Octopodes, pronounced oc-top-o-dees, not oc-to-po-des. Like Hercules.

Also, using the I ending to pluralize us endings comes out of an attempted prescriptive reform of English in the late 1800s to make it more like Latin. We still use es endings to pluralize us singulars most of the time, the places where we use I are ether direct usages of Latin words or remnants of that prescriptive push.

there are some older games that rely on multi threading and even on a modern system this can cause some serious performance issues, again, this is getting solved though.

So It does depend on the situation, there have been some issues with significantly reduced performance for heavily multi threaded games through wine/proton. It seems like that is getting cleared up by a direct implementation of the relevant stuff in the kernel, rather than being a distro specific thing. There are also some performance losses due to linux giving all application equal priority for “video random access memory” on a GPU (so if a game needs more than what is available it gets forced to use other memory which slows things down a lot) but there are some fixes coming down the line to make a system default to giving games higher priority for VRAM than the browser or desktop. In general stuff through a translation layer will always cause some lose in performance though.

Realistically, on a super high end machine (multi thousand dollar GPU, nonsense amounts of ram, and absurd core count over clocked CPU) the bloat of windows doesn’t use up enough resources to impact performance, but on a lot of mid and low end machines Linux will outperform. The issues with translation layers are getting solved at an astonishing rate right now and… windows is just getting more bloated and buggy as Microsoft tries to push more subscription services and data harvesting.

Technically, mammals did not evolve from reptiles, being synapsids, while reptiles are Sauropsids, having split basically immediately after the evolution of amniotes.

molten salt systems can be fail safe by having the coolant drain from parts of the system that can’t operate with solidified salt in them, even if they do, you can sends someone with a heating element to remelt the system at critical points before turning it on. It’s not like water where the coolant will physically expand and burst things when it freezes, water’s actually pretty weird in that regard, most things take up less volume when they freeze.

I don’t know why they couldn’t do the same for an alpha class, but I suspect it’s because running the reactor without coolant in it would have caused a melt down, and if any coolant was left inside it when turned off, the control rods would have been frozen in place preventing it from being restarted. Perhaps in such a tightly sealed system, the shrinkage caused by cooling could have caused things to break as well.

Various common steels with a bunch of insulation around it usually, sometimes with a thin coating. The potassium/sodium/calcium nitrate mixes that are used with concentrated solar systems operating in range between 200 C and 600 C. So like, yah you don’t want to touch it, but it’s not gonna do much to steel. It can be somewhat corrosive, but, this is fairly easily mitigated by design.

Molten salt for heat transfer and thermal storage is a pretty mature technology that goes way back before we started using it in concentrated solar systems.

They’re actually quite similar to thermoelectric generators. But the potential difference between two semi conductors is created by a heat differential rather than by photon excitation.

Thermoelectric generators have been used on various rovers and deep space probes as well as in remote lighthouses.

You can use molten salt to move and store heat but you don’t put it through a turbine. Molten salt systems run it through a heat exchanger that heats steam or CO2.

I really like the concentrated solar systems that use molten salt, where rather than heating water directly, molten salt is heated and stored In large insulated tanks and tapped off to a heat exchanger to run the turbines, thus allowing power generation to match demand and continue at a constant rate even when light level very (such as at night).

One interesting idea is to use a concentrated solar system to run an Einstein–Szilard refrigerator, or some other absorption refrigerator cycle.

Solar thermal has some distinct advantages when you start talking about really big instillations. Especially when considering power storage, molten salt systems can store heat and allow the generators to keep working even at night. Much cheaper than batteries at very large scales.

Thermal solar systems are generally very efficient when the goal is heating something, not just generating power. So say, you want to run an ammonia plant without burning natural gas, or if you want to melt down metals for recycling. There are so many industrial applications where it’s a better way of doing it than using an electric heating element.

Yes, super critical CO2 turbines can work in such a system. As can sterling engines. Or thermoelectric solid state couples.

Any system that uses a temperature differential to generate power can be used. It’s just a matter of what you care about in a given situation. Upfront cost, mechanical reliability, noise/vibration, and availability of needed components play in to what makes the most sense.