AnyOldName3

That’s definitely something that gets listed as an advantage of The Digital Euro, and something that you can’t do with Visa (although you can with PayPal), so if expect that Taler supports it.

Even accounting for disasters, coal power puts more radionuclides into the environment into the environment than nuclear for the same amount of energy. If you dig lots of stuff up and spew it all into the air, the small amount of radioactive material that’s in coal and the rocks around it is much bigger than the tiny amounts of nuclear fuel a nuclear power plant gets through. If the only concern is radiation that persists on geological timescales, then swapping all coal for nuclear is an improvement. Other things that release surprising amounts of radiation include making things out of granite (it’s usually got uranium in) and importing bananas and Brazil nuts.

If it’s changes on a geological timescale in general, then as fossil fuels form on a geological timescale (the clue’s in the name), digging them up is going to take unfathomable amounts of time to undo. It won’t even be as quick as the first time around, as most coal formed before ligninase evolved, so trees fell over and didn’t rot and usually became coal, buy they’re biodegradable now so need specific fossilisation-friendly conditions to become coal.

That problem isn’t unique to nuclear. It wouldn’t be newsworthy if a worn-out wind turbine blade was incinerated unsafely, and that’s something that happens routinely and is much more damaging than dumping this quantity (about a beer crate full) of depleted uranium. The reason we’re hearing about this incident is that the nuclear industry is held to a much higher standard than anything else in the energy sector. There are good reasons for that - the worst case scenario for a single fuckup is much worse - but a lot of it is just fear-mongering by fossil fuel companies who needed to lie to make something seem more dangerous than what they do, even before climate change was recognised.

Nuclear is so much better than fossil fuels that even if we cut every corner and accepted a Chernobyl-scale indicent would happen a couple of times a year, it’d still be preferable over the gradual phase out of fossil fuels and resulting climate crisis we’re on track for.

I was meaning that the blade count and detachability was the difference in definition between turboprop and propfan/open turbofan, not that it was necessarily the thing making the engine more efficient.

I’ve seen turboprops in museums and on the internet with around six or eight blades. When I looked on the Wikipedia page for propfan engines, which seems to be another name for an open turbofan, the distinction seemed to be mainly how the blades were shaped (like propellor blades or turbine blades) and how tightly-integrated everything is (you can swap the propeller out on a turboprop).

How many blades do you have to add to a turboprop before it’s promoted to an open turbofan and touted as a major new innovation?