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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

Always a treat to read something by Charles Stross. Seems like Accelerando was required reading for the previous generation, is it still? I was not familiar with the UK advanced gas cooled reactors, which use CO2 to cool the core and transfer heat to the steam. From the name it seems to be gas and not supercritical CO2 although I may have that wrong.

Power generation is the one topic that makes thermodynamics crystal clear imo. Energy goes into steam, steam does work, lowering the steam temperature and pressure, heating and cooling at different point can increase efficiency. It’s a topic I wish I’d have learned about sooner!

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My old man was a Navy nuke turned instrument tech at Three Mile Island... he can go on and on about steam tables.

I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building (that Unit 2), staring at the humongous, partially-disassembled turbine (they may have replaced it that year), spotlighting deer at the end of the island. I also remember a very strange feeling while listening to radiation monitors go crazy when the spent fuel was being removed... if you walked a few dozen feet past the warning tape you were probably dead.

Great anecdotes - only on HN. Cheers for sharing.

I'm getting flashbacks of the engineering problems I had to solve at school with all this talk of steam look up tables. Not sure if its enjoyable or suppression nostalgia :)

I fell asleep in Thermo 1 on the day the professor taught us to read steam tables. I never did get many of those problems right, even though I did my engineering co-ops at power plants.

Hey, maybe you can share something about the Three Mile Island accident.

I read somewhere that during the accident some insects were irradiated. One of the irradiated spiders later bit a man and that man mutated to be able to walk on walls, like a spider.

Do you know anything about this?

I think I saw a documentary about this.

The Marvel research institute has a whole series about it.

I was very disappointed when I finally learned how a nuclear power plant worked because I assumed there was some really cool way to turn nuclear energy into electricity (apparently this is still challenging to do at power plant scale).

RTGs are even more hilariously stupid simple. They are literally just lump of radioactive material that is slowly decaying by itself and heating a thermocouple, producing electricity. No moving parts, no complicated reactor chambers and systems, no nothing.

edit: fissile -> radioactive

Yeah, I was ameliorated when I learned about RTGs, since they're solid state but it's still heat based. I assumed if you knew how to split that atom that somehow magically meant you could also convert it to electron current.

RTGs use alpha decay, not fission.

Accelerando is my all-time-favorite Sci Fi book. I read it twice now and will again in the near future. I'm 36 year old. I hope more people read this book.

It is really not my own favourite of the books I've written, though. (If you want to understand why, you might enjoy The Rapture of the Nerds -- my two-fer with Cory Doctorow, revisiting the same themes a decade later from a rather more tongue-in-cheek, not to say skeptical, direction.)

Supercritical is the state of the CO2 gas. Smoothly intermediate from a regular gas to a liquid.

The coolant in these reactors would not normally be considered supercritical as its pressure (2.66 MPa max) is well below its critical pressure (7.38 MPa.)

https://www.eolss.net/Sample-Chapters/C08/E3-06-02-05.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_carbon_dioxide

I read "The Fountainhead" at age 18 and was marvelled by it. I even quoted bits of Howard Roark's speeches on second-handers. I re-read it at age 25 and, uh, it's a really bad novel built around a couple of awesome "yas queen" kind of put-down rants.

I feel the same about Accelerando. At one point I was in a clubbing phase and always took my paperback in my jacket pockets. Then, I never fully read it a second time because I can't get through Annette Benning, and I remember the flock of birds stuff at the end.

The linked text is pretty good, but Stross thinks too highly of himself re: his knowledge of science, and he presents his politics in a way that mildly annoys people who don't agree with his politics. Also, Accelerando ages as badly as Ayn Rand.

Accelerando is geek bait. His best work is the Laundry series which he's still working on.

Disclaimer: no idea what his opinion of his work is.

The Laundry Files: never has the end of the world been so entertaining.

I personally liked the Eschaton stuff but he pretty firmly rebuked himself there.

My opinion? I began writing the stories that turned into Accelerando in 1998, largely to keep myself from having a work-induced nervous breakdown during the dot-com bubble. I finished it in 2003/04. It's journeyman work, and I like to think I'm both a better writer and a deeper/broader thinker than I was back then: it's no masterpiece, and I'm a little embarrassed by its staying power among the folks here.

For what it's worth, I think you're being a bit hard on yourself - the exuberance and density of ideas of Accelerando make it a good read.

Also, while I'm at it - I don't know how many times I've read A Colder War but the ending still gives me the creeps.

"Accelerando" is an awesome name, and it came on the scene just as the "exponential pace!" thing was going on in the zeitgeist.

I feel like you want to move beyond being the "Accelerando guy". You have my best wishes on that.

Personally I'm a fan of Glasshouse.

I think of Accelerando sort of the same way I think of Snowcrash. They're both just avalanches of mind candy barely contained by enough thin narrative to pretend they're novels.

They're both incredibly fun reads, but awful fiction. Both authors got significantly better at the craft with practice, although one of them still seems to have an ideological aversion to endings.

Indeed on Stross lacking humility. His recent post where he talked about COVID was pretty rife with inaccuracies and assumptions, which is fine, but he presented them with this unbridled level of certainty that simply isn't available in the data.

I've grown to tire over the "certain" people trying to analyze the science in this pandemic, on both "sides". (If you force it into a binary framing, it's the "holy shit this is bad" side and the "holy shit you guys are overreacting" side, both of whom have loud nutbags who are too confident in their assumptions.)

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