Four billion metric tons of uranium sit dissolved in the world’s oceans right now, roughly 1,000 times the total identified in hard-rock mines worldwide. A US startup called Fluxnium just emerged from stealth with a plan to get at it, backed by $7 million in seed funding and chemistry licensed from the US Department of Energy.
The catch: extracting that uranium currently costs more than twice the market rate, and no one has proven it works at commercial scale.
The timing matters. Yellowcake prices have risen approximately 75% over the past five years, according to US Energy Information Administration data. US policy discussions target tripling nuclear capacity by 2050, yet the country imports the overwhelming majority of its uranium from a short list of geopolitically exposed nations.
Great points.
I’d also add that, if you live alone in an apartment, an electric blanket is the best. They’re cheap, work great, and use very, very little electricity.
Yeah, let’s take my condo, for example. I have a 2 bedroom with a big inteconnected dining/kitchen/living area. There are only doors to the bedrooms or the bathroom. With no way to subdivide the living areas, the bedrooms are the only practical place to hidey-hole in the winter.
So let’s see the problems there:
Frozen pipes. The rule of the condo (not guideline, rule) is thermostats are set no lower than 55 degrees F. Now pipes freeze at 32, so that is a pretty outrageous amount of manadatory wiggle room --23 degrees. I honestly don’t know enough about plumbing or insulation to suggest a fix, but I will note that there is no plumbing inside my ground floor apartment that touches an outside wall, so I bet I could get pretty darn close to 32 in any room without bursting pipes, but I do so at a pretty high risk.
So I’m hiding in the bedroom, the only room with a door. Why is the space taken up by a frame, boxspring, and matress that is used for only 8 hours a day, and why is everyone sleeping in fucking full size mattresses instead of a twin if they live alone? Honestly, I never understood it.
Japanese solution is a roll up mattress; the western solution is the much more complicated and expesnive and permanent murphy bed. I think any homeowner can replace their full size matress with a twin, or a bed with a roll-up mattress, or a bed with a futon, so that’s pretty easy.
If the inside of your apartment is at 55, and the outside is at 9, and the insulation between the pipes and the inside/outside is equal, that puts your pipes at 32. In theory the pipes should be “closer” to the inside temperature, but plumbers don’t always put pipes in with an aim to avoid future plumbing work…
The pipes are never outside, though, they come out underground in the basement. There really is no communication with the outdoor temperature, it’s just the ambient temp in the basement and my first floor condo?
One think I"m wondering about is conductivity. So if I put a thermostat on a feed pipe under the kitchen sink, what can I surmise about the temperature of the pipe in the basement?
If you don’t run any water overnight then turn on the cold tap (preferably first thing in the morning) and take temperature readings as it runs, you can (likely) spot if you’ve got any cold spots / weak insulation against outside cold, assuming it’s a lot colder outside than inside that night.