Oh man so much to unpack here.

First things first, you aren’t shielding solar panels from radiation, you’re shielding the computing components from the radiations. I don’t know how much you know about microprocessors and silicon engineering, but I can promise you they do NOT like ionizing radiation or most other high energy sources of EM radiation, especially while energized. In space, this is a lot of heavy plating that is effectively dead weight and at best can be used as a secondary heat sink, but that’s highly unlikely since it would also be absorbing heat energy while in sunlight.

Additionally, as I pointed out, you’d want to or at least be highly encouraged to pair these lunar data centers with long term colonies, at least as long term as you’d want the data center active. Any unmanned data center is going to fail within 6 months, be it in space, on the moon or some remote valley here on Earth. And while it’s not cheap to sustain life on the moon, it’s even less cheap to do so in orbit when you examine the effects of micro gravity on the human body as well as what it would cost to build a suitable shelter in orbit. There is a reason scientists talk about building long term colonization projects on the moon or Mars, not just putting up orbital space habitats like some gundam series. Earth Orbit may be closer but it’s probably the least hospitable long term to any form of human habitation.

It’s funny to me because the moon would be a much better choice, if latency wasn’t an issue. Don’t get me wrong, if your aim is uptime, reliability and ease of upgrades/use then terrestrial based is your only option.

But if your goal was off Earth, the moon has a number of advantages that free floating in orbit lacks. You can place the servers themselves underground in lavatubes or excavated caverns as well as install heat-sinks (or even seal a cavern, pressurize it and use what ever gaseous medium for extra heat capacity and thermal transfer) then place a series of solar on the surface with battery support (remembering that lunar nights are 2 weeks long) to generate all your power needs, as well as take advantage of the moon’s tidally locked nature to have your transmission and receivers always pointed at the Earth, or relay satellites in orbit.

Such a project could coincide with NASA or other agencies or enterprises looking to establish settlements on the moon for research or mining purposes, so you could have short or long term settlements with technicians on hand to troubleshoot any problems that arise or even get semi regular (every 18-24 months) deliveries of components for repairs and upgrades for your system, something that long term would be a lot simpler logistically and more stable than attempting a satellite or constellation of satellites any Earth orbit.

The plan is nonsensical for a number of reasons, namely the cost and long term dedication, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to put an energy intensive project in orbit and hope the lowest bidder parts last more than 6 months.

Good luck dumbfuck, tell me how easy it is to service, maintain and repair them when you inevitably overheat them, or don’t have the proper shielding so components burn out or degrade beyond useful parameters.

Mars is all red, maybe you want to restart those plans and take your flock of sheeple with you as soon as possible?

Texas tax your billionaires and use that fucking money to regulate and fix your fucking power grid, please.

A few discords I’m on for games have a lot of people crashing out. It’s pretty cathartic after seeing all the sewage they’ve been posting for the last few years.

Send him to Kentucky next. They deserve it.

The only way Trump gets removed from office is if a significant number of Republicans flip on Trump and try to distance themselves and the party from MAGA and his policies leading up to 2028 election. With the current state of things that seems highly unlikely though things could change over the next 18 months that would push the GOP distance themselves enough the current admin to support his removal. Though if the last 10 years have been any indication, there isn’t anywhere near enough backbone for them to turn against the far right.

It’s exactly what the co-pilot does. Communicating with the ATC, reading instruments and any relevant checklist to the pilot. During an emergency like this, the pilot’s primary job is keep both hands on the stick and do everything in their power to get the plane under control and either land safely or return to a safe altitude until they can land. The co-pilot is the one who takes a step back from controls and gets all relevant information to the pilot and ATC in the tower.

If you’ve ever watched the movie Sully, it’s a decent example where the senior/veteran pilot is attempting what he can with the controls that are responding while the co-pilot goes through the emergency checklist and attempts to restart the engines.

As much as I’d love to see them made illegal, I don’t remember the last time I saw an SUV or oversized pickup truck make a 20 foot crater.

I demand more. MANY MORE.

Strange thing to say given how much his boss gets paid by the Saudis.

Yes but no. The sun didn’t form the Earth. The Earth and the sun both formed from a primordial star. You don’t hear much talk about the star that actually birthed us, because theres very little we can say for certain about it. We can’t even say for certain if Sol (the sun) is a second or third generation star because we only have vague notions about if the star that produced all the elements that aren’t hydrogen in the solar system was long lived or went nova in under a billion years.

How the fuck does an AI film cost 1.5 million to make?

Anyone who has Epic Games software installed on their personal device is an absolute moron at this point.

Improved battery tech helps nuclear just as much as it helps solar and wind, as you can design reactors to run peak efficiency at a specific output, allowing you to target a base load where during low demand hours nuclear, wind and solar as available charge batteries or energy storage devices and then during peak hours draw from that reserve without having to increase or decrease the load and allow a much more efficient consumption of fuel.

As for nuclear being expensive, that entirely comes down to the extremely flawed policy of no radiation exposure, which was put in a place when very little was known about exposure at all, let alone how many natural sources of similar radiation there is. If those policies were relaxed to much more realistic standards, the cost of nuclear would be competitive with solar.

From the turbines? Basically nothing. Millions have been spent and best has been figured out is shredding them and using them as filler, which no one is going to use when dirt and sand are cheaper and no risk of break down. All other attempts to recycle turbine blades has resulted in just better ways to crush the down to bury them, which funnily enough is what most of the ‘clean up’ for Sweetwater was.

For nuclear? They can be recycled today if the incentive was there, France recycles almost all of it’s nuclear waste with something like an 80% recovery rate and predict they could go 95% if that ever became economically viable. Most of the nuclear waste in the above picture will be inert after 100 years, though there is no data publicly available of the make up the waste though it should be fewer than 1% plutonium which could be recovered for use else where, such as if thorium reactors ever become viable or for space probes as NASA loves to use it for.

The main reason the US doesn’t recycle is because US’s flawed policy of no radiation exposure means setting up a reprocessing and recycling facility would never become viable for the amount of waste produced annually. And as other posters have pointed out, even stuff that can’t be recycled or reprocessed for other uses could still be simply buried and used to boost a geothermal powerplant.

Most nuclear waste is below background radiation in ten years. High level nuclear waste, when taking the mean by volume, is 100 years. The stuff that lasts ‘thousands and thousands of years’ is plutonium which is the primary thing that can be recycled and reprocessed into fuel and neutron sources, to say nothing of all the ways nuclear waste has been used over the last half century in medical research and technology to save lives.

So no, this theoretical situations where we have mountains of nuclear waste sitting around killing anyone that gets close is not realistic and just a strawman.

The Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, Maine, produced approximately 119 billion kilowatt-hours (119 terawatt-hours) of electricity during its operation from 1972 to 1996.

The Sweetwater Wind Farm is a 585.3-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Nolan County, Texas. Annual production estimates are 1,700,000 MWh, or approx 1.7 terrawatt hours per year on average

So giving the Wind farm the most generous output figures, in a ten year span it produces less than 20 Terrawatt hours, almost 1/6th (one sixth) of the power the single reactor nuclear plant produced in it’s life time.

So yeah, balls in your court.

20 years of nuclear waste vs less than 10 years (2017-2023) of wind turbine blades (dumped illegally no less)

Which one is the unsolved problem again?

100%, there re natural rock formations that emit more radiation than nuclear power plants, hell if the US Capitol building was rezoned as a nuclear power plant, half of DC would need to be evacuated and an exclusion zone setup without any change to the building or fuel brought to the site. The granite used in it’s construction emits more radiation naturally that exceeds the legal limit that nuclear power plants are allowed.

Meanwhile self professed environmentalists are anti-nuclear energy despite it having the least impact environmentally per kw produced.