Posts by thames

Re: "Planning"

One common example in the US is that the main train station in New York City would not meet the radiation limits required for a nuclear power plant. The building is made of granite and so is naturally radioactive to a degree higher than allowed for a nuclear power plant. This is apparently OK for a public building that millions of people go through, but not for a power plant.

There are probably plenty of historic buildings in the UK in a similar situation. Just look for anything made of granite.

This is already part of Linux and has been for years. It's called OARS, which means Open Age Rating Service. It's used by Gnome Software, KDE Discover, and Flathub. It just doesn't become active until you install parental controls (provided by libmalcontent and malcontent-control). The information is stored in /var/lib/AccountsService/users/${user}

I haven't tried it myself.

Re: How to find the Register's RSS feeds?

Perhaps what The Register ought to be doing is to put the RSS feed symbol beside the social media options like a lot of web sites do. Considering the target audience of this site, hiding the RSS feed amounts to shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to attracting and maintaining readership.

Re: Natrium????

It's just product branding. They can't trademark the word "sodium" in connection with nuclear reactors as it has been used in connection with reactors for decades. They had to come up with something else, and this was it.

1.4 percent is statistical noise.

There was a famous experiment done during WWII in which an industrial engineer was trying to measure the effects of changing factory lighting on worker productivity. However, he could not find an optimal lighting level. There seemed to be no pattern to how the inputs affected the outputs.

Eventually he figured out that any change produced a temporary increase in productivity for psychological reasons. However, that increase faded away and returned to its original level after a period of time as people became used to the new conditions. Within certain reasonable limits, the actual lighting level had no effect.

This is an example of how productivity measurements need to have a scientific basis or they're worthless. The exception is when the productivity increases are so large and unmistakable that there is no question there has been an improvement. We're not seeing that with the published AI data. It'd down in the statistical noise levels.

I have a long background in factory automation and every productivity project that I've worked on had a clear and measurable goal measured in terms of actual money, and success was based on meeting targets. If productivity increased but by enough to meet the minimum return on investment criteria, then the project was considered a money losing failure.

I haven't been seeing this rigorous measurement with AI. People are throwing AI at their offices with no clear idea of what they hope to achieve or any rigorous method of measuring it. It's farcical.

Re: hydrogen for helium gas

Gas cooled reactors typically use helium because it is non-corrosive and has good heat transfer properties. High temperature hydrogen would be fairly corrosive I would imagine.

The UK were the first country to commercialize gas cooled reactors on a big scale with the Magnox (the first commercial nuclear reactors to supply power to the grid) and AGR designs. These used CO2 because at the time the US had a monopoly on helium production and it was seen as being too risky to rely on them for a supply. There are of course more commercial sources of helium now so that is less of an issue.

Re: Pot, kettle, all black

The entire Internet is having to implement measures to try to stop the American AI companies from stealing all their stuff and grinding their servers into the dust in the process, but that's OK.

But if someone does the same to them, then that is bad, really, really bad and it must be stopped.

I have zero sympathy for them.

Re: 50% efficiency

It outputs 200 MW of heat, which it converts to 60 MW of electricity. This is 30% efficiency, which is below that of typical reactors, which are in the mid thirties range. This is dictated by operating temperature of the steam cycle. You need much higher temperatures to get more efficiency. I think the maximum possible efficiency of a rankine steam cycle is somewhere in the low to mid forties, and you need very high temperature steam for that. Fuel costs are not a big proportion of typical nuclear plants, so there isn't a lot of incentive to push the engineering limits here.

It also outputs 60 MW of cooling. However, they are very vague about this, so I would hesitate to speculate on what they may mean here, as they don't show any direct connection between the refrigeration plant and the reactor or steam system.

Overall though, the basic concept is fairly conservative. It's a scaled down PWR using normal commercial fuel enriched below 5%. The notable features are its size and the long time between refuelling (about 6 years).

With SMRs there is a balance between economies of scale and economies of replication. That is, there are savings to be made from greater size but these must be balanced against savings to be made form serial factory production of smaller units. Most engineering and economic studies suggest the trade off point is at about 300 to 500 MW or so.

The problem these data centre specific reactors may face is they may be too small to hit the minimum operating cost point and so face higher electricity costs than data centres which locate in places where they can buy electricity from the grid.

Of course, once the AI bubble pops all of this will be a moot point.

Yes, the actual blog post mentions that they relied upon having a very extensive and high quality set of tests developed by other people. They also used GCC extensively so that when the output of their own compiler didn't work they could compile most of it with GCC and a small part of it with the AI compiler and do this repeatedly to narrow down where the problem was.

So in order to use this methodology, you need to have a very complete set of known good high quality tests and a high quality known good compiler. Once you have those you can then create a poor quality compiler using AI.

The author said he was doing it to try to push Claude Code to its limits to see where it would fail.

In terms of developing practical applications however, it's fairly useless unless your goal is to clone a project which has very comprehensive and high quality tests and which allows you to slowly substitute the AI's work in place of the original so you can incrementally find the failure points.

There's not a lot of software out there that meets those criteria and it's of no help at all in terms of creating genuinely new software. It's basically a tool for cloning existing software under a new license while possibly skirting around copyright law.

AI companies will talk about using nuclear, but actual SMR projects getting built so far are mainly being driven by net-zero targets. Utilities have been running the numbers, and the only viable way of reaching those targets is with nuclear powered base load.

There are four 300 MW SMRs currently under construction just east of Toronto, and the first one will be in service by the end of the decade. This is utility investment to meet general load growth.

Re: Highly enriched fuel

Civil grade uranium is limited to less than 20% enrichment. At 20% and above, this is considered to be military grade material and is more highly restricted. An actual bomb needs somewhere above 90%, the exact figures being a bit hard to come by.

This is why the highest enrichment level you see on civilian reactors, except for a handful of small, older research reactors, is less than 20% (e.g. typically 19.75%).

Typical light water moderated commercial power reactors use 3% to 5% for economic reasons. The third most common reactor type after PWR and BWR uses natural uranium at 0.7%. You don't need to enrich the uranium if you use a very efficient reactor design with a good moderator.

Plutonium has similar limits based on the different isotopes. The plutonium in spent fuel from commercial reactors is not suitable for making weapons as it does not have a high enough level of Pu-239 and unlike uranium, it is not practical to enrich plutonium. It can however be used as reactor fuel and there are a number of different fuel recycling technologies, depending on the reactor type it is to be used in. Weapons material is made in military reactors designed for the purpose. The first few Magnox reactors were actually military reactors which produced electric power as a byproduct.

Re: Additional reading

Whole Fleet Management is not working out well with other vehicles in terms of getting enough crew training, but has little to do with the problems which AJAX is having. Blaming H&S problems and manufacturing defects on WFM is quite frankly grasping at straws.

So WFM should go and crews should get assigned vehicles, but that won't do anything with respect to the problems with AJAX.

Re: old boy network rides again

The "old boy network" decision would have been to buy the CV90, owned by well established British defence contractor BAE and built in their plant in Sweden. However, there was a perception within the MoD that too much work was going to one company so for AJAX the attitude, according to insiders, was "anyone but BAE".

As a result it went to General Dynamics, an American company without a strong foothold in the British armoured vehicle defence market, and who would build the vehicle in their plant in Spain.

This fiasco is very much the product of "the new boy" in the British defence market.

Re: 40% of the workforce are paying attention & give a damn

I talked to someone in the banking industry recently. The bank uses AI to help compose emails. The AI pulls some templates on things the bank wants to sell customers at that time and knits them together, she modifies the results to suit what she thinks that particular customer should see, and then she sends the email. I imagine she's pretty typical of what people are using AI for in business. As to whether she's part of the 60% who use it "daily" or part of the 40% who use it less than daily isn't something that we got around to discussing. It's nice to have, but it doesn't really make a great deal of difference to what she does.

She (the banker) said by the way that the current market is in an AI bubble and people are going to get burned very badly if they don't recognize that.

I can remember when we first got access to Internet email at work. It made a huge difference to our ability to communicate with suppliers and partners around the world and increased the whole pace of business. Everyone was all over it as soon as we were allowed access to it and it was a real source of contention over how long it was taking the company to implement it (they had foolishly locked themselves into a proprietary service that they had to get out of).

I'm seeing nothing like that with AI in any of the companies that I have talked to about it. It's all a case of people saying they use it, but it doesn't make any real difference in terms of getting useful work done any faster or better.

I'm not really sure what your point is. As the article states, IEEE floating point exceptions are designed to work a very specific way, and common algorithms are often designed with those methods in mind. Many times those algorithms rely on floating point errors flowing through to the end rather than checking after every operation. You can count on 1.0 + NaN producing a result of NaN, so you can check for NaN later rather than beforehand if that gives better performance.

If an emulation of floating point math works differently however, such that 1.0 + NaN produces a result of something other than NaN, then many well proven math libraries and algorithms may not work correctly with it in terms of error handling.

If you have an algorithm which requires checking at certain steps in the process, then that's part of that algorithm. However, you will still have the problem that if the emulation system doesn't behave the way you expected then you can get errors that your error checking doesn't know how to look for.

Hence my conclusion Ozaki will only be useful in very specific hand coded libraries handling very specific algorithms for very specific applications.

Re: "I have another 20 years to monetize that customer,"

You're talking about hardware costs. He is talking about service contract lock-in. He is assuming that LLM AI will increase vendor lock-in. Salesforce hope to be able to increase prices at will for locked-in customers, who will find it very difficult to duplicate those custom features with another vendor.

Have a look at VMWare's business strategy, which is squeeze locked-in customers until their pips squeak. That's the plan for the AI business model.

Re: Siemens S5-DOS/MT

Siemens was and is a big company. They made everything from mainframes to nuclear reactors. One of their biggest divisions was and is industrial controls, where they were the world leader.

There are various sources of information on line, but I'll stick to the known safe ones (as opposed to ones offering who knows what in terms of downloads) such as Wikipedia.

Here's an article on the Simatic product line, which was Siemens' name for their programmable industrial controls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simatic

Here's a photo of the PG 675 computer which is better than the PG 685 used in the article, even if it is a bit grubby. "PG" was Siemens' term for the programming computer.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Siemens_Simatic_S5_PG_675.jpg

In the main article, scroll down to the section on "Step 5". It mentions there that the OS for the PG 630 was CP/M.

If you scroll down to "History of STEP5", there is a table which shows that from v1.0 to v1.4 it ran on an unspecified version of CP/M. From 2.0 to 3.2 it ran on CP/M-86. Version v6.3 ran on MS-DOS on the PG750. I think the table is not complete, so there may be other version numbers.

I know however that you could also run STEP5 on an ordinary laptop under MS-DOS (or Windows 95). I also recall that the earlier versions ran on some sort of CP/M emulator in order to run on MS-DOS, but I don't know the details. The very late versions (I think somewhere around version 6 or 7) were ported directly to run natively on MS-DOS.

As for why Siemens used CP/M, when they first came out with the software MD-DOS didn't exist yet. CP/M on the other hand was the de facto standard operating for business microcomputers.

As for the PGs themselves, you will notice in the photo that they have an extra row of function keys below the standard F1 to F8. These have special symbols which are used by the STEP5 programming software. You will also notice a deep socket to the left of the floppy drives labelled "module". There is a corresponding socket on the photos of the S5-95U and S5-103U CPUs. This was for a ROM module which you could burn so you didn't need a backup battery to keep the program in RAM. Most people didn't bother with the ROM module and just changed the battery every year.

The PDF that you linked in the story for Siemens S5-DOS/MT is actually for the MS-DOS version of the programming software. I don't know if at this point it was running under an emulator or was a native MS-DOS port, but the host OS in that manual is definitely MS-DOS. If you go to chapter 5 it talks about the included utilities for reading and writing "PCP/M" floppy disks so you could exchange data between older PGs (which used CP/M) and newer ones running MS-DOS. I suspect these are licensed third party utilities. The manual by the way has a very good explanation of how to optimize memory management for MS-DOS. Siemens manuals from that era were excellent in terms of providing technical detail even if they did have a tendency to use their own names for things.

As for whether Siemens also sold FlexOS, I wouldn't dispute that. There are lots of different applications in industry, and you can outfit pretty much your entire plant with just Siemens control kit. That however would have been used in some sort of dedicated application rather than the type of programming PC such as I was describing.

They currently sell their own industrial Linux distro, based on Debian, to fill that niche.

https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/document/109988870/simatic-industrial-os-4-2-%E2%80%93-the-operating-system-for-applications-in-the-industrial-environment?dti=0&lc=en-CA

Re: That's not survival. It is an unnecessary nightmare.

I could see structural batteries in things like high end phones and tablets to make them a tiny bit smaller or have a slightly larger battery. Phone cases aren't really that strong anyway.

It doesn't make much sense in cars though. The structural parts of a car are designed for strength and the trend there is for stronger steels to reduce weight. You aren't likely to be able to create a battery material which can match high strength steel when it comes to strength and durability. You also have the problem of getting electric power from all over the frame to the motor power pack. A car is big enough that you can always find places to put the battery.

Cars are big objects so it's always going to be worth while having the frame be the best possible frame and the battery be the best possible battery and so have these as separate components.

It's when you get to small objects like phones where small size is important that combining functions makes sense.

Re: The result of an investigation into China’s semiconductor industry

There's several things going on. One is that the main market for these older chips is in low cost electronic goods, of which China is the biggest manufacturer. The chip plants are located where their customers are. There's a huge market for this stuff because it's cheap and good enough.

The other thing is that US has spent a great deal of effort in preventing Western companies from selling the latest chip making equipment to Chinese companies, only allowing stuff for making older generation chips of the type we are talking about here. So, Chinese chip companies had little choice except to stick to making lower end chips based on older chip technology. Washington patted themselves on the back of this brilliant success.

Then the US observed that Chinese companies were making lots of older generation chips. The American government studied this carefully and decided that this focus on older generation chip technology instead of buying the latest Western equipment was due to some deeply laid plan which the Chinese government have cooked up.

I'm sure this US strategy makes sense to someone.

It's not really an SMR, it's what is known as a "micro-reactor". If you go to their web site they say that it is intended to replace diesel generators which currently power remote communities and mines. This is why it's built as a single container size unit.

There's a whole separate market for micro-reactors. They are competing against diesel generators in terms of cost, and for diesel the big cost is often that of shipping the fuel in. In many places these shipments take place once per year.

Numerous attempts at using wind and solar in these applications have generally been unsuccessful. Due to their intermittency, they can't actually replace diesel, just supplement it. Due to their rapid variability (fluctuations over minutes or even seconds) they can only provide a small percentage of the total power (10 to 15 percent is typical in various projects in Canada, even with storage). There is no huge grid to absorb variability and diesels are limited in their ramp rates without damaging them, so you can only use them to compensate for the variability of wind and solar to a very small degree limiting how much wind or solar you can have. You also can't have diesels run at idle for extensive periods of time without carboning up inside. You need to put a minimum load on them.

Also fuel efficiency of diesels drops with reduced load, so your fuel savings are much less than the amount of power generated by wind or solar. On top of that, saving a few percent of fuel may not save you any money because much of the cost is shipping, and you have to have that same barge or ice road shipment come each year regardless of how much they deliver.

The ideal solution is hydro electric, but that is site specific, and building very long transmission lines is not practical if there isn't a suitable site nearby. This is why it isn't used much for small communities.

What micro-reactors offer is something that can completely replace diesels, something that wind and solar have not been able to do despite very large sums of money having been invested in numerous projects for this. There are several hundred communities and mines in Canada alone which depend on diesel and which are a potential market for micro-reactors.

The company in this story have contracts to supply the US military with micro-reactors to power remote bases. For many remote US bases, the main logistics burden is shipping diesel.

As to whether this company's product works as good as they hope it will, nobody knows yet. They hope to build a fuel demonstration project next year. That apparently won't produce electric power, just test if their proprietary fuel design works like the simulations say it will.

As for using these reactors to power huge AI data centres, I don't see it being practical. They operate on a completely different scale. I suspect the AI industry interest in this sort of technology is as a form of green washing, just like with that study that claims that wind can power data centres. When you dig into the latter it turns out that the actual plan is actually to have a big gas turbine on site plus a promise to buy some wind power from offshore wind farms located somewhere. With these micro reactors, if the AI money is still around when they are ready for market, then I suspect they will buy a couple and issue press releases about them while actually getting most of their power from gas turbines.

So as far as this reactor is concerned, it looks interesting if used for what its designers intended it for. It's not meant for the AI industry however.

Re: This isn't to speed up delivery to the fleet

All or nearly all new frigates and destroyers are powered by either a combination of diesel and gas turbine, or just diesel. The ships cruise on diesel for economical operation and gas turbines are fired up for high speed operation. The newest ones tend to have an electric drive system, where the diesels and gas turbines drive generators and the generators feed electric motors which turn the propellers. Any engine or combination of them can feed any electric motor. On the slightly older ones the gas turbines may be able to be coupled directly to the propeller shafts when needed instead of going through the electric drive system, but they only are used when high speed is needed.

The replacements for the Burke class destroyers will look fairly similar to the Constellation class ships, but much bigger and with more vertical launch cells for missiles.

The differences between ships these days are mainly in the details. These include things like damage control and fire fighting arrangements, size of magazines, and the electronics fitted. The combat systems can cost more than the rest of the ship put together.

The Burke replacement will apparently displace about 14,500 tons and have 96 vertical launch cells, as compared to half that displacement and a third of the number of vertical launch cells for the Constellation class.

The Constellations were supposed to be an off the shelf quick fix for the failed LCS program. However, the US ended up making so many changes that only about 15 percent of the original FREMM design was left by the time they were done with it. This sort of defeats the whole purpose.

Because the Burkes (and planned replacements) are so large and expensive, the US wanted a smaller frigate to give them the numbers to cover places in the world where attention is needed but the threat level is lower. They also wanted them quickly to make up for the time lost pursuing the LCS dead end.

It's hard to say where things are going now, unless someone has a replacement already lined up which is ready to build. Given how that sort of thing tends to leak in the US, I would be very surprised if that were the case however.

Re: Hardly makes us meatbags feel better ...

UK interest in reviving nuclear power predates the AI bubble. It's based on the goal of the total electrification of society in order to meet environmental goals.

What happened is that reality sunk in and people realized that there is no path to "net zero" which involves wind turbines. Wind turbines are joined at the hip to fossil fuels and will be forever. Solar panels are the same.

If you look at which countries in Europe have low carbon emissions in their electricity sector, it isn't the ones which depend on wind/gas. It's the ones which depend on hydro-electric and/or nuclear.

So if the UK genuinely desires to save the environment, then it either needs to find a continental scale high mountainous plateau somewhere in say Norfolk and built hydro-electric plants there, or else build enough nuclear power plants to power Britain. The latter sounds like the more realistic plan.