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Cake day: September 28th, 2023

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  • The Idaho researchers observed that reversing the intrinsic angular momentum, or “spin,” of thorium-229’s outermost neutron seemed to take 10,000 times less energy than a typical nuclear excitation. The neutron’s altered spin slightly changes both the electromagnetic and strong forces, but those changes happen to cancel each other out almost exactly. Consequently, the excited nuclear state barely differs from the ground state. Lots of nuclei have similar spin transitions, but only in thorium-229 is this cancellation so nearly perfect.

    Basically, thorium-229 can be excited by conventional lasers instead of gamma rays. Instead of millions of electron volts, it takes less than 10, which means it’s more reliable and more precise.


  • You’re saying that data centers are replacing batteries constantly…just imagine the labor costs on that (and the down time), not even considering the material cost.

    I’m the tech doing the battery replacements. The big boy UPSes are typically a 3-5 year replacement cycle. Something like this:

    (I just picked the last one on my phone so not a great picture, they’re about the size of a small refrigerator)

    On rack mount and desktop style UPSes 18-36 months isn’t unreasonable. Some of the smaller UPSes, like APC 750s, go through batteries even faster. My personal theory is that they just get and stay too hot.

    There is typically zero downtime while servicing any of them, every critical system has redundant power supply and battery replacements usually don’t interrupt power output anyway. It would take multiple failures to cause any sort of significant downtime, and if it would, we just do them during scheduled downtime.