sushibowl

Another big factor is that every plant is effectively a completely custom design. Because of how few nuclear plants are constructed, every new one tends to incorporate technological advancements to enhance safety or efficiency. The design also has to be adapted to the local climate and land layout. This makes every single plant effectively one of a kind.

It also tends to be built by different contractors, involving different vendors and electric utilities every time. Other countries have done better here (e.g. China and France) mostly due to comprehensive government planning: plopping down lots of reactors of the same design, done by the same engineers. Although these countries are not fully escaping cost increases either.

You are completely correct that regulation is also a big factor. Quality assurance and documentation requirements are enormously onerous. This article does a pretty decent job explaining the difficulties.

Seriously though. Weasel words. If journalists adopted even 20% of Wikipedia's manual of style, news would improve by orders of magnitude.

I think holding more helium in a smaller space is the opposite of what you want. The lifting force is equal to the weight of the air being displaced, so you want as little stuff as possible in as big a volume as possible.

Maybe if you went the other way round and compressed the atmosphere?

I did not come away from this article with a very positive opinion on Clarkson. He strikes me as the type of guy who is incapable of recognising a problem that he himself is not personally facing. Climate change wasn't real until he tried his hand at farming. Driving electric vehicles won't solve the climate problem, science will (did science not develop the battery technology needed to move away from gasoline cars?). Farmers are struggling and will be forced to sell to millionaires and capitalists (is he himself not the capitalist that bought a hobby farm from a struggling farmer?).

I don't think he's seeing his own hypocrisy here. Farmers have been facing these problems for years and no one paid attention. He calls up his buddy in Westminster, immediately gets a full cabinet meeting, and as if by magic the government starts moving in his favour (taking away power from local government, I might add).

This isn't a black and white issue and there is merit to Clarkson's point that local government can get captured and corrupted by personal conflicts and interests. But I don't agree with the image he appears to project as a defender of the common man and poor farmer. He's a millionaire who has never given a single shit about farmers until he personally owned a farm.

A system I work with gives all keys a string value of "Not_set" when the key is intended to be unset. The team decided to put this in because of a connection with a different, legacy system, whose developers (somehow) could not distinguish between a key being missing or being present but with a null value. So now every team that integrates with this system has to deal with these unset values.

Of course, it's up to individual developers to never forget to set a key to "Not_Set". Also, they forgot to standardise capitalisation and such so there are all sorts of variations "NOT_SET", "Not_set", "NotSet", etc. floating around the API responses. Also null is still a possible value you need to handle as well, though what it means is context dependent (usually it means someone fucked up).

I think it's more so that the kind of people contributing to these projects are on balance not that interested in doing the marketing work.

No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.

The biggest reason we haven't had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.

The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won't have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.

Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.

is-number is a project by John Schlinkert. John has a background in sales and marketing before he became an open source programmer and started creating these types of single function packages. So far he has about 1400 projects. Not all of them are this small, though many are.

He builds a lot of very basic functionality packages. Get the first n values from an array. Sort an array. Set a non-enumerable property on an object. Split a string. Get the length of the longest item in an array. Check if a path ends with some string. It goes on and on.

If you browse through it's not uncommon to find packages that do nothing but call another package of his. For example, is-valid-path provides a function to check if a windows path contains any invalid characters. The only thing it does is import and call another package, is-invalid-path, and inverses its output.

He has a package called alphabet that only exports an array with all the letters of the alphabet. There's a package that provides a list of phrases that could mean "yes." He has a package (ansi-wrap) to wrap text in ANSI color escape codes, then he has separate packages to wrap text in every color name (ansi-red, ansi-cyan, etc).

To me, 1400 projects is just an insane number, and it's only possible because they are all so trivial. To me, it very much looks like the work of someone who cares a lot about pumping up his numbers and looking impressive. However the JavaScript world also extolled the virtues of these types of micro packages at some point so what do I know.