That's apparently Lethabo Power Station:

> Lethabo Power Station in the Free State, South Africa, is a large coal fired power station owned and operated by Eskom.

Bolding mine.

In astronomy, metallicity is the abundance of elements present in an object that are heavier than hydrogen and helium.

Literally the first thing a person reads is "737 Max crashes".

Given the issue of 737 Max's... y'know... crashing, structuring the headline to lead with that creates the impression that there's been yet another crash involving a 737 Max, instead of this merely being about crashes that already occurred.

I mean nothing's happening without an approval first, is all I'm saying. The fact that there's more milestones to reach doesn't change the fact that this indeed achieved a big milestone.

A distinction without a difference: Nuclear plants don't get built without approval first.

It's a sign that our staid and slow system of building nuclear plants - which has been a big part of rising costs - is finally changing to embrace reality.

Nuclear plants can be built in a few years. It's just we're not very good at it, and this is the sort of thing that can change that.

In a cosmic sense they're basically simultaneous.

Twice as many cows as people.

I don't think you understand how Federal funding works, and it's entirely due to lazy thinking.

Probably use the information for modeling future maintenance/replacement schedules and such. Less "we see a crack, let's fix it" and more like "we're seeing X new cracks a week, let's bump up the maintenance of this sector by Y months" or whatever.

I think it would be trivial in comparison to the whole project. I mean, it's no secret that just about every aspect of a megastructure is definitionally huge.

True, but that phenomenon can be used to our advantage (.pdf warning) to repel dust as well.

Unless the dust is disturbed by human or machine activity it'll just stay where it currently is. And if it is disturbed its trajectory tends to follow a simple up-and-down arc. It doesn't float in the air like it does here on Earth, for the very obvious reason.

Moon dust won't linger off the ground like it would in an atmosphere. You kick dust up and it falls right back down.

Which isn't to suggest it's not a concern, just that there's not going to be big billowing clouds that linger for any appreciable amount of time.

Yeah, even Chernobyl needed them to deliberately shut off safety equipment and run the reactor in an atypical experimental manner before experiencing a catastrophe.

> We didn't see any of this in the post war period

The stuff I initially referenced above was about the Hell's Angels, formed in 1948.

> but these are the kinds of material conditions which give rise to political grievance(s)

They're also conditions that can be CAUSED by political grievances, mind. Poor health care systems can lead to overprescribing of painkillers and poor support during recovery, for instance.

It's not like society handed these guys a few beers and them bam they want to overthrow the government.

Renewables, actually, and solar in particular. A large amount of solar installation will create an interesting paradigm: If designed around being sufficient during the annual minimum (ie- winter), seasonal variation will net a huge excess of generation in the summer. Tap some of that excess to break down harmful substances.

Well, not all of it can be.

> If you own a lifted F-350 and you can afford to skip work for three weeks, you have not been "left out" of anything important

But you sure can FEEL that you have been left out, which matters more than the actual reality of their situation.

> This guy can't even articulate what they are protesting

It's the ethic of total retaliation:

> "Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment… and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity” destined for extinction.

> Studs Terkel, after reading that passage out loud in a 1967 interview with Thompson, calls it “the key” to the entire book. “Here we have technology, we have the computer, we have labor-saving devices,” he says to Thompson, but we also “have the need for more and more college education for almost any kind of job, and we have this tremendous mass of young who find themselves obsolete.” But Thompson replies that the real consequences have only started to manifest: “The people who are being left out and put behind won’t be obvious for years. Christ only knows what’ll happen in, say, 1985 — a million Hell’s Angels. They won’t be wearing the colors; they’ll be people who are just looking for vengeance because they’ve been left behind.”

It's crazy energy-intensive, so only makes sense with a very robust and non-emitting energy grid. So waste is gonna be sitting in those concrete casks for many decades yet.

Still, I favor this option over burying it.

Nuclear material is great for probes sent to the outer reaches of the solar system, where A: solar becomes less effective, B: you need stronger broadcasts to transmit data, and C: the danger of errant nuclear material is cosmically unlikely.

> What a great way to gradually get rid of nuclear waste.

Well, for its own waste, sure, since it's already out of Earth's gravity well. For current terrestrial stuff I say we just blast it with lasers until it's whittled down to less-harmful elements. Bonus: We can do this with other toxic substances too.

Minor nitpick: Most of Musk's wealth is from Tesla. SpaceX generates a few billion a year lately, nothing to sneeze at but nowhere near enough to make one the richest in the world.