that of the US, but I’m guessing neoliberalism has eaten at it a bit.
God damn liberalism lol. Even when I was a lib I was always like "man I wish libs had more teeth"
“man I wish libs had more teeth”
They do but they always bite left.
While this is true, I grew up just after the so-called "end of history" so didn't get the full dose of anti-communist fervor, as the soviet union had just collapsed, and China had not had its meteoric resurgence.
Socialism wasn't really a threat and while there were pockets of uprising in the 90s in the imperial core they were mostly dismissed as anti-white hatred like with the Rodney King riots.
Socialism is once again scratching at popularity over the last decade and so of course the old red scare machine is again firing on all cylinders.
British Tabloids might be even Worse than other Western MSM, Theyre like RFA/RFE Levels of Rhetoric
Frans Timmermans, EU figurehead, has decided to lead the Dutch left Green/Labour coalition in order to get Dutch left back on track.
He has already announced that he wants a mandatory 2% NATO budget... So far for Dutch left, I guess.
Left-ish coalition and choosing the right side of the party for leadership is a tradition in Liberalism. He also will do nothing to push for any real changes for the environment globally, just maybe some very Dutch specific regulations that have almost no impact. Not a doom-post, though, because we can work to radicalize more people to the left from ir
The only positive thing that can come out of this is slightly left of center policies for a while and a small hope for an actual marxist movement to rise.
But looking at the state of the Dutch left right now you'd think we will soon have the Dutch Soviet Union under Timmermans. And any criticism is regarded as 'helping the right'. Because you just have to vote for an outspoken anti communist otherwise it's your fault!!!! Fuck leftist values.
I loved the scene at the end of season 3 of For All Mankind,
spoiler
where they find out that North Korea actually beat everyone to Mars
spoiler
all the cope "nk could never, etc" but i'm assuming in this timeline NK would have recovered strongly from the atrocities committed against it and have returned to an industrial, economic and scientific powerhouse buoyed by a still intact communist bloc
So a Russian moon probe crashed and two days later, India lands a rover.
I hate it here, comrades. It hurts to know what we have been and never will be again
The american emotions are wild in this regard as well. There is a reason the place where it started will always be an important part of history
club of shitty dictatorial fake democracies
But NATO already exists
