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A Canadian company buried a giant radiator 2.8 miles under a German town to pull power from hot rock anywhere on Earth, and six months after it hit the grid, its own CEO admits two loops are clogged, the budget’s gone, and it’s walking away
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@mattsmith ROOKIE · 5 hours
Cool! I've never heard of this process. It sounds promising. But I still believe OIL &GAS is the most reliable source of energy. Nuclear is …
Everyone’s chasing the cheap electric truck, but a startup just undercut Bezos-backed Slate with the opposite bet: a $21,500 gas pickup with a six-speed manual, real four-wheel drive and 600 miles a tank, reviving a brand that’s been dead since the 1950s
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@casey ROOKIE · 3 hours
This is too good to be true! But this is what every truck buyer wants! I hope these guys make it happen!!
A 2-megawatt reactor humming in China’s Gobi Desert runs on liquid salt at 650 degrees instead of water, and last year it pulled off something no reactor had done: it swapped in fresh thorium fuel while still running, like a car refueling at 70 mph
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@raymondpgauthie ROOKIE · 3 hours
India is also a big player in the development of thorium reactor technology
Slate reveals JUST how bare bones its trucks will be in order to be under $25K, including crank windows and no paint. At least Americans can finally afford an EV pickupComment on the article →
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@jdjones ROOKIE · 7 hours
A/C. Anything else I'll do myself
While the tallest wind turbines reach about 600 feet, a Chinese airship carried 12 turbines more than ten times higher, to 6,560 feet, and pushed the electricity down a single cable to the grid
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Matthew McKenzie ROOKIE · 1 day
So, 1KW for 285 hours, then? Test flight time would be useful to know. At 3MW that would be 5m42s. So I am thinking the flight was about …
Canada just cut a hole in the roof of a working nuclear reactor, hauled out eight steam generators weighing 100 tons each, and lowered new ones into the same hole, bringing the reactor back online seven months early to run another 35 years
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arthurb ROOKIE · 1 day
I enjoy your articles and how you present them. Too bad no pictures or graphics. I'd be interested in how the pipes and connections look as …
James L ROOKIE · 1 day
My father in law worked there for 32 years.
Canada just turned a herd of pigs loose between the rows of a solar farm, a breed picked because it grazes weeds along the surface instead of digging up the wiring, cleaning up what the sheep skip under 109,000 panels outside Calgary
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@mdaniel ROOKIE · 1 day
Don't know why any of this is surprising anymore. The next step should be to market the mutton and lamb chops raised this way as "from sola…
@kdanfrew ROOKIE · 12 hours
I'll take two pairs of wool socks, a blanket and an omelet with a side of bacon!
@jamesquail ROOKIE · 55 minutes
How refreshing..solving problems on this planet NOW rather than spending billions to go to a moon we may never Inhabit! Congratulations and …
A fleet of four robots just clamped down 100 megawatts of solar panels in the California desert at better than one a minute, the first time machines have done it at scale instead of as a demo, taking the back-wrecking job nobody wants off human hands
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@daveclark ROOKIE · 2 days
The narrative that nobody wants those jobs is bull. When they pay decent wages someone wants them. IBEW members proudly install millions o…
@mn ROOKIE · 1 day
Thank you for such a well-written article. It is refreshing to read positive, forward-looking news that helps alleviate the anxiety often ca…
America just built a nuclear reactor that cools itself with no pumps and no water, 400 sealed tubes moving heat the way the pipe in your laptop does, scaled to 12 feet and built to run eight years before it ships back to the factory
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@donalddolenc ROOKIE · 2 days
Low-temperature heat pipes have kept the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline from sinking into permafrost for just shy of 50 years. In winter they con…
America just cleared its first molten-salt reactor for construction, a Tennessee machine cooled by liquid salt instead of water so its core cannot boil dry, on the exact salt Oak Ridge proved sixty years ago and then buried
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@dwaynegruber ROOKIE · 2 days
Just want to clarify that the plant is targeted to produce 50 wme and not just 50mw thermal.
A US startup wants to drop a full nuclear reactor a mile down a 30-inch hole and let the water above it supply the pressure while billions of tons of rock replace the containment dome. One hole would make 15 megawatts; 100 on one site would add up to 1.5 gigawatts.
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@sathyamoorthyra ROOKIE · 3 days
A wonderful idea and concept. If it happens it gives cheap electricity and writes off of reactor failures on surface. Rajam Sathyamoorthy, P…
@kanachiangadi ROOKIE · 3 days
Informative article. Thanks for writing
@williamsabey ROOKIE · 3 days
Why would you think that dropping unburned fuel down a borehole would be alarming? If it hasn't been burned, it has no fission products in i…
Two Minnesota solar farms swapped the gravel under their panels for native prairie and wildflowers. Five years later the native bees had multiplied twentyfold and were crossing the fence to pollinate the soybeans next door
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A ROOKIE · 3 days
Those images are of non-native European Honey bees. North America has no native honey bees. With over 500 native bee species in Minnesota, i…
@steverothe ROOKIE · 13 hours
Non-native honeybees continue growing in population nationally and globally. Meanwhile, native bees are in significant decline. Honeybees ar…
Sweden just shipped the most powerful transformer of its kind ever built, a 446-ton machine the weight of a loaded 747, rolling it out of the factory on a 350-foot trailer with over 300 wheels at walking pace, bound for China to power 10 million homes
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@alancampbell ROOKIE · 4 days
This is why the "West" is doomed....we allow the Chinese to get access to our technology so they can copy it and put western businesses out …
@govindarajans ROOKIE · 2 days
Short time Competition can destroy years of developmental effort
@monsharkestad ROOKIE · 2 days
You lose the market much faster if you force the other part to make their own industry instead of at least making some money selling them th…
For centuries the playbook for boggy farmland was drain it. German scientists just ran the numbers on the opposite, flood it back and bolt solar panels on top, and the ground earns twice, power above, carbon locked belo
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@davidhilton ROOKIE · 4 days
Damn right you messed that up...
It's laughable that you think it's a good idea to restore peatlands, then build photovoltaic on top 🤦
Ford is now tearing brand-new engines apart 90 times more often than it used to, daily instead of once a quarter, hunting for the life-threatening defects before they end up in tens of thousands of cars
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@ricky ROOKIE · 5 days
Wtf! I was considering a F250 …..maybe I’ll stick with a Silverado 2500…. Better yet maybe I’ll just save money!
@paulsandgren ROOKIE · 5 days
From what I have heard, most of the defects seem from assembly. We have found metal in the oil passages meaning debris from machining was n…
@msills ROOKIE · 4 days
Well, thats good-this shows the give a sht & are trying to do better. BUT-it is all moot because the world is going electric.
!
Australia just punched a 2,300-ton machine through the rock nearly a kilometer under the mountains to build the country’s largest renewable project, a power station the size of a 20-story building, turning two lakes into a battery that stores a week of power
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georgeh ROOKIE · 5 days
Does this keep killing anything trying to live in those lakes?
@ericvandenbroek ROOKIE · 4 days
$12 billion???? You are way off !!! The latest costing on it is $48 BILLION!!!! And won't be bloody finished until 2036 if all goes smoothly…
This summer the U.S. Navy plans to plug the largest warship afloat into the world’s biggest naval base and run the base off the carrier’s two reactors, a 100,000-ton floating reactor on standby for the day a storm or drone swarm takes the grid down
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@aldogrimaldi ROOKIE · 5 days
Podrían evaluar si los reactores nucleares argentinos de pequeño tamaño se podrían utilizar en submarinos, buques y portaaviones, y si EEUUU…
@gregstewart ROOKIE · 5 days
Will be req’d when Calif falls of continent, next year!
@crashndent ROOKIE · 5 days
Not the first time the US Navy has done something like this, albeit with a nuclear carrier. Early 1900's, the US Navy sent the USS Lexingto…
China just strung 22,000 tons of steel, three Eiffel Towers’ worth, across a canyon in Guizhou to build the highest bridge ever, a four-lane highway hanging 625 meters over the river, higher than the Empire State Building
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@sathyanarayanan ROOKIE · 6 days
It is really unimaginable, marvellous task, congrats to the people who planned and executed, appreciating from India.
This hydrogen fuel cell submarine drone hit every one of its endurance, depth and acoustic targets in testing, the 3 numbers battery-powered AUVs have spent 15 years failing to match at once
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@kevinfitzgibbon ROOKIE · 6 days
Hi and thanks for this article. Very interesting. Questions arising for me: what's the payload capacity for sensors? What are the trade offs…
Russia built a 21,000-ton nuclear power plant on a barge with no engine, towed it thousands of miles to an Arctic port, and plugged it into the grid, the only floating reactor running anywhere on Earth, with four more on the way
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@groupwatchdog ROOKIE · 1 day
Fantastic idea. Canada & Norway should follow suit.
An Italian battery the size of a sports stadium is coming to the U.S. grid with no lithium inside, storing power by squeezing 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide into liquid and breathing back out the gas everyone spent a decade trying to bury
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@arthurnelson ROOKIE · 6 days
Read this quote so it makes sense: "The bigger thing is that this is the same trade a whole crop of stranger storage ideas is making right n…
Canada just lowered a 953-tonne slab of steel and concrete into a 35-meter shaft in Ontario and ended a decade of talk, starting the Western world’s first grid-scale small nuclear reactor, a machine that fits on two soccer fields and powers 300,000 homes
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@larrybaisden ROOKIE · 1 week
It is unclear if the 14.9 cents Canadian is the total cost as delivered to the consumer or just the energy generation cost. Also, is the gri…
@delwingoss ROOKIE · 7 days
Not in my back yard or anywhere close to it. Until human kind solves the issue of major war....earthquakes.....floods and anything else that…
@wendybays ROOKIE · 7 days
Why not use Thorium instead of volatile uranium. Canada, especially Ontario has vast untapped supplies of Thorium.
Spain just unveiled a two-meter drone that fires from a torpedo tube, skims the surface on a hydrofoil at 20 knots, then dives underwater to punch a hole below a ship’s waterline
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@georgekafantari ROOKIE · 1 week
While other countries -- large or small -- are busy building sea drones that have already turned naval warfare on its head, the United State…
Hyundai just signed on to run South Korea’s Antarctic bases on green hydrogen instead of diesel, banking summer sunlight as hydrogen to burn through a winter night that lasts months, with no cable and no pipeline anywhereComment on the article →
@georgekafantari ROOKIE · 1 week
The abundant sunlight of the Middle East and Africa can also supply power every night with no cable or pipeline anywhere.
A windowless concrete tower 40 stories tall on the China coast stacks 35-ton blocks to store a wind farm’s power, lifting them when the wind blows and dropping them through generators when the grid needs it, no lithium inside
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@johncreel ROOKIE · 1 week
What does the initial price run? What kind of maintenance and operating costs are there?
@frankfagan ROOKIE · 1 week
Buildings have Storeys not stories.
@robofoxman ROOKIE · 1 week
It's recycled blocks of concrete, dude. It's cables that lift it up and down. What maintenance is there for that? Minimal cost and minimal m…
Two American startups just bolted a Mach 5 hypersonic missile onto a 180-foot drone ship with nobody aboard, the kind of weapon that normally rides a billion-dollar destroyer, and they plan to fire it at sea in 2027
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@jason ROOKIE · 1 week
Large expensive weapons are going out like the dinosaurs. Adapt or die, though I suppose defense contractors don't have to give a damn. They…
@kennethgregory ROOKIE · 1 week
Russia doesn't have a hypersonic missile. They have an icbm launced from and airborne platform. By that standard, all ICBMs are hypersonic. …
A 160-ton steel cylinder as tall as a 14-story building is floating off the coast of Bilbao, and inside it a column of seawater rises and falls like a giant piston, pushing air through a turbine to power the Spanish grid
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@francisconoguei ROOKIE · 1 week
Interesting although you should start avoiding sentences like "The first kilowatt flowed into the grid". It's not killowat. It's killowat ho…
Bill Gates just started building the first new kind of American reactor in a decade, cooled by liquid sodium and wired to a molten-salt tank that works like a giant battery, letting it jump from 345 to 500 megawatts when the grid screams for power
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@kurtisengle ROOKIE · 1 week
You see, the thing about it is, sodium burns on contact with water or air. We experimented with this matirial North of Los Angeles in the 19…
@jamesrussell ROOKIE · 1 week
I'm assuming that even though it is a commercial reactor, that it is still looked at as a test bed for new reactor design at the commercial …
Mercedes-Benz spent the last decade selling you electric luxury. Now it’s building vehicles designed to knock drones out of the sky, mounting interceptors on the G-Class as Europe rearms and EV demand collapses
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@edwinjdingleyic ROOKIE · 2 weeks
The drone tech costs much more than the vehicle. Remember, the G-Class we know today is a SUPER-pimped version of the base model which costs…
Fiat is releasing an 8 (that’s eight) horsepower EV in the US
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@garrymasters ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Seems like “close but no cigar” for many places yet may be great for others.
In Ocean City MD the main drag of Ocean Hwy has a speed limit …
Britain just raised the last turbine on the first phase of the world’s biggest wind farm, 95 machines each as tall as Rockefeller Center, 80 miles out in the North Sea, while five nearly-finished U.S. projects sit frozen
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@paulwilkinson ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Life expectancy? Subsea cables, Turbines and blades. Could be interesting.
The biggest fear about going electric is the day the battery dies and you’re staring at a $16,000 bill. Run the 20-year numbers against what you’d burn in gas, and that fear looks very different
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@artadams ROOKIE · 2 weeks
oil changes monthly?
@artadams ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Q: What does it cost to fill up my F250 diesel? A: about 3 minutes.
@keithshultz ROOKIE · 2 weeks
I came in expecting a hit job, but I think you explained it very well. I will add that ICE vehicles are much more likely to have a major ove…
Stellantis brings back diesel options in Europe after EU softens its 2035 gas-car ban plans
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@daniqscorpio ROOKIE · 2 weeks
It's wrong. The difference in electric cars sales is only 0.1%, not 1%.
Also, recently more and more scientists are speaking out against th…
@daniqscorpio ROOKIE · 2 weeks
These guys cant even do basic math. Imagine understanding of climate data...
A 155-ton reactor in Italy running on molten lead, with electric heaters faking the uranium, is about to make real electricity with zero nuclear fuel inside, a full-size test of the metal before any fuel goes in
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@kimsch ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Surely lead fumes are toxic. How is this aspect managed?
@richardmccue ROOKIE · 1 week
how does this compare to the lead bismuth eutectic reactors used in a small number of soviet nuclear boats - i think the Alpha class. if i …
A French nuclear attack submarine just carried an American underwater drone on its back, launched it while submerged, let it fly its missions and brought it home, the first time a US robot has gone to sea from an ally’s sub
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@basilioreyes ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Why did the frogs have this honor? Why not use an American sub handle
They announced it 2 years ago and the factory is finally taking shape: Scout’s 160,000 reservations, 700 robots… but a 2028 delay looms over it all
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@scottietaylor ROOKIE · 2 weeks
I definitely think they should stick with the full EV release and delay the EREV models due to the software and hardware redesign.
China is building a 250-mile “great wall” of solar panels along a desert, wide enough to see from space, and one piece is shaped like a galloping horse the size of a small city, a Guinness record visible from orbit
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makinawake ROOKIE · 2 weeks
The US will never reach such lofty goals. They prefer to invest in pedophiles.
A steel buoy shaped like a giant lollipop is about to float out into the North Pacific with no anchor and no cable, generate its own power from the waves, and run AI chips on board, talking to shore through nothing but Starlink
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@marcbrown ROOKIE · 2 weeks
What is to stop ships from crashing into them?
@spanilangson ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Can you or AI make an animation out of this so I can understand better? I want to understand this, but I have traumatic brain injuries so I …
@michaelmcvicar ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Besides the already brought up questions, the satellite connection has its own issues.
A U.S. Navy underwater drone just spent a week patrolling the Baltic seabed where the cables keep getting severed, mapping more than a dozen miles per charge and flagging anything that moved since yesterday
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@oscargoldman ROOKIE · 2 weeks
And now Russia knows where everything is.
@davedrbixbixler ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Everyone knows, they've always known. They're supposed to know to avoid doing exactly what they're doing. You can know too because there's…
@davedrbixbixler ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Submarine Cable Map, Google it.
South Korea just revealed a pilot plant that’s been quietly turning smokestack CO2 into gasoline, 110 pounds a day drained into jerrycans, after its chemists deleted the hottest step in the recipe
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@tombell ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Introduce solar-derived energy to the process to power the furnace instead of natural gas.
Australian scientists just made the case that the continent already runs a natural nuclear reactor: superhot granite that once powered a plant for 160 days before the wells got plugged and everyone walked away
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@nigelbean ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Australia may have a lot of deep and expensive geothermal energy. We also have a lot of cheap and easily accessible solar, wind and coal. We…
A Finnish company just fed pure hydrogen to a 13,000-horsepower piston engine the size of a bus and put the electricity on Spain’s national grid, the world’s first large-scale engine running on 100% hydrogen
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@borisjohnston ROOKIE · 2 weeks
How is the Hydrogen created?
@scottsnell ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Great article. Very well written, punchy style, knowledgeable, and informative. However, I think the death of carbon-based fuels and engines…
@dorrisethel ROOKIE · 2 days
Appreciate the perspective, but declaring a carbon-free future dead is vastly premature. Political shifts offer temporary lifelines, not per…
Lockheed’s new parasite drone grips a warship with 16 suction cups, charges its batteries off the water rushing past like a bike dynamo taped to a destroyer, then lets go loaded with torpedoes and six aerial drones
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@joshuabrookhard ROOKIE · 2 weeks
It will be interesting to see if this leads into undersea EA/EW by attaching itself to enemy vessels and jamming their sonar and associated …
Australia’s new Ghost Shark drone submarine floods its own hull on purpose, sealing only what matters, vanishes at very long range to spy or strike, and comes back with answers, or not alone. Dozens just entered service
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@sls ROOKIE · 2 weeks
Great summary of the state of play. I disagree that the AUKUS subs are a nescessay component for our defense. The drone fleet will provide u…
@richardwade ROOKIE · 2 weeks
That's the whole idea of the crewed subs - to be a spear. If you cannot strike at an aggressor's territory you are destined to lose.
Australia just delivered the U.S. Navy a drone submarine that travels 1,240 miles underwater, dives to 6,600 feet, and ships inside a standard commercial container, same box that hauls flat-pack furniture
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@timmiller ROOKIE · 2 weeks
What a pleasure it is to see a AUSTRALIAN companie to come up with a great idea like this ...All the best for your future
@aussiesteve ROOKIE · 2 weeks
This definitely TRUMPs the AUKUS deal. Take back that US$386b and build a few hundred of these... then sell them to the US with 200% tarriff
While the U.S. and China were still testing theirs, Australia quietly built the Ghost Bat into the most mature AI combat drone in the world, and now Germany and the U.S. Navy want in
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@brettrumble ROOKIE · 2 weeks
A good article trampled on by non-stop ads making it near impossible to read.
While America pays developers $2 billion to walk away from offshore wind, China just floated a 16 MW turbine taller than a skyscraper in deep open water, built to survive Category 5 hurricane winds
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@barbarajohnson ROOKIE · 3 weeks
Trump is supporting the oil based companies to the exclusion of all other energy sources. He will continue to add to greenhouse gasses becau…
@paulsheridan ROOKIE · 2 weeks
All this flannel, and we don't know if to works!!!!
@mylesbumgarner ROOKIE · 2 weeks
The orange pos is just plain stupid and the stupidity of his staff says its all