Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33896110/tiny-nuclear-reactor-government-approval/ <comment><USER2> Here is the NRC website about this reactor:

[https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new- reactors/smr/nuscale.html](https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new- reactors/smr/nuscale.html)

Here is an interesting sub-report:

[https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2022/ML20224A525.pdf](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2022/ML20224A525.pdf)

Information withheld for security reasons. One item concerns the "ultimate heat sink". What happens when the ultimate heat sink is lost?

Well a design assumption is that it is not lost:

[https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2020/ML20205L410.pdf](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2020/ML20205L410.pdf)

"A key assumption of the PRA is the availability of the UHS to provide an adequate heat sink. To support passive heat removal with the DHRS or ECCS, the reactor modules are housed and partially submerged in the UHS such that most of the outer surface of the CNV directly contacts the UHS, which is a large pool of water in the reactor building (RXB). "

DHRC is decay heat. CNV is reactor containment vessel. So drain the pool and the reactor is in trouble.

<comment><USER3> Nuclear engineer here. I've read through a good portion of the regulatory submission to the NRC and have a few takeaways that oppose some of the less- well-informed takes in this thread:

\- The reactor differs substantially from existing PWRs by encasing the primary in double containment, using natural circulation flow for both normal operation and emergency cooling. There are no pumps needed (or installed) to move coolant through the reactor.

\- During normal operation, the primary is entirely contained within the primary containment, and circulates naturally, using the differential temperature and gravity. The steam system can is used to remove heat.

\- During an emergency, valves open to admit the reactor coolant into the backup containment. These valves are normally held shut by hydraulics with positive control from electronics-- their failure mode is to open with no other operator action in case of a loss of power. No additional operator action is needed to initiate the emergency cooling flow, which is _also_ a natural circulation loop to the backup containment shell, which then conducts heat to the pool.

\- The backup containment shell is designed to withstand hydrogen explosions such as those that occurred at Fukushima, and which was possibly prevented at Three Mile Island by venting (whether there was a hydrogen explosion at TMI-2 is not fully understood).

\- There is no mechanism for positive reactivity addition via graphite moderator rod such as in the Chernobyl design. The specific failure mode at Chernobyl is not possible with this reactor.

\- The pool is specified as a stainless-steel-lined reinforced concrete and designed to withstand earthquakes. The safety systems are such that no reactor electricity supply is needed to remove heat-- the pool could be filled e.g. from a fire truck, and the immediate decay heat from shutdown does not require any additional heat removal or water addition. So the failure mode we saw at Fukushima (inability to remove decay heat due to loss of electricity) and hydrogen explosion breaching containment does not apply to this design.

<comment><USER4> So it _requires_ gravity. It may seem trivial, but how would this thing react if suddenly not mounted vertically, say if it got knocked onto its side while running? Would coolant still flow as planned?

<comment><USER5> Anything that knocks a fully functional multiple thousands of tonnes of concrete, steel, water and fissile material onto it's side was already going to fuck up your day.

As far as I'm aware we've never had a nuclear reactor go sideways, and it's kinda ludicrous to even ask. It's one of the most massive structures, built on bedrock because it's too heavy to be built on anything else, and even these "small" reactors will be incredibly heavy.

<comment><USER4> They are vertical cylinders to be suspended vertically in a pool of water, not massive squat objects sitting on bedrock. They are thin and relatively top- heavy. It is not ludicrous to ask what could happen should they not remain as vertical as designed.

From a planning perspective, if verticality is a requirement then that verticality has to be protected as strongly as any other aspect. Any attachment or mounting points that maintain verticality must therefore be earthquake proof. If, as in the pictures, these reactors are held in place from the top, horizontal shaking from even a small earthquake would put massive strain on that joint. It isn't just the long/thin/heavy reactor but all the water sloshing around too. A super-strong joint and maybe something important bends/breaks under load? A flexible joint to allow the reactor to sway? Sway how much? What happens at the travel limit of the joint? Can we risk the reactor contracting its neighbours? These are not trivial engineering questions.

<comment><USER6> I think they are not trivial but relatively easy parts of the design. I'm sure they can design support structure to withstand whatever arbitrarily large earthquake you throw at it. The structure doesn't need to be particularly light or compact so there shouldn't be any design constraints getting in the way of strength. The heat transfer problem is much much harder and they've already solved that apparently.

<comment><USER4> I;m not saying it is impossible, just interesting. One option could be to suspend these reactors on cables from above. That might let them swing around all they want during even a huge quake. The water would act as the dampener. Not much extra engineering required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's disingenuous to argue the economics of nuclear without mentioning:

"DOE reported that it faced an estimated $494 billion in future environmental cleanup costs — a liability that roughly tripled during the previous 20 years."

[https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/696956.pdf](https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/696956.pdf)

<comment><USER8> This is IMO a positive for nuclear, not a negative. You're forced to confront the cleanup as opposed to fossil fuels, where you just blow your waste out into the atmosphere and make it the commons' problem.

<comment><USER7> If only a method for permanent disposal of nuclear waste actually existed.

<comment><USER9> We could dump it into the ocean and not worry about it. There's so much cooling capacity and radiation shielding in the oceans alone that we'd never run out of space, so all of the current disposal strategies are way above and beyond what's needed. Containment is solved problem.

It's important to note that other energy types also produce waste. For example, coal ash is incredibly toxic and hard to dispose of, and we create much more of it every year.

<comment><USER10> Another option which is completely safe and permanent* is drilling a borehole few km down and dumping the waste there. It's not coming back no matter what. The research done into it shows that "only" 800 boreholes would be required to store literally all nuclear waste ever produced.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal)

*to a point where it was actually brought up as a negative, because if we ever wanted to recycle that waste into something else, it's literally impossible this way.

<comment><USER11> There's one in Finland:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository)

They have thought thousands of years ahead and set up many different types of warning signs and symbols in case a future civilization discovers it.

<comment><USER12> No, they put zero warnings. Warnings only make it more likely that someone decides to start digging.

<comment><USER13> The idea that civilisation collapses and then recovers to the specific extent, where it is advanced enough to have coal-mines or similar, but not to know about radiation. Then it must find this particular repository and start digging, and die. Thousands of years must pass but they must dig up this sight withing a particular 100-year period of their development.

This is such a stupidly contrives scenario that you might as well plan for an alien incasion or zombie apocalypse. Lime prerequisite for that theory is civilisation collapsing, our investment in making sirebcovilisation does not xollapse is zero. You deal with it by making sure civilisation does not collapse.

<comment><USER14> Then they will know about radiation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is huge. Not only are micro reactors far more economical, it dramatically reduces the need to maintain a massive nationwide grid and provides flexibility to people in remote areas including greater autonomy. Efficiency should be greater without massive transmission line losses. Might start fewer fires in California too.

<comment><USER16> I'm not an expert, but I'm not convinced about it reducing the need to maintain a nationwide grid.

Nuclear reactors take ages to ramp up and down. It's basically going to be generating the same amount of power 24x7, but demand is going to fluctuate. The more other areas you're connected to, the more opportunity there is to send that power to someone who can use it.

Obviously there's a law of diminishing returns at some point, so maybe the grid doesn't need to be as large as possible.

There are alternatives like energy storage (batteries, etc.), but you'd have to compare all the costs and benefits.

<comment><USER17> Nukes are slow from a cold start but they can throttle up and down with load.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Nuc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants)

 _Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5% /minute slope._

<comment><USER16> Wow, that's pretty fast. So 12 minutes worst case. TIL.

Still, I wonder if the economics don't favor running near 100%. You've already paid the high up-front cost of the equipment, and fuel costs are low, so I assume you're better off selling excess power when possible.

<comment><USER18> Of course. Though with increasing deployment of intermittent sources like wind and solar, occasionally the wholesale price can drop lower than the marginal cost of the nuclear plant (or even negative, if said power sources receive production subsidies regardless of the wholesale price), in which case it makes sense to throttle down.

Future grids with more intermittent renewables will have increasingly volatile prices, but not necessarily lower on average. So generators that can produce during high price periods (e.g. if wind and solar aren't producing much) can make a lot of money then, compensating for less income during low price periods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Four links down: _" The staff has determined that the plant design meets the applicable requirements for the design certification stage of licensing. ... The NRC staff's issuance of this FSER does not constitute a commitment to issue the design certification"_[1] The actual review document is not up yet; search for "ML20023A318".

It's not that this is smaller. It's comparable to Shippingport or Vallecitos. The argument is that it's safe enough against meltdowns not to need a full containment vessel, which makes it cheaper. The idea is to have a group of these sharing the same reactor pool. What they do if there's a leak into the cooling pool. Does that take down all the reactors?

Anyway, the plan is to build the first one at the Idaho Reactor Test Station, 830 square miles with reactors spread miles apart. If something bad happens there, it's not a major problem.

[1] [https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2023/ML20231A804.pdf](https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2023/ML20231A804.pdf)

<comment><USER20> > If something bad happens there, it's not a major problem.

Well, unless you're in Idaho like some of us. ;-)

<comment><USER19> The whole point of having 830 square miles of reactor test station is to keep the problem on the property if something goes wrong. See the SL-1 disaster. It happened there, but nobody outside the test station was affected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you have 20 minutes, the video linked in the comments of the earlier HN post is quite informative, giving a much better technical explanation than the original article: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gtog_gOaGQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gtog_gOaGQ)

It is fascinating, for example, how a slight change in the packaging of the fuel (as sand-sized pellets coated with carbon) affects the safety/stability of the design, and how resonances in the cross section for neutron absorption come into play (they broaden at higher temperatures, dampening rather than enhancing the overall reaction speed, as temperatures rise).

</comment><comment><USER22> One thing not addressed is physical security. As pointed out by @adrianmonk it would take many of these tiny reactors to generate the same amount as a typical older reactor.

Older reactors are designed like fortresses, supposedly able to take a direct hit by a commercial jet and survive. They have armed guards, etc.

It would be interesting to see how they would try to protect these. Typical electrical substations are protected by a chain-link fence and a padlock.

<comment><USER18> The idea is to put multiple reactors at the same site, not to spread out mini reactors all over the landscape.

So the end result would be a powerplant that produces about as much power as a "normal" nuclear power plant, just that it contains many small reactors instead of a few big ones.

<comment><USER23> This undermines some of the claimed benefits. A bunch of little Fukushima Daiichi reactors in the same location wouldn't have fared any better than the actual Fukushima Daiichi reactor.

<comment><USER18> In this particular case, a power plant with these nuscale reactors would probably have survived a Fukushima type accident. One effect of being small is that the reactors are designed to be passively cooled after shutdown, using convection instead of pumped flow. So there is no need for emergency diesel generators to keep the coolant pumps running.

<comment><USER23> Sure, it's safer for reactors to tolerate flooding, if indeed these reactors actually do tolerate flooding. Definitely that would be a better design in flood/tsunami-prone areas. No design (from history, _especially_ no reactor design) is perfect. A set of smaller reactors that were _not_ co-located would be more tolerant of site-specific vulnerabilities in their design.

<comment><USER24> > ... if indeed these reactors actually do tolerate flooding

The reactor modules are partially immersed in a pond, the ultimate heat sink. Cooling is passive, i.e., no cooling pumps, and does not require electrical power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Article gave absolutely no indication of its dimensions. How "tiny" is it exactly?

<comment><USER16> Maybe tiny refers to the power output. The article says it makes 50 megawatts.

Compare that to a nuclear plant near me which has two reactors that each generate 1280 megawatts.

So it would take about 25 of these to equal the power output of a traditional nuclear reactor.

<comment><USER26> Yes but it's inherently safer. Utility scale nuclear was scaled up from naval reactors which are smaller, use highly enriched uranium as opposed to LEU and are safer. Alvin Weinberg, the father of several LWR designs cautioned about the safety of utility scale reactors (17:51):

[https://youtu.be/EviEN0ScOwg](https://youtu.be/EviEN0ScOwg)

The NuScale design also uses LEU and a plant is comprised of up to 12 of these modules sitting in water pools. You can view it as a battery pack where batteris are continously rotated as they are refuelled.

<comment><USER18> To nitpick, some naval reactors are designed to use LEU. E.g. French submarines run on 7% enriched fuel. And reportedly Chinese subs also use LEU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As a huge fan of nuclear power, I never felt like NuScale style 'SMR' were all that great of an idea.

Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory construction and that you can start small and scale a location, but on the other side you lose that again because you lose the economics of scale that traditional PWR gets.

I really believe we should be a nuclear society by now, and that regulations both around reactors and fuel availability prevented this from happening. In the 1960 lots and lots of innovative reactors were build, often with relatively low budgets at that. The amount of untapped potential in nuclear energy is incredible. We don't need fusion, fission is plenty energy dense, if we can't figure out how to make fission practical, we want with fusion either.

Yet here we are in the year 2020 and we are still building new PWR reactors. But the reality is, in the US it is essentially impossible to build anything else. Regulations are designed so that the only reactor that can really get approval is a PWR.

If you attempt to build anything new, you have to basically pay the government to study your design and after a unknown amount of time and money, the government might develop a new regulatory framework. By the time that happens of course you have run out of money already, no buissness plan that depends on the government figuring out how to regulate a new type of reactor would ever really happen.

The good thing at least is that the DoE in the last 5 years seem to have realized that their whole approach was a problem and they have done a lot of good things to try to change. Outside of the US the energy sector is government controlled or to small for a nuclear reactor startup to have a large enough market to make a new reactor worth it.

Canada has established itself as basically the only viable place for new reactor development, with Terrestrial Energy and Moltex Energy (moved from Britain to Canada because regulation).

So, good luck to NuScale, I hope they can prove me wrong and deploy many of these in an economical way.

<comment><USER28> >Yes, it gains you some of the economics of factory construction and that you can start small and scale a location, but on the other side you lose that again because you lose the economics of scale that traditional PWR gets.

You mean they lose operational efficiency ? Economies of scale come from the ability to mass produce.

You forgot to mention the largest differentiator - eliminates the possibility of a global catastrophe.

<comment><USER29> Not in nuclear they haven't historically. Economies of scale drove light water reactor designs from tens of megawatts to hundreds to over a thousand universally from all vendors around the world historically. The big institutional nuclear economics reports all agree that going big improves nuclear economics. The hypothesis that SMRs will somehow overpower this is popular but is very much unproven. This agrees with OECD reports like last month's [1] and all the older ones listed in [2].

[1] [http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2020/7530-reducing-cost- nuc...](http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2020/7530-reducing-cost-nuclear- construction.pdf)

[2] [https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern- nu...](https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html#improving-modern-nuclear- power-economics)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Previous Discussion 2 days ago

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345288)

<comment><USER31> Yikes - that is a classic example of a post that accumulated lots of upvotes but stayed underwater the whole time: [http://hnrankings.info/24345288/](http://hnrankings.info/24345288/). This is a known problem and it's on our list to fix.

Since that story didn't get much attention (relative to the interest in it), we won't call the current thread a dupe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "The design is based on Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor developed at Oregon State University in the early 2000s. NuScale is a natural circulation light water reactor with the reactor core and helical coil steam generators located in a common reactor vessel in a cylindrical steel containment. The reactor vessel containment module is submerged in water in the reactor building safety related pool, which is also the ultimate heat sink for the reactor. The pool portion of the reactor building is located below grade. The reactor building is designed to uphold 12 SMRs. Each NuScale SMR has a rated thermal output of 160 MWt and electrical output of 50 MWe, yielding a total capacity of 600 MWe for 12 SMRs."

</comment><comment><USER33> Amazing how many people in this thread don't understand nuclear and are spouting rampant fear mongering. Nuclear is fundamentally a safe technology, and these new reactors are safer than anything before. Think about how many deaths have actually been caused because of nuclear compared to coal power. The difference is dramatic.

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't understand what makes small reactors desirable. Don't you loose economies of scales, not only production, but also demand (ie if you have small local sources of electricity you miss the diversification of the demand you have in the central grid and you need to overprovision a lot more)?

<comment><USER35> > Don't you loose economies of scales

On the contrary, you gain economies of scale. The way the economies of scale work is if you build n identical widgets, it costs you less than n times the cost of building one single widgets. In other words the unit cost of a widget goes down as the number of produced widgets increases.

If you want to produce a bigger widget though, you generally have diseconomies of scale. For example the Saturn V rocket was about 20 times bigger than the Titan 2 rocket (from which it was derived) but cost about 60 times more.

So, if a Gigawatt-size nuclear power plant is too expensive to build, you build 20 plants of 50 MW each. This is how you achieve economies of scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> How is nuclear compatible with variable renewable energy sources? It can't ramp up or down quickly, so it's not good for filling the gaps in the day when the sun is not shining. And solar is now so cheap during sunny days that the excess power is curtailed or at a negative price.

<comment><USER37> Nuclear can operate in load following mode for a long time now. It's already done in Europe.

[https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea- news-29-2-lo...](https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea- news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is Bill Gates an investor in NuScale? Or am I thinking of another modular reactor startup in the PNW?

<comment><USER39> Bill Gates is involved with TerraPower, the other PNW based nuclear startup

<comment><USER38> Thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Thinking about the cooling pool:

Could you just make an off-shore in-ocean "farm" of these?

<comment><USER41> > Could you just make an off-shore in-ocean "farm"

Not! Ocean is inherently unstable!.

The first serious storm would dislodge and damage the whole farm crashing one module against the other before to vomit them in the shore. Some modules just would dissapear.

And then you have a humongous environmental damage and a really expensive rescue problem trying to clean the fragmented mess.

<comment><USER40> AFAIK, put em deep enough - which isn't that deep - and you're basically fine? It's why subs (AFAIK) DGAF about storms.

Mutual impact issue sounds pretty resolvable with a big steel frame and the like.

<comment><USER41> You will have still many deep currents that shouldn't be underestimated. Is not so simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > _The current design, which still has several steps until it can be > constructed in the wild, is for 50 megawatts per module. NuScale seeks to > apply for a 60-megawatt version next._

I'm very impressed by that output. It will make a difference with areas of high solar and wind generation, which can't maintain a sustained high duty cycle.

I expect these types of reactors to be in places to _augment_ solar and wind, not replace it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Have they announced an estimate of how much a reactor/cost of energy production will be? That's kind of the most important factor, isn't it?

<comment><USER44> $0.24 per kwh is a rough estimate I've seen for NuScale. Typically initial costs for microreactors right now are around $0.25 to $0.30/kwh which is about the cost of energy created by diesel generators. Natural gas is much lower. However they hope that as we make a lot of them the cost will drop.

<comment><USER45> Wow. That's substantially more expensive than I was expecting. It's been years but we always assumed ~$0.08/KWh for on-site natural gas generated electricity on US based projects.

<comment><USER46> I wonder how much more would that be if the median carbon-tax proposal was added?

<comment><USER45> We did some calcs to that effect since we were operating in Australia, and they had a $25/ton carbon tax at the time. If my memory serves, it would increase natural gas costs by ~25%. So it'd likely still be right around $0.10/KWh.

Actually I take that back - our calcs were all based on ~$4/mmBTU gas but I just looked and gas prices have been below $3/mmBTU for years. So $0.08/KWh is probably a worst case even if we had a reasonable carbon tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I don't know why they are bothering to try and build this in the US. Between the insane regulations, the anti-nuclear lobby, and the NIMBYs, they don't stand a chance.

Surely they would have a much easier time selling things like that elsewhere? Growing nations would probably love reliable power that could be plonked down off a ship and added to incrementally.

</comment><comment><USER48> The ratio of the weight of the reactor assembly for these reactors to their power is about an order of magnitude worse than the similar ratio (using weight of the reactor vessel + pressurizer + steam generators) of a conventional PWR. How is this going to be competitive?

I understand they've given up on making that part themselves in a factory of their own, btw.

</comment><comment><USER49> Things are always different when deployed, I want to see how it performs before real world before getting excited.

</comment><comment><USER50> From the article: "In the event of any runaway reactor event, NuScale says, the reactor quenches itself in its pool, making it 'passively safe.'"

So what happens when an earthquake causes a rupture of the pool barrier and all the water leaks out?

<comment><USER51> This is a solved problem. Tokyo is a good example.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake- resistant_structure...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake- resistant_structures)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> NRC Release: [https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc- collections/news/2020/20-...](https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc- collections/news/2020/20-043.pdf)

<comment><USER31> Also [https://apnews.com/910766c07afd96fbe2bd875e16087464](https://apnews.com/910766c07afd96fbe2bd875e16087464)

edit: and [https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/first-modular- nuclea...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/first-modular-nuclear- reactor-design-certified-in-the-us/), via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345288)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I was looking for a reference to the physical size of the reactor and couldn't find it. The sites only say "smaller". Any links with size info and requirements for containing infrastructure?

</comment><comment><USER54> If you build one of these things don't you also need to build an impervious shell around them so they can't be attacked? I have read that the existing reactors can withstand air crash impacts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER55> fyi, OSU college has a 1-megawatt research reactor.

[https://www.oregon.gov/energy/facilities- safety/facilities/P...](https://www.oregon.gov/energy/facilities- safety/facilities/Pages/OSU.aspx)

[https://www.corvallisadvocate.com/2012/got-nuke-state-of- the...](https://www.corvallisadvocate.com/2012/got-nuke-state-of-the-osu- reactor/)

<comment><USER16> The University of Texas at Austin has a 1-megawatt nuclear reactor:

[https://nuclear.engr.utexas.edu/netl/triga- reactor](https://nuclear.engr.utexas.edu/netl/triga-reactor)

BUT... it also has two 74-megawatt gas turbines that supply the campus with electricity and steam:

[https://utilities.utexas.edu/chp/about-carl-j-eckhardt- combi...](https://utilities.utexas.edu/chp/about-carl-j-eckhardt-combined- heating-and-power-complex)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Aren't BIG nuclear plants with universal distribution system BETTER from security/safety/management perspective?

</comment><comment><USER57> Why is most important left out? So, power output 50MW ...

How long does one "charge" last?

What is the price of unit and per kWh?

What is the maintenance procedure?

How long is the life?

What after expiry?

</comment><comment><USER58> Fwiw, any nuclear reactor design in history was sold as 100% safe. In reality, shit happen. Contractors use subspec material, things on the building site get overlooked and inspectors miss things or get told to look away,

But hey, I'm sure, this time, it will be different. 100%.

<comment><USER59> Nothing is 100% safe, who said Nuclear power is? Nuclear power always has been and still is one of the safest ways to generate electrical power and this is what counts. Solar power for example causes a lot of fatalities due to accidents that happen during installation and has it's own environmental problems, yet nobody talks about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Great, we really need a way to produce massive amounts of green energy.

</comment><comment><USER61> What's keeping the nuclear fusion so long? It's much safer.

Can we use Thorium for now?

</comment><comment><USER62> So, what's the size of one of these tings?

small? how small is small?

Tiny? how tiny is tiny?

<comment><USER63> Each containment, vessel which produces 50MW of electric power, can fit on a truck. Each site might contain up to 12 separate reactors. That was basically the design constraint so the can be manufactured off site and shipped as one unit.

A regional power company might seek permitting at 10-20 locations. If some locations didn't get a permit or if other locations proved to be uneconomical to produce power at the time of construction, they could just build at the sites they chose. Basically takes the two phase pre-construction permitting and post-construction operating permit which has been killing nuclear power and streamlines it. Because the designs are standard and modular they will be pre-approved to operate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Best news I've heard in years.

</comment><comment><USER65> why do we bother with this junk when we have a very large fusion reaction that is located several million miles away from us & delivers it's energy to us in the form of photons every single day.

<comment><USER66> > every single day

As a California resident, I would like the option to run A/C after sunset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Finally, 1.21 gigawatts for my DeLorean.

</comment><comment><USER68> Boom!

</comment><comment><USER31> @natcombs would you mind emailing firstname.lastname@example.com? I'd like to suggest something so we can send you repost invites in the future.

</comment><comment><USER69> "Officially safe" is a hilarious term which tries to predict the possibility of an MCA or "Maximum Credible Accident." Of course, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were also "officially safe" when they were built.

<comment> core-questions What a bad faith post.

> Three Mile Island

Was handled reasonably well, resulted in safety improvements to procedures and designs for future reactors.

From [https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact- sheets/3...](https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile- isle.html#summary)

> The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are > estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 > millirem above the usual background dose. To put this into context, exposure > from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and the area's natural radioactive > background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year for the area. The > accident's maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been > less than 100 millirem above background.

Not exactly the end of the world.

> Chernobyl

Accident caused by Communists who did not care about what happened to Ukrainians, as usual for them, and experimented with something that any nuclear physicist could have told them was a terrible idea. This is like blaming vehicles and calling them unsafe after reaching over from the passenger seat and yanking the wheel to drive a truck into a crowd. The moral of the story here is to keep Communists away from anything important, which applies to farms, industrial sectors, food distribution, and really most things more complicated than a pitchfork or a torch.

> Fukushima

Was reasonably safe for its long life, but they cheaped out on the necessary wall and drainage functionality; should probably have been decomm'd and replaced before this happened.

The problem in the nuclear industry is that anti-nuclear people like you form public opinion that causes it to be difficult for it to move forward. New plants based on newer designs are orders of magnitude safer - e.g. the CANDU Canadian reactor which is more fail-safe than most, and the push towards 4th generation reactors.

Get out of the way and let the planet have a clean base load energy source, or be sitting here bitching about carbon footprints 50 years from now when it should be a solved problem already.

<comment><USER70> > Communists who did not care about what happened to Ukrainians

They didn't really care what happened to _anybody_, not just Ukrainians. Ukrainians (as well as about 30% of Russians) just happened to live in that particular location. The plume made it all the way to the Nordics and Germany, and I, as a kid, had to take iodine tablets in Russia, even though officially everything was "under control" for a few days. Then the narrative shifted to showing the heroism of the "liquidators", never fully acknowledging how dangerous any of this really was.

<comment> core-questions Good point, I agree entirely. It's clear that nuclear power needs to be under the control of responsible governments, built in safe locations (i.e. not on fault lines, not in tsunami zones), and needs solid maintenance budgets.

All of these things are solvable problems, but if we don't solve them before all the current nuclear plant techs age out, we won't be able to apprentice people and keep the culture of solid maintenance alive. At that point, they really do become an albatross.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Can someone refresh my memory?

Is generating electricity directly from the products of fission proven [mathematically] to be less efficient than

decay->steam->mechanical->electrical

or is just that the applied science of steam power is so far ahead of everything else?

My peace of mind would be much greater if the energy transfer went through solid state systems instead of a working fluid that is pretty good at carrying the bad products of a [malfunctioning] reactor.

<comment><USER72> The problem is heat. fission produces a ton of it and it has to go somewhere. Yes, you can absorb radiation thrown off by fission, but you still have the problem that heat will melt everything.

So you throw water (or salt) on the reactor, heat it up, and do work with the steam that is ultimately produced.

It has less to do with steam being the ideal route and more to do the the practicality of dealing with heat.

AFAIK, most reactors are closed loops anyways, so there's not much of an issue with water carrying away radioactive materials.

<comment><USER71> Most people are worried about the reactor transitioning to an open loop against the wishes of the maintainers.

But that's good info, thanks. Molten salt still has to heat transfer to steam because we don't have any thermovoltaics in the 50% efficient range.

I think I now understand that most of the heat comes from absorbing neutrons, which don't like to generate electricity (vs betavoltaics and gammavoltaics). And any device inside the pressure vessel would be altered by those neutrons, need to be accounted for as another source of decaying particles, and need to be replaced.

And/Or, you'd want a completely different reaction and then need a neutron generator capable of running continuously.

That about right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I was thinking Nuclear would be the stable baseline for renewable. But this is not a sustainable option. We need to enforce hydrogen.

Do not submit to the fallacy of nuclear waste disposal. First Elon needs to fix space travel and make transport into the sun feasible. And we will have iter by then.

<comment><USER74> Hydrogen is not a good (at the moment at least) source of energy or fuel for cars or industry (chemically speaking, obviously much better together with Deuterium and Tritium for fission, though we are still from such a technology). Steam reforming, which is currently the most common way of hydrogen production, uses natural gas and water and produces plenty of CO2 [1]. Nice summary as for cars fuel application here [2].

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production)

[2] [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MzFfuNOtY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MzFfuNOtY)

<comment><USER48> Hydrogen is an answer to the question "how do renewables serve 100% of the grid?". It enables renewables to cover that last 10% or so, and rare prolonged dark/calm periods, without excessive amounts of overcapacity or batteries.</comment></comment></comment>


Alleged founder of world's largest BitTorrent distribution site arrested - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/kickasstorrents-alleged-founder-artem-vaulin-arrested-in-poland/ <comment><USER3> ArsTechnica seems to have the most detailed and best linked (PDF + DoJ press release) article as of now:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2016/07/kickasstorrents-a...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2016/07/kickasstorrents-alleged-founder-artem-vaulin-arrested-in- poland/)

Somewhat more/complementary details seem to be available on: [https://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-kickasstorrents- domains-...](https://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-kickasstorrents-domains- charge-owner-160720/) — e.g. regarding methods:

 _[...] The complaint further reveals that the feds posed as an advertiser, which revealed a bank account associated with the site._

 _It also shows that Apple handed over personal details of Vaulin after the investigator cross-referenced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction with an IP-address that was used to login to KAT's Facebook account. [...]_

Some aspects which seem interesting to me, from what is reported:

• that apparently KAT owner tried to shield off DMCA takedown requests (which I'd see as trying to affirm being legal);

• that according to the articles he seems to not have used Tor (or fumbled in it).

(Assuming no parallel construction and that he's actually the guy, etc. etc.)

EDIT: I couldn't really find any Polish sources — suppose because it's middle of the night here... (the single article — [http://www.dobreprogramy.pl/Zalozyciel-Kickass-Torrents- zatr...](http://www.dobreprogramy.pl/Zalozyciel-Kickass-Torrents-zatrzymany- przez-polska-policje-chce-go-amerykanska-prokuratura,News,74921.html) — seems to be written based on the above English-language ones)

<comment><USER4> > investigator cross-referenced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction > with an IP-address that was used to login to KAT's Facebook account

The article implies that the investigator had a FB and iTunes IP address and THEN Apple gave the rest of the user's details but that doesn't really make sense.

I'm guessing that they gag-ordered and subpoenaed FB for account info, but how did the investigator get the iTunes transaction IP address prior to getting user details from Apple?

Edit:

I think the more likely scenario is that FB was forced to give up user details and the only valid info was the IP Address, and then Apple (and probably google etc.) was forced to search through their databases and produce any records related to the IP address in question.

Or maybe the USG has a database filled with iTunes transaction information -- I really wouldn't doubt this at all. I'm sure music is a partial indicator of "dissident" level in whatever algorithm is used to assist investigators.

<comment><USER5> The FBI found out his bank account information from buying ads. He probably bought something on iTunes and that would be sufficient for Apple to be given a search warrant for any data related to x IP address, billing info, email address, or name. Any identifying details they collected at that point.

Not hard to connect the pieces once you have a money trail. That's an investigative gold mine.

<comment><USER4> > The FBI found out his bank account information from buying ads. He probably > bought something on iTunes

This actually sounds the most believable to me, excellent point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an American, I wish we would stop doing this. It isn't effective, and it's a waste of time/resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

I'd even argue that its counter-effective to progress. Instead of punishing people for making more efficient systems, we should reward them, and try to integrate.

<comment><USER7> A person in the US who, for example, wants to watch all but the latest season of Game of Thrones can go to iTunes and, within seconds, purchase and start watching. And it will be in better quality than the torrent which was ripped off some TV broadcast and re-compressed. iTunes is available for both Windows and Mac (plus various iOS) and is super simple to use. And the one purchase lets you either stream or download to any of your devices and watch whenever you want.

The very latest content does get artificially restricted due to various business reasons (licensing deals, etc.) and I suspect that will change over time to go to an instant-release model. Ditto for fewer geo restrictions. We're starting to see these changes more and more. For music, there are far more options available: Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, etc. where one low monthly fee lets you play almost anything you want.

However, despite all this incredible ease for lots of different media, people still want content for free. Maybe the solution is to combine enforcement with an educational campaign so that people are aware of the myriad legal options available to them.

<comment><USER8> As an American living in Australia, I'd say your perspective is kind of skewed by the American market. A large number of torrenters aren't cheapskates or thieves but are from outside the U.S. and unable to even get ahold of this stuff due to the way licensing overseas works. Or if they do, it's at 1.5x-2.5x the price.

We have a 21st century distribution model tied to a mid-20th century legal framework and business model. It's hard to say what is fair in every case. What I feel is not fair is throwing the book at all of these site owners, especially when the laws are written in the U.S. but are somehow stretched to where they apply to people who never set foot there.

In 5-10 years, they could still be in jail while technology remakes itself to the point where either distribution and payment has finally started working gain, or torrenting has gotten to the point where it's nearly impossible to trace the activity to any one person. Neither option seems unlikely, and punishing people now for something that doesn't hurt anyone too much does not seem like it's worth it.

<comment><USER9> I'll give some more examples of use cases where the torrent system serves users better than the legal distribution, but has nothing to do with money.

My wife is Brazilian and I'm British, so we're trying to bring our son up as bilingual. Trying to find legally distributed mainstream kids films dubbed in Portuguese is incredibly hard. Sure, you can buy them in Brazil... and then they don't play on hardware in the UK. Neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime have them. Meanwhile, a quick search on a torrent download site gives me access to hundreds of mainstream films dubbed in Portuguese.

Torrents allow me to watch anything, anywhere, with minimal hardware. I don't need to buy DVDs or DVD players. I don't have to work out which subscription I need to use to watch the latest episode of a program. I have downloaded torrents for which I already own the Blu-ray DVD, but it's in a box somewhere and I can't be bothered to find it.

So yeah, there are lots more use cases for torrents than just wanting to be a cheapskate.

<comment><USER10> Note: You can find some shows on youtube.

Cheers and abraços

<comment><USER11> My son liked Fishtronaut / Peixonauta [1] which was made in Brazil and released in Portuguese, Spanish, and English simultaneously, I think (it's on Netflix in the US).

1: [http://tvpinguim.com/peixonauta/](http://tvpinguim.com/peixonauta/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like a lot of the most well-known pseudo-legal BitTorrent "groups" (PopcornTime, YIFY, ISOHunt, now Kat) turn out to be one-man shops, and as such, just completely dissolve as soon as their owner crosses paths with law enforcement. In some cases, these services are integral enough to the "scene" to be brought back by others. But other times, everything just stops for a while.

This seems like a bus-factor problem. Why does it keep happening? Why aren't these sites being run by multi-national teams that can survive a loss like this?

Even The Pirate Bay is "just" Swedish, so a sufficiently-motivated Swedish Government _could_ shut TPB down. Meanwhile, there's no single country that could shut down e.g. Wikipedia.

<comment><USER13> > This seems like a bus-factor problem. Why does it keep happening? Why aren't > these sites being run by multi-national teams that can survive a loss like > this?

Trust. You have to be sure the people you're working with are diligent, careful, and won't turn you in (and likewise for them).

<comment><USER12> It feels like you could factor off the trust requirements into a much smaller kernel, though.

For example, you could operate (your instance of) your pseudo-legal service yourself, but open-source the codebase (sticking it on GitHub even) and accept patches from anyone.

You could also implement a simple replication architecture for your service, where at any time one node (yours) is considered to be the 'canonical master', and then other nodes can join the network as slaves, receive replicated state, and run as mirrors. Sort of like Linux package repository mirrors.

With such a setup, arresting the original maintainer just means 1. a codebase fork by a new maintainer, and 2. a (probably manual) network master-node election.

And that's just a setup that lets you stay in complete control without having to trust anybody (since you still "own" the codebase, and the master node, until you disappear.) If you are willing to relinquish control to the system itself, you could just build your service on a DHT or a signed store-and- forward hierarchy or a blockchain or whatever. There's no reason that things that are essentially "a BitTorrent tracker exposed through a website" need to have their canonical state anywhere at all.

<comment><USER14> A distributed blockchain sounds right. Now imagine that "mining" for this blockhchain is serving torrents, and you have to spend currency to download. The currency can be sold for monetary currency (e.g. dollars or bitcoin), so leechers could pay seeders.

<comment><USER15> What problem are you trying to solve? Downloading torrents works fine. The weak link is the search engine and description-host.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Aside from the legal technicalities here, I mostly ponder the future of IP. I think Napster positively affected the music distribution world in the long run. I am not very black-and-white on this issue, however, since there are many contradictions by both sides.

I read the majority of comments here on HN about dated business models, big corporation dislike, the old executives don't understand the new market, etc..., but then a young indie artist in LA finds out Zara the clothing retailer has obviously copied her designs, and the lynch mobs are out to boycott Zara, send letters and other things to Zara and their attorneys. [1]

I have not inquired directly, but I am guessing a number of the indie artist's supporters have downloaded a torrent or two. How do they morally distinguish the two, or how does anybody who is against copyright or property rights of IP?

[1] [https://www.buzzfeed.com/victoriasanusi/an-independent- artis...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/victoriasanusi/an-independent-artist-has- accused-zara-of-stealing-her-desig?utm_term=.duwxvQBeek#.hr3OM54qqg)

<comment><USER17> Lots of cognitive dissonance on HN regarding IP rights. Also, see any previous post where a Chinese company is accused of stealing IP or cloning apps.

<comment><USER18> Is it cognitive dissonance, or simply different people commenting? HN is not a hive mind.

<comment><USER17> Can't say for sure, just the feeling I get. HN comments usually seem pre- dominantly pro or anti copyright depending on context (e.g. "big company fails to comply with GPL" would result in mainly pro copyright comments while "bittorrent site gets shut down" would mainly result in anti copyright ones).

<comment><USER19> > HN comments usually seem pre-dominantly pro or anti copyright depending on > context (e.g. "big company fails to comply with GPL" would result in mainly > pro copyright comments while "bittorrent site gets shut down" would mainly > result in anti copyright ones).

I wouldn't use the GPL as a copyrights poster-boy since it subverts the 'normal' use of copyrights (restriction of distribution by 3rd parties) - <USER2> FSF calls it 'copyleft' for that very reason. My feeling is that being pro-GPL and being pro-bittorrent is consistent with the "information wants to be free" mindset - no cognitive dissonance necessary. The day HN becomes pro-Mickey- Mouse laws then you would have an argument.

<comment><USER17> I disagree that the GPL subverts the 'normal' use of copyright (though I'm aware it is presented as such by the FSF). Tons of copyrighted works are licensed for distribution by 3rd parties. Software licenses which allowed unrestricted distribution existed before the GPL. What the GPL innovated on was to put light restrictions on distribution to ensure modified source code would be made available along with binary distributions. In a world without copyright, there would still be tons of software without publicly available source code (perhaps more than now, due to the inability to enforce GPL violations).

Also, "information wants to be free" is more of a vague idea than anything else. I want information to be free. I'm a big user and proponent of open source software (heck, I wrote a non-trivial feature of Webtorrent). That doesn't necessarily mean I'm against copyright.

<comment><USER19> > Software licenses which allowed unrestricted distribution existed before the > GPL

There is a world of a difference between 'allowing' distribution of source code and _mandating_ it (like the GPL does).

<comment><USER20> Isn't that exactly his point though? That the main innovation with GPL would be unenforceable without copyright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The cat and mouse game continues.

Remember The Pirate Bay?

Why don't studios have their own similar sites where they allow free torrents of some shows and offer paid torrents.

As a busy person, I'd much rather pay for something which guarantees:

\- high quality \- no subtitles \- no buffering issues \- no viruses \- click and play

<comment><USER22> You can do all of those things on iTunes or Amazon Video. Why would the movie studios run their own content distribution when it gives them little competitive advantage.

<comment><USER23> No you can't, all the content there is DRM'ed. I believe many people care about running their videos where they like. For example, Amazon video does not work at all on Linux because there is no DRM support there.

<comment><USER24> You're confusing streaming (renting) with purchasing.

On iTunes, EVERYTHING is DRM free. If you purchase it, you get a mp4 (or mov), and that's it. No DRM.

So nothing is stopping you from paying for much of this content legally.

<comment><USER25> Not quite, Music you buy on iTunes does not have DRM and will play anywhere you copy it too. However it has your name, Apple ID, and email embedded into the MP3 file and anyone you share the file with can use a tool like exiftool to look at the embedded info.

Movies are another thing, they appear to be DRM free as long as they are on a machine that is authorized with the purchasers Apple ID. Once copied to a computer that isn't authorized, the movie will either refuse to open or ask you to authorize the computer with the purchasers Apple ID because once again all your info is embedded into the file. And if that wasn't bad enough, if you try to play a iTunes bough movie on a external device that does not support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Copy Protection) it will also refuse to play.

I got burned by this once. There once was a way to remove all the crap Apple puts in their movies, but the software that could strip it out hasn't been updated for ages now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I find it interesting that a Polish man was charged by US laws, rather than under Polish law.

I think he opened himself to US law by hosting the servers at one point in the US. Regardless, it is rather fascinating that his first visit to the US could potentially be from extradition.

<comment><USER27> Anyone doing things that affect the US is automatically subject to US jurisdiction. But whether they can be extradited depends on the particular treaty the country in question has with the US.

<comment><USER28> Are there any good examples of when this works the other way around? A US citizen being extradited to another country for non-violent crimes? Something in tune of computer hacking or hosting a website?

Other than drugs and murders, I have a hard time believing US govt to give out its citizens to third parties...

<comment><USER29> The USA will not extradite someone for a crime that is not also a crime in the USA itself.

<comment><USER30> Does USA ever extradite its own citizens anywhere? Has this ever happened?

<comment><USER29> Yes it happens, not often but it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said that KickassTorrents helped to > distribute over $1 billion in pirated files.

So, two or three files, by Hollywood accounting.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you think about it, torrent sites are like a modern day robinhood. They take profits from the rich and bring enjoyment to the poor.

<comment><USER33> i don't remember robin hood lining his pockets with truckloads of money he made off of the dodgy ads that all these torrent sites serve.

and if its not ads, then it's the donations.

<comment><USER26> I suspect robin hood would have had the support of the people that he helped, so donations is appropriate.

I'd say where the analog breaks down is the media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging.

<comment><USER34> >media companies aren't exactly extorting the people, nor price gouging.

In your opinion.

<comment><USER26> Ok, I'll bite. What makes you feel they are extorting consumers or price gouging?

<comment><USER32> Because they bundle 200 channels of crap with the 5 channels that you actually want forcing just about everyone to overpay for what they're receiving.

<comment><USER35> Hence the popularity of HBO Go. Showtime, Discovery, History, BBC are also working on theirs and have launched them in some countries. Sadly, Comcast refuses to make deals with most of them, so we can't e.g. Get a Discovery account because we already pay them through Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon despite a similar deal with nearly every other provider: [https://www.discoverygo.com](https://www.discoverygo.com) .

At least where I live, we get a choice between AT&T or Comcast, where AT&T is over land line DSL @768k not guaranteed, plus I'd have to pay for a phone line vs Comcast at up to 300mbit. Guess which I went with

Anything that accelerates the downfall of the toxic incumbents in the US is a win in my book.

<comment><USER36> AT&T, obviously, as Comcast offers connection measured in millibits instead of kilobits per second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > It also shows that Apple handed over personal details of Vaulin after the > investigator cross-referenced an IP-address used for an iTunes transaction > with an IP-address that was used to login to KAT's Facebook account.

I find it darkly ironic that a legal purchase of music helped them catch the guy.

<comment><USER38> Does that mean that Apple basically feeds every transaction information to Feds so that they can find this match?

<comment><USER37> Unlikely.

KAT apparently had a Facebook page, so step one was serving Facebook with a search warrant demanding the list of IP addresses used to administrate that page.

They likely then went to major companies like Apple, Google, etc. with search warrants for any billing activity (valuable as it comes with a cardholder name and address, usually) matching those IP addresses.

<comment><USER39> So he may have been fine by simply using a VPN?

<comment><USER37> Maybe, maybe not. Plenty of VPN providers are in places within the reach of US law enforcement, and it only takes one slip up to expose yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone know if there is data somewhere on how much money has been spent by governments (specifically the USA) on attacking copyright related stuff?

My main complaint about this is that I'd rather my tax dollars be spent stopping crime that causes physical harm.

<comment><USER41> You're free to ask your congressmen to change the copyright laws. Until then, they should be enforced: Having some manager deprioritize certain crimes because he thinks they're too expensive to enforce moves power from the legislative to the executive.

You didn't directly make this distinction, but your point about preferring to allocate tax dollars to physical crimes would be a strange way to view changing the law.

<comment><USER42> Your congressman is most likely accepting large sums of money from companies supporting these draconian laws. Sums you can never hope to compete with.

So break these laws. Break them as much as is possible. Convince others to do the same.

Civil disobedience is the engine of progress.

<comment><USER41> If you have a concrete example of this occurring, then consider whether it's bribery:

18 U.S. Code § 201 - Bribery of public officials and witnesses "directly or indirectly gives, offers, or promises anything of value to any public official, former public official, or person selected to be a public official, for or because of any official act performed or to be performed by such public official, former public official, or person selected to be a public official; or

being a public official, former public official, or person selected to be a public official, otherwise than as provided by law for the proper discharge of official duty, directly or indirectly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally for or because of any official act performed or to be performed by such official or person; "

My understanding is that prosecutors would be heavily incentivized to find an underground bribery operation on Congressmen; it would be a career-making move, and they could make press releases to everyone. People clearly care about corruption and bribery, as evidenced by this election cycle.

The commenters in this subthread have already agreed that it is good to give prosecutors extensive leeway in prosecuting crimes, or even deciding whether something is a crime. And in this particular case, the incentives line up. So it seems unlikely that congressmen are engaging in outright bribery, with the prosecutors letting them get away with it.

Again, if you know something that the prosecutors don't, you can contact your state Attorney General to report a crime. They would probably at least open up an investigation. For example, it looks like 5 Congressmen have been prosecuted over the last year alone, so they're hardly immune to the law:

[http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/dem-congressman- conv...](http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/dem-congressman-convicted- federal-corruption-charges)

Additionally, the FCPA makes it a crime for US companies to bribe foreign officials(such as in the Ukraine, where this article's criminal seems to be based). I've had to sit through 3-4 of these anti-corruption seminars, and it sure seems like another law that prosecutors would love to follow up on.

My guess is that the lobbyists are simply more persuasive, and seem to care about the law a lot more than the other types of people who comment on the law.

<comment><USER42> Lobbying is what I was referring to, and it basically is bribery legalised.

You cannot hope to compete with lobbysists from Disney, the MPAA/RIAA etc. It's heavily skewed in their favour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another black market business opportunity brought to you via fed money. DOJ, FBI, polish police, etc, etc all spent tax money on this takedown. All working so the next guy can make a website and make $16 million / year. And it only takes one guy to run the site apparently.

Who knows maybe the next guy will use Tor, Bitcoin, read Grugq's blog and be 5x as expensive to hunt down. Thanks US tax payers!

<comment><USER43> The disincentive to start the next pirate website is the fact that the owners/operators of said website are subject to arrest and jail time. If actions like the ones in linked article didn't occur, you would find a large array of piracy websites pop up and operate with impunity. Under such a scenario, each website would individually earn less.

Yes, piracy websites will always exist, but the purpose of these shutdowns is to minimize the net profitability of operating piracy websites and to deter would-be operators. However, the constant shutdowns of piracy websites does create a perverse incentive in which those that succeed do so at a massive scale.

<comment><USER44> >The disincentive to start the next pirate website is the fact that the owners/operators of said website are subject to arrest and jail time.

But it takes only one guy who thinks "they will never get me as I'm smarter" to have your next KAT/Pirate Bay that will (allegedly) cause billions dollars of damage.

<comment><USER5> > But it takes only one guy who thinks "they will never get me as I'm smarter"

And fortunately for us, Eastern Europe is full of the these kinds of people. :)

<comment><USER42> God bless them, the industrious little rapscallions!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This will be interesting to watch. Torrent sites only host torrent files; I'm sure he'll argue that the DMCA requests were invalid because the people filing them didn't own copyright to the _torrent_ files, which were the only thing that the site distributed. Where do we draw the line? Do we prosecute people for posting a magnet link? If a movie studio puts an MP4 of a not-yet-released film on its servers, is it illegal to link to it?

It will be an interesting case to watch if he takes it all the way to trial. I don't think it's nearly as open-and-shut as the DOJ would like everyone to believe every case it files is though.

<comment><USER46> Aren't file-hashes derived works?

<comment><USER45> That would be news to me. More likely, they're just going with a conspiracy argument (and indeed he is charged with conspiracy): he didn't actually commit copyright infringement himself, but aided others in doing so. Even then, conspiracy laws have very specific requirements for conviction, and this may not check all the boxes. It will be interesting to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So if extradited he may be tried. Now has jury of your peers (fellow citizens) any meaning in case of trying a non-US citizen? Jurors must be US citizens, but they will not be his peers, really.

</comment><comment><USER48> " unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of copyrighted materials."

bullshit of course. He simply hosted hashes of torrents that other people uploaded.

As far as I know he even acknowledged dcma takedowns.

</comment><comment><USER49> Well we all switched from TPB to Kickass... which one do we switch to next?

<comment> obj-g I kind of like TorrentProject. The UI leaves something to be desired (make sure to use advanced searching) but...

<comment><USER50> Thank you! TorrentProject indeed looks like the proper alternative to KAT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> So that's why KAT's been down all day.

Two things: If you're going to build a torrent indexer, don't profit from it. Keep it alive yourself, with NO ads, just plain HTML and JS and images.

Second: This is why I vastly prefer usenet.

<comment><USER52> But you have to pay to access Usenet - sort of defeats the point. And the whole retention thing sucks.

<comment><USER51> Sonarr + Usenet + Nzbgeek, no issues whatsoever and I can download my public access public broadcasted tv shows at my full ISP speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is really unfortunate and sad news.

</comment><comment><USER54> If I was making millions of dollars from illicit activities I would practice incredibly rigorous opsec. I realize modern lifestyles don't align with any kind of anonymity but come on. Here's a short list:

\- No Apple

\- No Facebook

\- No Google

\- Don't live in a 5 eyes or affiliated country

\- Know the extradition and legal precedent in all countries visited

<comment><USER55> Its really hard to do....

I was shorting the A50 via deutsche bank swaps on an ETF on the NYSE while China was arresting people for short selling. Is there an arrest warrant for me valid in Singapore if I happen to visit 3 years from now? What if the TPP gets ratified?

Fact is, nobody knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> When will the feds learn that this is whack a mole.. and every time the mole improves. (I am 1428x times smarter...)

<comment><USER57> Whackamole has uses. Sure diehard users will find new trackers but it makes it harder for the average consumer to pirate.

My dads favorite tv show tracker went down and he couldn't figure out how to get another private one. He's had to get a dvr and borrow my HBO password.

<comment><USER58>
      > it makes it harder for the average consumer to pirate.

How diehard do you have to be to type "Best torrent sites" into google?

<comment><USER59> You are ignoring a few factors. The knowledge on how interpret the results intelligently, the likely feeling of discomfort or danger of viruses, confusion about which torrent client to use, etc..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Is there a legal lesson to take from this when it comes to using cloud services hosted in the US where you can be affected by US laws just because you hosted a site with links to PDFs from Elsevier in an S3 bucket which itself happens to be pointing to a US datacenter? I haven't read it all, but there must be more to it than having used a US hoster that made the guy an easy litigation target.

<comment><USER35> Sounds like he "does business in the US" in that case. The laws haven't exactly kept up with modern times and the Internet, but DAs are happy to apply them liberally to Hoover up more cash whenever they can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> A gentle reminder that the US can hunt you down and punish you under US law even you have never stepped foot in the country:

>> _" According to a Department of Justice press release sent to Ars, Vaulin was arrested on Wednesday in Poland. The DOJ will shortly seek his extradition to the United States."_

<comment><USER62> Yes, but it's not exclusive to the US. This is standard procedure among allies, and US & Poland are definitely strong allies. The same thing happens between Germany & Latvia, or Russia & Uzbekistan. Beyond that, this can happen even between non-allies if the pursuer is powerful enough. The US & Russia are probably with the widest grasp due to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Very interesting. It seems he got busted by making the mistake of once-upon-a- time hosting in the US and Canada, thus providing them grounds for persecution.

So reading in that context, they would have been free and clear if it were not for that mistake!

<comment><USER64> ^This, if you're working with copyrighted material its best to not leave a paper trail to a server in the US

<comment><USER65> Ever? Isn't there a three-year statute of limitations on copyright infringement?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Here's the paperwork: [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2996082-Artem- Vaulin...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2996082-Artem-Vaulin- Complaint.html#document/)

PDF link:[https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2996082/Artem- Vau...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2996082/Artem-Vaulin- Complaint.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER67> So Bittorrent is decentralized but you need a centralized index of the available torrents? Is this correct? Can you find anything without a site like KAT? TIA.

<comment><USER68> Distributed discovery is possible, but you quickly run into spam/noise problems. Centralized communities generally have features such as curation and deduplication (duplication is bad for torrents, as it causes peers to be spread across multiple slightly-different packages of files, reducing the available peers for both).

It's not a technical problem, it's a social one.

<comment><USER69> In a blockchain-based system, proof of work could give users points so they could spend them to show their trust on a file (or maybe transfer them to whoever they trust so they can release files with a number of points from the start). For the duplication problem, solve it like IPFS does, the file's hash is it's Uri so a duplicate would just point to the same resource. Actually, people could build KAT-like sites entirely in IPFS and users loading (and thus, serving them to other users) said sites would be the trust mechanism.

<comment><USER70> Proof of work burns money and I guess users won't pay for some content's reputation score, there are no incentives to do it other than altruism. POW- based currencies work well because you can exchange the points for stuff or services, not because you can spend them within the system (proof of stack does exactly this indeed and its long-term reliability has been questioned many times).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> ~15 Years ago I went to to Poland on a student exchange. They held a presentation about their school and stuff and in the middle of the presentation theres a popup from emule saying it has finished downloading something. Mind you this was a school computer on their school network.

I suspect this has changed, but back then they were pretty laid back about that sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER72> Today such databases of cultural works metadata (movie descriptions, music album track lists) are illegal because you can use some of metadata (checksum of files) as identifier to associate it with actual content in p2p network.

What if we modify bittorrent dht or similar thing so it'll use some other identifier: wikidata id, oclc, instead of "checksum of checksums of files"? Next day Wikipedia and library catalogs become illegal?

</comment><comment><USER73> > "Vaulin is charged with running today's most visited illegal file-sharing > website, responsible for unlawfully distributing well over $1 billion of > copyrighted materials," Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said in the > statement.

I can't keep myself from giggling and thinking about this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0)

</comment><comment><USER74> Someone has taken a dump of db ? I can't access to api to download dump. I try to connect on mirrors like [http://kickasstorrents.video/](http://kickasstorrents.video/) or [https://kat.host/](https://kat.host/)

</comment><comment><USER75> In the light of KAT and PirateBay being down, which is the next most worthwhile torrent website.

</comment><comment><USER76> After reading the whole PDF document of the complaint one thing jumped out

Here we have Apple, Google, Facebook, Coinbase, FDC Servers and few others handing over info on email accounts, wallets, hosting records and so on.

<comment><USER50> So, I imagine, they asked Facebook for a list of IPs having logged to the Facebook KAT page, and then maybe they went around asking Apple – and who knows whom else – if they got those IPs in their records?

If it was like this it doesn't seem proper to me, but IANAL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> > KAT does not host individual infringing files but rather provides links to > .torrent and .magnet files

What is a .magnet file? My understanding is that .magent link is the key hash in a distributed hash store (DHT).

<comment><USER62> Pretty sure there is no such thing and the author actually meant magnet links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> kat was actually the best torrent website at the moment, and I'd say by far. This is a very inefficient way for the US government to spend resources and money, they won't be getting anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER79> Time and resources well spent, glad we have our priorities in order. Maybe Hollywood actually runs the country and not the banks and corporations, ahh, ahh, I mean elected officials of the government.

</comment><comment><USER80> Can't read this site because of their adblocker detection.

<comment><USER81> Use uBlock Origin instead or dive into the wonderful world of adblock-blocker- blockers (such as Anti-Adblock Killer or Fuck FuckAdBlock)

<comment><USER80> I use uBlock, on Safari.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Perhaps this is pedantic, but i wonder if magnet links provide any legal securities when compared to actually hosting the torrent files themselves.

</comment><comment><USER83> I think it's ridiculous that Homeland Security is involved in a copyright infringement case.

</comment><comment><USER51> Now that's KickAssTorrents is dead, what alternatives are there?

<comment><USER84> You could try paying people for their work, or else forgo enjoying it.

<comment><USER51> No way to do that in Bolivia.

<comment><USER84> But you can in Boston.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> I'm surprised he didn't use a virtual currency to sell ads.

</comment><comment><USER86> So he pays for software and goes to jail :-)

</comment><comment><USER87> how are newsgroups safe all these years? how comes feds aren't going after newsgroups?

<comment><USER88> All news providers comply with the DMCA nowadays. They are legally protected as hosts of user-generated content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> R.I.P.

</comment><comment><USER90> The folks who operate sites like KAT and TPB are heroes.

</comment><comment><USER91> Wait, you can get extradited to the US for hosting (magnet) links? Madness.

<comment><USER92> KA also had torrent files

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Wow, this sucks, I love KAT, what now? TPB is rubbish.

<comment><USER94> Whip out that credit card and start buying stuff instead? Who cares if you don't use it much, it's all relative.

I like buying CDs and Bluray, then I rip them for everyday use. But its nice to have something tangible to back it up.

Plus its all legal and protected, since I don't rebroadcast any of the content, just private enjoyment.

<comment><USER12> Two instances where this isn't practical:

• "Abandonware" — IP held by a company that wants to just sit on it and never release it again, and probably forgets it exists. Probably the company that produced the IP was acquired and shut down by the company currently holding it. It's nearly impossible to find a physical copy of most of this kind of stuff. I'm not a collector; I don't want to pay $1000 for the only surviving copy of some old book or NES cartridge or whatever. (Or, rather, I would, but only as part of a group-buy with the goal of giving the thing to a digital archivist who will properly preserve it and publish the results to everyone.)

• "Isolationism-ware" – IP that only legally exists in some particular markets. Usually meaning "some Asian country, and no English-speaking countries." To acquire such, I'd—at the easiest—have to convince the iTunes Store that I have a credit card with an address in that country; for the more indie stuff, I'd have to find someone physically in the country willing to go be my proxy, searching used book-stores/record-stores for the item and then sending it to me. Either way, I'd then have to work pretty hard to consume the thing, given that I don't fully understand the languages involved. Translated release groups handle all these steps. (I wouldn't mind if I could donate money to them in a way that would in turn give money to the original IP owner; I've just never heard of such a setup.)

<comment><USER95> > Usually meaning "some Asian country, and no English-speaking countries."

In my experience a lot of content is only available in the West (due to georestrictions).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Oh shit! And why Google is still running than?

</comment><comment><USER97> I just had a crazy brain fart, what if bitTorrent and bitcoin had a child?

</comment><comment><USER98> 01001110011000000101

</comment><comment><USER98> 010000000111000101011

</comment><comment><USER99> "Do you have a legal right to distribute this content?"

"No."

"Do you respect the people who spent their personal time and their money to make the content you distribute?"

"Yes of course."

"No you don't or you would get their permission first."

"I don't think whether I respect the creators or not has anything to do with making their content available, which is what I want to do."

"Will you please get their permission to distribute what they spent their time and money -- part of their life -- to create?"

"Nope, sorry. I'm distributing it for free. They can take a hike."

Real sad, these modern morals. Real sad. If you don't respect others, they ain't gonna respect you.

<comment><USER100> "How much did Return of the Jedi cost to make?"

"$32.5 million"

"And how much was the revenue?"

"$475 million"

"So you had a $442.5 million profit!"

"No, no. We had no profit - we use Hollywood accounting"

Repeat for Forrest Gump, Spider-Man, etc.

Real sad, these modern morals. Real sad. If you don't respect others, they ain't gonna respect you.

<comment><USER99> You can try but you'll never be able to rationalize stealing from someone. Especially when you use someone(s) else's actions to try to justify stealing from them.

You folks are young. If you're lucky enough to learn some of these things, the fact that a lot of bad karma will suddenly disappear from your life and things will go shockingly smoothly -- will only be the dessert. The real banquet will be knowing that you went through a time when you made bad decisions but by a stroke of genius, realized you were actually hurting someone (financially in this case) and were able to set aside your selfish wants on their behalf.

One of the best things you will discover is this: when a person is making bad decisions in one part of their life, they're _rarely_ able to confine that bad decision making to just one part of life -- they're making bad decisions across the entire spectrum of their behavior.

That was a cool lesson to learn. I had to become in charge of a lot of young techies to discover it. A near-karma-free life is waiting for you guys. Shalom.

<comment><USER101> >>>You can try but you'll never be able to rationalize stealing from someone. Especially when you use someone(s) else's actions to try to justify stealing from them.

The supporters of a too-strict, repressive form of copyright often use words like "stolen" and "theft" to refer to copyright infringement. This is spin, but they would like you to take it for objective truth.

Under the US legal system, copyright infringement is not theft. Laws about theft are not applicable to copyright infringement. The supporters of repressive copyright are making an appeal to authority—and misrepresenting what authority says.

To refute them, you can point to this real case which shows what can properly be described as "copyright theft."

Unauthorized copying is forbidden by copyright law in many circumstances (not all!), but being forbidden doesn't make it wrong. In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.

A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that "piracy" and "theft" are smear-words.

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to- avoid.html#Theft](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft)

<comment><USER99> You often need permission, then pay royalties, to copyright holders. That is the theft. In cases where you enjoy then distribute the copyrighted works of someone without their permission and avoid paying them the required royalties -- you have stolen money $$ from them. It's the same as eating at a restaurant then not paying. STEALING. You got a benefit you were supposed to pay for -- and you DID NOT PAY.

Stealing from others habitually is a very bad decision. You can justify it using any inner dialog you like.

The only caution is this: there _are_ consequences to bad decisions you've made.

Here is the biggest consequence: if you purposely decide to hurt someone else (financially in this case), unless you are sociopathic/career criminal, you'll have an internal conflict about it. You will 'explain it away' so it doesn't feel as bad: "I do this because the law is unfair" or "everyone else is doing it".

YOU ARE _LYING_ TO YOURSELF. You know darn well you shouldn't act that way. Once you start lying to yourself, you're going to green-light lying to yourself again.

For example: If asked in a job interview with the IRS "let's say we hire you and you have access to the IRS secure network, and after a week you discover that a lot of your IRS coworkers change personal data in our computer system and underpay their taxes. And you find your coworkers also download and seed torrent clouds with copyrighted material. Which activity would you find acceptable?"

YOU'D HAVE TO LIE TO THE IRS INTERVIEWER!! See? You'd have to say "I would never cheat on my taxes. And I download copyrighted material and seed with copyrighted material all the time."

YOU WOULDN'T SAY THAT!

Nope, you wouldn't get hired if you admitted to the IRS interviewer -- OR ANY OTHER COMPANY INTERVIEWING YOU FOR A JOB -- that you make illegal, unauthorized use of copyrighted works.

Why wouldn't you admit to the IRS job interviewer you seed torrents with copyrighted works without the owner's permission?

BECAUSE YOU KNOW IT'S WRONG. That's why.

RECAP: (1) you're stealing from an artist by not paying royalties on their film/music/etc. when using sites like KAT; (2) YOU'RE LYING TO YOUR FUTURE EMPLOYER in a job interview.

Slippery slope. In managing large groups of tech workers, what I discovered was this: if an employee is unethical or dishonest in one area of life, they seem to have a hard time restricting those bad decisions to only one area.

<comment><USER101> As a libertarian I would never work for Government Especially the IRS.

>>You often need permission, then pay royalties, to copyright holders. That is the theft.

You operate under the idea that I believe they are entitled to these things, I do support or believe copyright is ethical, I do not believe the government has the ethical authority to tell me how I can arrange the bits on my hard disk, I do not believe the government has the ethical authority to grant a person or company the monopoly on an idea or arrangement or words, notes, or images</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>