I'd never really considered that the "How is it powered?" question is an issue. If you're talking about 700 years in the future, an unobtanium power source sort of goes without saying.
The thing which dates most SF movies, even the good ones (and older SF books, for that matter) is the lack of computing/technological prowess on offer. The leap in tech over the past decade has been so massive that even the most futuristic show from the 1990s/2000s looks hopelessly dated. Problem is, anybody thinking seriously about what might be possible in a few hundred years time wouldn't get anywhere when showrunning.
As for the disappearance of inertia in superhero films featuring characters who don't have any specific superhero invulnerability, you just have to shrug and ignore it. On the other hand for non-superhero stuff, I have less patience. Peter Jackson's King Kong remake was utterly stupid for the way in which the heroine was chucked around as KK fought some dinosaurs. She would have been a crumpled smear of flesh after all of that action.
]]>We already know that the South African and perhaps the South American variants in the news seem to have some degree of immune escape so can cause reinfection even if you've had a past infection or even perhaps a vaccination. However, one thing which has been noticeably lacking is any sort of a breakdown of how severe these reinfections were.
On the one hand, this isn't a surprise as there was such little global testing capacity during the first major wave of infections a year ago. Many supposed or suspected infections may have been nothing of the sort, so some of the reinfections could actually be first infections. The various vaccine trials have most definitely not mentioned anything about the severity of reinfections, even though one or two of them flagged these up. Perhaps not a surprise as nobody is selling sterilising immunity with the current vaccines and it is good for business to be able to sell a booster shot every year, especially with governments so eager to chuck money at them.
However, if the vast majority of reinfections are mild (or milder) cases, as you would tend to expect given the way the immune system operates, then it isn't nearly as much of a worry. Vaccine boosters would then soon become similar to the flu jabs we know well - generally just given to the older population and younger people with serious risk factors.
I suspect that it won't be until later in the year that any data about the general severity of confirmed reinfections becomes clear, although this is likely to be limited as the news will all be about the rollout of 'variant' vaccines by then. I'd expect the usual media scare stories about a small number of people who have worse infections the second time around, but I'm cautiously hopeful that we'll perhaps discover that after a year or two of 'boosters', we don't really need them any more as our immune systems will have adapted and the virus won't be quite as novel any longer. Not to mention, of course, the billions pumped into treatments which should also mitigate the damage infection can do.
Obviously, this presupposes that a super-variant doesn't emerge to put us in a doomsday situation, but this doesn't seem particularly likely from what we've seen so far. I know the anti-vaxxers have been pushing some scaremongering about the risk of ADE as their latest approach to deter vaccination so let's hope the universe doesn't get too ironic and make them right by sheer chance!
]]>For this reason, I know that some proponents of MSRs are promoting other designs such as the Denatured Molten Salt Reactor. Some of the benefits of an LFTR (chiefly in lack of complexity in comparison to some of the other Gen IV reactors and inherent safety due to operation at atmospheric pressure), but using Uranium along with Thorium and with no attempt to reprocess the fuel.
The idea behind a DMSR is to reduce the cost and increase the safety. Would be a good idea from my viewpoint though, again, the current nuclear industry probably wouldn't be interested in getting on board.
I must say, I had originally hoped that the British government might have punted a billion or two on new reactor designs as some stimulus following the financial crisis in 2008 but, unfortunately, we ended up with incompetent Osbornomics instead. Nuclear certainly needs to be a big part of our energy mix but the current political classes have kicked the can so far down the road that we're reduced to throwing money at the Chinese and French to build and operate reactors for us at eye-watering costs.
]]>Best publicised of these is the LFTR (Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor). Originally designed back in the 1960s using the thermal spectrum but 'canned' due to a preference for fast breeder reactors which have never really worked out well.
The LFTR (and many other MSRs) would operate at atmospheric pressure so no need for elaborate containment of the sort required for PWRs and other fast reactors using exotic coolants such as liquid sodium or molten lead. In the event of a core breach, there couldn't be any sort of a catastrophic meltdown because the reaction actually slows the hotter it gets. You could just drain the reactor and the salts containing the fissile material (whether Uranium or the more abundant Thorium) would solidify harmlessly. No chance of explosions or fallout anywhere. Not to mention that, if you design in ongoing reprocessing (which ought to be feasible), the waste produced has decayed down to background levels of radiation within a couple of hundred years.
A MSR experiment ran for a number of years in the US in the 60s and 70s so many of the the difficulties with the technology are understood and can be resolved relatively easily. With the billions being thrown at ITER fusion, it is just very sad that nobody other than the Chinese and one or two private companies have bothered to invest any money in MSR research.
Too many vested interests around either stopping investment in any form of nuclear power or simply keeping the industry on the PWR route as that is where they know they can make the money.
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