Interesting Links for 24-11-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Russia Today and the Fremen Mirage

(tags:politics society war history Russia Ukraine )

2. Thorium-uranium Conversion Makes Breakthrough

(tags:thorium nuclearpower China )

3. Dance teacher Melissa Revell wins payout after yoga course triggers emotional breakdown

(tags:mentalhealth yoga )

4. Valve Issues Black Ops 7 Refund Over Undisclosed AI Materials

(tags:ai games fraud valve )

5. Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Actors

(tags:twitter usa politics fraud )

6. The voice of the New York subway is now transgender

(tags:LGBT transgender voice newyork video )

7. How top level mathematicians are using AI

(tags:AI mathematics )

8. Disney loses the rights to Roger Rabbit characters, as they revert to original author of novel

(tags:Disney intellectual_property )

9. Leftist and Moderate Democrats Are Trying to Be More Alike

(tags:democrats usa politics economics )

10. College Students Furious When Their Course Is Taught by AI Instead of a Professor

(tags:university ai OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

#7 looks really impressive, how fast things are going now. Pretty unexpected.

As to #1 - it's a myth against another myth...

[autopope]

The Thorium reactor cycle is very iffy when it comes to production of U-233; starting from Th-232 you inevitably get some U-232 as a contaminant, and U-232 rapidly decays to high-level gamma emitters which make it extremely dangerous to handle. (It's bad enough to make thorium-to-U-233 conversion almost a non-starter for weapons proliferation: you can make A-bombs with U-233, but the "dirty" U-232 in them make the material lethally radioactive to workers.)

A well-designed molten-salt thorium cycle reactor can burn up all the uranium it produces internally, so it's fine for power generation. Just don't go expecting to find it easy to breeed bomb fuel …

[bens_dad]

Maybe you can answer my confusion.

The article says that the fuel and coolant are mixed. If the reactor over-heats, the entire mixture drops into a storage chamber. What stops the reaction from continuing in the storage chamber ?

[andrewducker]

You can, if I remember correctly, design the storage chamber so that it divides the fuel in to small enough chunks that it's not able to keep self sustaining.