Heat pumps and air conditioners both work off of the refrigeration cycle. A heat pump is essentially an air conditioner that has a reversing valve to allow the refrigerant to flow the opposite way.

It’s indeed not neutral. It always takes work to move heat from a cold area to a hotter area, so there’s always energy (and therefore heat) being added every cycle. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump_and_refrigeration_cycle

True, usually the front only falls off if a wave hits it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

I had no idea Moss 2 was out, and it came out in 2022. Instant purchase for sure, but now I have to decide if I’m going to replay the first one. Thanks for the PSA.

The previous 40kW proposal linked in the article mentions it would allow operation where solar panels aren’t feasible, like permanently shadowed areas where water might be. There’s also the dust problem to solve with solar panels, although this would also be a problem for nuclear reactors since their radiators could become less efficient from dust buildup.

There’s a lot of extra costs associated with making solar panels space worthy. No atmosphere also means no radiation shielding and no cooling. I actually managed to find satellite solar panels for sale: https://www.cubesatshop.com/product/solar-panels/. They have front and back panels but if we assume they didn’t have a back and all panels faced towards the sun it would be ~120W. That gives us $133/W, which means 100kW would be $13.3 million. Unfortunately the mass isn’t listed, so we can’t estimate the launch costs. I don’t have a way to estimate the cost of a fission nuclear reactor on the moon since we don’t know how it would work yet, so this calculation is mostly for fun. That math would change significantly if we are able to manufacture solar cells from lunar regolith.

In nuclear’s defense, we’ve been sending plutonium-238 into space since 1961. There’s been a few accidents, but the fuel casing has been improved so that the later accidents resulted in no leakage. That was in the early days, so we know a lot more about safety now. Do you think the risks are too high for any nuclear fuels in space, or does uranium pose unique risks?

To be fair, he said he’s passionate about peer-to-peer technology and listed Bitcoin as an example. I don’t think that makes him a crypto bro. He probably just appreciates the theory behind it.

This isn’t really a Windows vs Linux issue as far as I’m aware. It was a bad driver update made by a third party. I don’t see why Linux couldn’t suffer from the same kind of issue.

We should dunk on Windows for Windows specific flaws. Like how Windows won’t let me reinstall a corrupted Windows Store library file because admins can’t be trusted to manage Microsoft components on their own machine.

Has someone been reading https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/?

It’s funny, because two male electrical plugs will still pass electricity fine if you put them together.