To me it seems a personality trait of well informed people, that they are not as interested in searching or building capital.
Yes, there’s a tradeoff between putting effort into research and putting it into “hustle”, and usually people specialize in doing one. But it’s not like “ability to partner with someone who searches for capital” is the real bottleneck. I’d say instead that there are certain people in the position to raise capital, but they have to believe in the technology and pitch it themselves, and they need to be on the same wavelength as people like Bill Gates and the moral maze masters, and the people in those positions who can communicate with investors are more likely to be delusional than to understand technology really well.
Also as an aside, what is your interpretation of the Bill Gates article? I see no particular evidence of a lack of physics knowledge, are you referring to the take about the water comments or? It’s definitely not an in-depth description of the problems with PWRs or BWRs, but I think is an acceptable explanation of the advantages of using LMRs. Maybe there is some other comment I am missing, but it comes across as an easily accessible article written to persuade the layman of the benefits of his endeavor?
Sure, I can explain.
First, water isn’t very good at absorbing heat—it turns to steam and stops absorbing heat at just 100 degrees C
Water is actually rather good at absorbing heat. It has a much higher heat capacity than sodium, boiling absorbs a lot of heat if you boil it, and in a typical BWR design it boils at 285 C.
The Natrium plant uses liquid sodium, whose boiling point is more than 8 times higher than water’s
Gates is using unspecified temperature units and pressure, presumably Celcius at 1 bar. Divisions of temps in C aren’t meaningful—does water have −3x the boiling point of ammonia?
Unlike water, the sodium doesn’t need to be pumped, because as it gets hot, it rises, and as it rises, it cools off
Water does that too. It’s an almost universal property of liquids. You can do natural convection cooling with water.
Safety isn’t the only reason I’m excited about the Natrium design
The TerraPower Natrium design is much less safe than current reactors, and using sodium does nothing to improve safety. The sodium reduces reactivity so if the coolant boils off then reactivity increases. That’s bad. The neutrons are fast so neutron lifetime is short so response time needs to be fast. That’s bad. IIRC the design still involves robots moving fuel rods around during operation. That can fail.
It’s just a really terrible design. Bad safety, and very expensive design decisions. Supposedly in the future they plan to use a “Pascal” heavy water moderated CO2 cooled reactor, which I always considered a better approach, but I have little faith in TerraPower doing a good job on it.
Like other power plant designs, it uses heat to turn water into steam, which moves a turbine, which generates electricity. … It also includes an energy storage system that will allow it to control how much electricity it produces at any given time.
If you’re using steam, the low-pressure steam turbines are big and have a lot of inertia compared to the low-pressure steam going through them, so they take a long time to spin up. That’s a big reason why coal plants aren’t load-following like gas turbines.
They’re also expensive, so you really want to avoid them for cost reasons, and if you do have them you want to run them all the time. So with natural gas, the combined cycle plants with steam turbines also tend to run continuously.
The point there was just that we don’t see an inverse relationship, with smarter humans having slower development during childhood. Yet, we do see that inverse relationship when we compare humans to other animals.
Regarding the other half of D:prodigy...I was making an empirical argument based on a large volume of literature, but if you consider the energy landscape of ANN systems, plateauing at bad performance means getting stuck in bad minima, and increasing the number and quality of good paths through the energy landscape is both what makes that less likely and what increases the speed of gradient descent.
As I noted, this raises the question of what’s different about human childhood development that requires it to be slow.