Like Robert Hooke on Acid

This apparatus is a profound mind-f%$#.

It is fascinating, though I'm not sure of its strength or its physical robustness. 

^*Robert Hooke was a 17^th century physicist, astronomer, etc. who is credited with inventing the univerals joint.

Deep Thought

Yeah, Boeing.

H/T Tim Boudreau

Interesting Point

There are a number of videos out there which analyze and condemn the Tesla Cybertruck, this one is interesting because early in the video it raises an interesting point, that for every one of the other products produced by the auto manufacturer, they had their origins in the time before Elon had complete control of the company.

For all of the earlier products the basic design, which has remained the same until the truck, had their origins when  Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were heavily involved in the technical end of things.

The Cybertruck is where the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ first got to do a blank sheet of paper design that he controlled, and it ain't pretty.

As a Doctor Who Fan, I am not Flattered

A cow-orker of mine finds that my "Mad SolidWorks Skilz" impressive enough that he has nicknamed me, "Master," and he occasionally calls me, "The Master."

As a Doctor Who fan, I find it a bit disconcerting.

There is only one, "The Master," and that is the late actor Roger Caesar Marius Bernard de Delgado Torres Castillo Roberto.

OK, I'll also grant that John Simms and  especially Michelle Gomez have done very well, but there is just no filling the shoes left by Roger Delgado.

In any case, if any of you out there are wondering, I am not a time traveling evil genius bent on taking over the earth.

I tend to think of myself as the sidekick, but not of The Master.

Rather I think of myself as being the sidekick of an evil genius whose proclivities are a bit less lethal to his assistants.

I wonder what sort of dental plan comes with being the minion of an evil genius.

Narf!

It Appears that I Never Learn

I spent most of the day reteaching myself the equations for a plane, and the equations for the distance from a point to that plane.

Back to the forgotten lessons of high school trigonometry class.

I now remember why I forgot them.

(on edit)

Yeah, it's also linear algebra, which I took circa 1982.

Running Grisly Numbers

As I have noted earlier, I've not made much in the way of comments about the Gaza war, because I have very little to add.

Then there was a discussion of plans by IDF to bring in large pumps and flood the Gaza tunnel complexes with seawater at the Stellar Parthenon BBS, and someone said that they should use desalinated water to minimize the damage.

And then I got to go all, "Guardian of Forever," because I got to run numbers. Someone gave me a problem to solve, and by Spock's pointy ears, once you do that, there is no stopping me.

Just ask Sharon*, when I said early in our marriage that I was neither of us were the divorcing kind, we were the murdering kind, and she asked me, "So how would you kill me?"

Give me a problem, and I will look for a solution.  It makes me happy to figure stuff like this out.

My solution, rather upset Sharon* for a few days, but as the chicken said, "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

So back to the flooding problem.

Point 1 which should be obvious to everyone, is that flooding the tunnels will do enormous damage regardless of the salinity of the water , because pumping that much water into a cave complex does a f%$# tonne of damage.

So, let's assume that the IDF has about 20 so pumps to flood the Tunnel.

The first question is, "How much water will they move?"

Well, given that the Three Gorges dam has a flow rate of about 600–950 cubic metres per second with a water head of 86m through through its generators, and you are looking for flow rate, and not pressure (head), we can say that about 20 pumps could likely put out about 100 m3/s, (26,417 gallon/s) probably with about a 10m (32.8 feet) head.

Each pump would put out 5m3/s (1321 gallon/s).

By way of comparison, the one of the larger fire boats out there the Warner L. Lawrence  can put out about 38,000 gallon/minute. (633 Gallon/S or 2.397 m3/s).

OK, so we would probably be looking at more pumps, or less water, but comparative numbers are the same.

The equation for the energy required for pumping is:

P = q h ρ / (6116 103 μ) (3)

where

P = power (kW)
q = flow (liter/min)
h = head (m)
ρ = density (kg/m3) (water 1000 kg/m3)
μ = pump efficiency (decimal value)

100 m3/s equals 6 million liters per minute, we've got a head of 10 feet, and I am assuming a pump efficiency of 80%, which is probably a bit low.

Crunching those numbers, we get 12,263 kW, which is a lot of power, about ⅓ of the shaft horsepower of a Virginia Class SSN.

So for 100 m3/s of water desalination, how much power does it take?

Well, it takes between 3 and 9 kWh/m3 of water using reverse osmosis, generally considered the most efficient method. Taking the low end, 3kWh = 10,800,000 Joules, so to desalinate 100 m3/s of water, you would need, 1,080,000,000 Joules/s = 1,080,000,000 W = 1,080,000 kW = 1,080 mW = 1.08 gW.

That is roughly 88 times more power than involved in just pumping sea water, and about 5% of Israeli generation capacity of 21.5 gW.

As such it is likely not viable.

Now this is all just spitballing, and I am not considering the humanitarian and moral issues, because this serves as a way for me to avoid the potential humanitarian and moral issues.

Please, feel free to check my math.  It is late at night, and I am still recovering from whatever variant of the Plague that I caught from my wife, so my mind is no where as clear as it should be.

Feel free to castigate me for running these numbers as a way to avoid looking at the moral dimensions here.  I just can't do that yet.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Fuck, This is Real

Not the Onion


This makes Mad Max look like a utopian dream

Misfiring the unlock button at after school pickup and pepper spraying my kids from the side mirrors as they're zapped by the electrified door handles I left armed pic.twitter.com/gawaYO6HcQ

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) January 23, 2023

And here is a disturbingly upbeat video review

For those of you who think that your ordinary SUVs are not hostile and murderous enough, we now have the Rezvani Vengeance, which has options for a smoke screen, pepper spray projectors, and electrified door handles, in addition to the inevitable bullet proofing.

When I first saw this on Twitter, I thought that it was a joke, but it's fucking real.

Prices start at $285,000.00.

In southern California, parking lot warfare just got real. Not content with their supersized pickup trucks and child-killing SUVs, America’s road warriors can now go full military apocalypse, with the arrival of the Rezvani Vengeance.

While its competitors offer heated seats and optional roof-racks, this souped-up SUV boasts bulletproof glass, blinding strobe lights, electrified doorhandles, and wing mirrors that can shoot pepper spray – handy for putting those pesky cyclists in their place.

“Vengeance is yours,” trumpets the website, which details how the car can release a dense smoke screen to confuse people following you, as well as detect electromagnetic pulses from nuclear weapons. Always handy for the supermarket run.

Picking up the kids from school? You can announce your arrival through the car’s booming intercom system. Or why not just drive straight through the gates? The vehicle’s hefty steel ram bumpers and military-grade tyres would make mincemeat of any parking barrier – and dispatch the headteacher while they’re at it.

One thing oddly missing from the Vengeance (priced from $285,000, rising to $499,000 with all the extras) is a rear windscreen, because of course that would be unsafe. Instead, drivers are treated to a live video rear-view mirror and a front camera overlaid with “augmented reality”. Perhaps it shows an imaginary zombie army for you to mow down on your way to the mall.

………

This steroidal tank might seem like an anomalous extreme, but the truth is it represents the broader rise of the average US consumer vehicle into a supercharged killing machine. With its added tactical weaponry and paranoid styling, at least the Vengeance is honest about it.

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, drivers behind the wheel of an SUV are two to three times more likely to kill a pedestrian in a collision than when driving a regular car. A study in Michigan found that, at 20-39 mph, 30% of SUV crashes resulted in a pedestrian fatality, compared with 23% of car crashes. While, at 40mph or above, 100% of SUV crashes resulted in a pedestrian death, compared with 54% of car crashes.

Like I said, hostile and murderous. 

When I shit like this, I understand why Osama bin Laden wanted to destroy our nation and our culture.

I do not approve, but I understand.

Only About a Year Late

Boeing has finally gotten FAA approval to restart deliveries of the 787.

Following the dual debacles of the 737 MAX and 787, the FAA did not allow Boeing to self certify its solution to the problems.

They still don't know how to make planes.

In fact torturous path to getting the plane out the door in the first place, where Boeing attempted to foist off most of the serious engineering and manufacturing onto, "Risk Sharing Partners," strongly implies that they aren't interested in making planes.

They have done their best to reduce everything to marketing and financial engineering, and not actual engineering:

Boeing Co. received preliminary US regulatory clearance to restart deliveries of its 787 Dreamliner aircraft, paving the way for the end to a drought that drained cash and dented the planemaker’s reputation for quality.

The Federal Aviation Administration approved Boeing’s plans to inspect and repair tiny manufacturing flaws in the Dreamliner’s carbon-composite frame, two people familiar with the plan said late Friday. The jet manufacturer had largely halted deliveries since late 2020 as its engineers found improperly filled gaps in about 20 locations.

The FAA agreement is a milestone for the company, but it won’t immediately resume deliveries. Boeing must still make required fixes and get FAA inspectors to approve each aircraft, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information hasn’t been publicly announced. While timing of delivery resumptions remains unclear, the company is aiming to begin in the week of Aug. 8, one of the people said.

………

The resumption of shipments will mark a financial turnaround for Boeing after years of operational lapses that have frustrated customers, suppliers and investors. It’s also a potential catalyst for Boeing shares, since the Arlington, Virginia-based company will start to unlock nearly $10 billion in cash tied up in Dreamliners stashed around its factories and in desert storage, according to Rob Spingarn, an analyst with Melius Research.

………

The chief problem for the 787 had been how the plane’s carbon-fiber fuselage sections were joined, which didn’t meet Boeing’s design specifications but wasn’t deemed to be a safety hazard.

The company’s plan to resume sales also includes addressing how the planemaker constructed the so-called forward pressure bulkhead, the structure near the nose that maintains pressurized atmosphere, and other issues that had arisen during the past year, said one of the people.

This is what happens when the marketing and finance guys take over.

Fragility Has Its Costs

It looks like manufacturers in general and the automobile industry in particular, are taking a few steps back from just-in-time manufacturing.  It appears that they have discovered that the system where they accumulate little or no inventory may save a few bucks, but when it breaks, it gets ugly fast:

Toyota Motor Corp. is stockpiling up to four months of some parts. Volkswagen AG is building six factories so it can get its own batteries. And, in shades of Henry Ford, Tesla Inc. is trying to lock up access to raw materials.

The hyperefficient auto supply chain symbolized by the words “just in time” is undergoing its biggest transformation in more than half a century, accelerated by the troubles car makers have suffered during the pandemic. After sudden swings in demand, freak weather and a series of accidents, they are reassessing their basic assumption that they could always get the parts they needed when they needed them.

“The just-in-time model is designed for supply-chain efficiencies and economies of scale,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan Motor Co.’s chief operating officer. “The repercussions of an unprecedented crisis like Covid highlight the fragility of our supply-chain model.”

………

The basic idea of just in time is avoiding waste. By having suppliers deliver parts to the assembly line a few hours or days before they go into a vehicle, auto makers don’t pay for what they don’t use. They save on warehouses and the people to manage them.

But as supply chains get more global and car makers increasingly rely on single suppliers, the system has grown brittle. The crises are more frequent.

………

A freak snowstorm in Texas in mid-February shut down a refinery that feeds production of 85% of resins produced in the U.S. Those resins go into components from car bumpers to steering wheels. They’re some of the least expensive raw materials in a car, but they go into seat foam, and dealers can’t sell a car without seats.

At the end of March, Toyota shut down production at several U.S. plants due to the shortage, according to a schedule seen by The Wall Street Journal, hitting production of some of its bestsellers, including the RAV4 sport-utility vehicle. 

Obviously, excessive inventory can be as much of a problem as not enough, but when you have inventory levels that are measured in hours, as opposed to weeks, when something goes wrong, you are completely f%$#ed.

Today in Weird

Source if the leak

The leak in the space station was some screw-up with a drill who tried to hide his mistake:

Last week, a pressure leak occurred on the International Space Station. It was slow and posed no immediate threat to the crew, with the atmosphere leaving the station at a rate such that depressurization of the station would have taken 14 days.

Eventually, US and Russian crew members traced the leak to a 2mm breach in the orbital module of the Soyuz MS-09 vehicle that had flown to the space station in June. The module had carried Russian cosmonaut Sergey Prokopyev, European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, and NASA's Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor.

The crew on the station was in no danger, and, over the course of several hours, Russian engineers devised a fix that involved epoxy. A preliminary analysis concluded that the vehicle is safe for return to Earth (the orbital module detaches from the small Soyuz capsule before entry into Earth's atmosphere).

The drama might have ended there, as it was initially presumed that the breach had been caused by a tiny bit of orbital debris. However, recent Russian news reports have shown that the problem was, in fact, a manufacturing defect. It remains unclear whether the hole was an accidental error or intentional. There is evidence that a technician saw the drilling mistake and covered the hole with glue, which prevented the problem from being detected during a vacuum test.

“We are able to narrow down the cause to a technological mistake of a technician. We can see the mark where the drill bit slid along the surface of the hull,” Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, told RIA Novosti. (A translation of the Russian articles in this story was provided to Ars by Robinson Mitchell). “We want to find out the full name of who is at fault—and we will.”

………

In this case, the technician used glue instead of epoxy. As the Soyuz hull is made from an aluminum alloy, it could have been properly repaired on Earth by welding, had the technician reported the mistake.

The Soyuz manufacturing issue represents another significant problem for the Russian space agency's suppliers and its quality control processes. Already, the manufacturer of Proton rockets, Khrunichev, has had several serious problems that have led to launch failures. Rogozin was recently installed as the leader of Roscosmos to try to clean up corruption and address these kinds of issues.

Seriously, this sh%$ is rocket science, and everyone screws up.  You own it, and the Russians know how to use a TiG welder just as well as anyone else, and the fix along with post weld inspections, should not have taken more than a couple of hours.

Bondo is not an option in space.

This is Ingenious

Comparison of various cycles


SPCCI Cycle


Pressure Profiles

Diesel engines have been getting a lot of bad news recently, but there is a another form of compression ignition that has been lurking in the laboratory for years.

A diesel compresses the air, and then squirts in fuel, which ignites in the hot air.

The other form of compression ignition compresses a fuel air mixture until it all ignites simultaneously.

Theoretically, this could result in superior fuel economy and low levels of pollution.

This is a tremendously difficult thing to do since things like this, since the line between ignition and nothing is a very fine line, and things like ambient temperature, barometric pressure, etc. can cause premature ignition, i.e. pinging, which hits the inside of an engine like a hammer.

Nissan has come up with an innovative way to fix the timing, they have added a spark assist so that they can control the timing.

As opposed to a conventional spark ignited engine, where the flame front progresses from the spark, in their "Skyactive X®" technology, and the initial local ignition kicks up the pressure and temperature enough for the compression ignition to kick in.

Mazda is now has a car with this technology on the road:

Despite rumors to the contrary, the internal combustion engine is far from dead. Recently we've seen several technological advances that will significantly boost the efficiency of gasoline-powered engines. One of these, first reported back in August 2017, is Mazda's breakthrough with compression ignition. On Tuesday, Mazda invited us to its R&D facility in California to learn more about this clever new Skyactiv-X engine, but more importantly we actually got to drive it on the road.

The idea behind Skyactiv-X is to be able to run the engine with as lean a fuel-air mixture (known as λ) as possible. Because very lean combustion is cooler than a stoichiometric reaction (where λ=1 and there is exactly enough air to completely burn each molecule of fuel but no more), less energy is wasted as heat. What's more, the exhaust gases contain fewer nasty nitrogen oxides, and the unused air gets put to work. It absorbs the combustion heat and then expands and pushes down on the piston. The result is a cleaner, more efficient, and more powerful engine. And Skyactiv-X uses a very lean mix: a λ up to 2.5.

………

This is known as homogeneous charge compression ignition, or HCCI, an idea that Kyle Niemeyer covered in depth for us back in 2012. HCCI has some other advantages, too. On top of burning cooler and with fewer pollutants, the combustion event happens faster, with a higher pressure peak, so you get more work out of the same energy. All of that sounds pretty wonderful, so you're probably asking yourself why every gasoline engine on the road doesn't just use HCCI.

Unfortunately, it has been one of those ideas that worked in the lab but couldn't ever quite be translated into a production engine. The biggest problem has always been controlling exactly when during the engine cycle compression ignition occurred, something that you want as close to top-dead center as possible.

………

Obviously, this wasn't without challenges. The fuel:air mix needs to be a little richer near the spark for it to ignite than you want it to be throughout the rest of the cylinder. These need to be distinct regions to avoid λ dropping to 2 or below (which won't undergo compression ignition). That's achieved by swirling the air inside the cylinder and generating a vortex effect, where the calm center has a low enough λ to ignite by spark, surrounded by a high λ region that then undergoes compression ignition.

Mazda's next challenge was to prevent pre-ignition, or knock. Higher compression ratios increase the potential for knock, which is why higher compression ratio engines usually also require more expensive, higher octane fuel that is knock-resistant. Now, technically, compression ignition is knock, but if it occurs before you want it to—at top dead center—bad things can happen, because a combustion event will exert downward pressure on the piston as it's moving up on a compression stroke.

The solution here was to use less time to heat the fuel:air mix. There's a small initial injection of fuel at first, then the bulk of the fuel is introduced into the cylinder as late as possible during the compression stroke. This is done using multiple orifice injectors to increase atomization and mixing of fuel and air.

If all that wasn't enough, there's the added problem of keeping track of compression ignition. In the past, this has been one of the hardest problems for HCCI engines to solve. Ideally you want combustion to happen at the same point in the engine cycle each time—about four degrees after top dead center. But as ambient conditions change—a cold day in Denver versus a hot one in Houston—the time needed for the fireball to reach sufficient pressure also changes. So the engine ought to be able to change spark timing to keep the peak pressure at the right spot.

It's basically an ingenious use of the stratified charge engine to create an HCCI engine.

Neat.

How Not to Design Reasonably

One of the fails going around the internet is Juicero, which is selling a press to squeeze raw juices from its pouches into a cup.

This press recently had its price reduced to "only" $400, for a juicer.

What's more reporters at Bloomberg discovered that you could get about the same amount of juice from the pouches using the Mark 1 human hand.

Not bad for a company that has raised $120 million in VC funding  ……… For a juice squeezer.

After all of this product designer Ben Einstein did a a disassembly and a deep dive, and  he found a ridiculously over-designed mess.

The short version is that there is a press using a custom motor and custom gear train, a half dozen machined aluminum parts which drives an aluminum plate against the pouch to uniformly apply pressure.

Einstein inventoried the following:

• An extremely complex plastic molding, including co-molded parts.
• A heavy custom machined aluminum frame.
• A custom power supply.
• Massive custom hinges on the door.
• Custom sliders.
• A very robust custom gearbox.  
• Etc.

Looking at this problem, I immediately have a better way of doing things.

I could make a prototype using an off the shelf aquarium pump for less than $100 in in parts.  (It would work like the so called "Neat Squeeze" toothpaste tube), or do something similar with a store bought pasta maker retailing for $29.99.

That took me all of 15 minutes to think about it.

This is all of Silicon Valley dysfunction in a squeezable pouch.

If I am Sounding a Bit Incoherent, It's Because I am a Bit Incoherent

Major deadline at work, and I put in 14 hours today.

I got everything done that I needed to do today, but I am completely knackered.

Tomorrow should be fascinating. (Not snarking here)

More on That Zeppo Thing

Basically, I was trying to come up with a way of holding two things together that would allow for simple installation and removal of a payload on top of a mast.

After coming up with a number of rather ugly potential solutions, I remembered that Zeppo (Herbert) Marx had developed a clamp in his post showbiz career as an Engineer and manufacturer, developing the Marman Clamp^* (pictured), which found extensive use as a stage separation mechanism in space craft in addition to securing the "Fat Man" inside the B-29 "Bock's Car" when it dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

The clamp, plus a couple of pins for alignment, and I had a solution that was clean, dirt cheap, robust, and nearly soldier proof.^†

Needless to say, I am feeling rather smug about this.

^*It appears that Zeppo did not invent the clamp, but rather he was the one to bring it to mass production.

^†Nothing can be made soldier proof. It simply can be made somewhat soldier resistant.

Could My Relatives Please Confirm Who Sent Which T-Shirt?

OK, I know that Dad sent me this, because it came with gummy worms:


But who sent me this one?


Sometimes, Chanukah is confusing.

Huh, Neat Tech

It appears that machining titanium at cryogenic temperatures extends tool life:

Cryogenic titanium machining improves cutting-tool life by a factor of 10 with appropriate material removal processing speed. The Joint Program Office in coordination with the F-35 Fracture Control Board (FCB) approved the new process for standard roughing operations, impacting the most time-consuming and cost-intensive machining processes associated with manufacturing titanium parts. Broadly applied, this new technology could improve affordability and efficiency in the production of the F-35, which is approximately 25 percent titanium by weight.

My guess would that this generates smaller chips, that it might prevent material from adhering (galling, welding, etc.) to the tools, and it might slow the formation of an oxide coating, but I'd love to hear the theory behind it.

I would make an observation here:  If you have an aircraft that is 25% by weight titanium, you have a very expensive aircraft.

It's Been a Weird Year for the Auto Industry

Play them off, Jon Stewart

With the recall of more than 6½ million to repair a sticky accelerator pedal, Toyota's sales fell by 47% from December, and 16% year over year, which was enough for both Ford and GM outsell to outsell the Japanese car firm.

Of course, we now know that it's not just accelerator pedals, but also the brakes on its Prius hybrid, where it appears to be a software issue that creates unsteady breaking in the interplay between regenerative and mechanical braking.

It may not be any consolation to the Toyoda family, but Ford just rolled out a software update for its hybrid vehicles:

Ford Motor Co. announced Thursday that it will ask owners of its Ford Fusion Hybrid and Mercury Milan Hybrids sedan to bring their car into their Ford dealer to replace software that operates the car's braking system.

While the cars maintain full braking ability, Ford said, drivers may occasionally experience a strange feeling in the brakes under certain circumstances.

So the latest problems may be an artifact of the move to "drive by wire" technologies for hybrid vehicles, you pretty much have to, because managing the battery/engine balance cannot be done manually by the driver.

In any case, the juxtaposxition of glitches in software and automotive hardware, it seems appropriate to invoke the proven to be false by Snopes joke:

At a computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release (by Mr. Welch himself) stating:

---

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuver such as a left-turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, and you would have to reinstall the engine.
4. When your car died on the freeway for no reason, you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought 'Car95' or 'CarNT', and then added more seats.
6. Apple would make a car powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five per cent of the roads.
7. Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single 'general car default' warning light.
8. New seats would force every-one to have the same size butt.
9. The airbag would say 'Are you sure?' before going off.
10. Occasionally, for no reason, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of road maps from Rand-McNally (a subsidiary of GM), even though they neither need them nor want them. Trying to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You would press the 'start' button to shut off the engine.

Everything old is weird again.

Bad Ideas: Combining Nuclear Power With Explosive Metals

I understand that there advantages to Sodium cooled reactors, particularly the fact that, because of the small cross section of the nucleus of Sodium, you can get a much more complete burn with fewer waste products, but that the Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor Prototype Development, memorandum of understanding (MOU) will lead nowhere.

The U.S Department of Energy (DOE), the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) have expanded cooperation to coordinate Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor Prototype development through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The MOU establishes a collaborative framework with the ultimate goal of deploying sodium-cooled fast reactor prototypes. A sodium-cooled fast reactor uses liquid sodium to transfer heat, burning the plutonium and other transuranic elements in the process producing clean, safe nuclear power, less waste and increasing non-proliferation goals.

This makes the Hindenberg look like a cap gun.

Liquid Sodium explodes on contact with air.

NTSB: Design Flaw Caused Minnesota Bridge Collapse

The NTSB has determined that the gusset plate were under-size for the structure.

The interesting thing is that this is below spec for the 1960s, when the bridge was constructed. Since then, with more sophisticated analysis tools, the safety factors on designs have gotten smaller.

Yes, It's a Cheap Pun, but that's a Weakeness of Mine

Well, it appears that the corrosive properties of pigeon excrement may have contributed to the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

To quote noted Internet wit Bladesmith, "Like I said elsewhere, it's all fun and games till the shit hits the span".

Sigh, someone else who writes better than I do.