Hacker Public Radio

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.

This series is dedicated to exploring little-known—and occasionally useful—trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of UNIX-like operating systems.


Imagine, if you will, a Jane Austen novel about three sisters. The first is well-known and celebrated by everyone; the second, while slightly smarter and more capable, is significantly less popular; and the third languishes in near-total isolation and obscurity. These three sisters live on any UNIX-like system, and their names are
grep
,
egrep
, and
fgrep
.



We will assume you are already familiar with
grep
—
egrep
works pretty much the same, except she handles
e
xtended regular expression syntax. (When writing shell scripts intended to be portable, be careful to call
egrep
if your expression uses
+
,
?
,
|
, or braces as metacharacters. Some versions of GNU grep make no distinction between basic and extended regular expressions, so you may be surprised when your script works on one system but not another.)



But our subject for today is poor, unnoticed
fgrep
. While the plainest sister of the three, she really doesn't deserve to be ignored. The "f" in her name stands either for
f
ixed-string or
f
ast, depending on who you ask. She does not handle regular expressions at all; the pattern she is given is taken literally. This is a great advantage when what you are searching for contains characters having special meaning in a regular expression.



Suppose you have a directory full of PHP scripts and want to find references to an array element called
$tokens[0]
. You can try
grep
(note that the single quotes are necessary to prevent the shell from interpreting
$tokens
as a shell variable):



$ grep '$tokens[0]' *.php



But there is no output. The reason is that the brackets have special significance to
grep
;
[0]
is interpreted as a character class containing only 0. Therefore, this command looks for the string
$tokens0
, which is not what we want. We would have to escape the brackets with backslashes to get the correct match (some implementations may require you to escape the dollar sign also):



$ grep '$tokens\[0\]' *.php
parser.php: $outside[] = $tokens[0];



Instead of fooling with all that escaping (which might get tedious if our pattern contains many special characters), we can just use
fgrep
instead:



$ fgrep '$tokens[0]' *.php
parser.php: $outside[] = $tokens[0];



One place where
fgrep
can be particularly handy is when searching through log files for IP addresses. With ordinary
grep
, the pattern
43.2.1.0
would match 43.221.0.123, 43.2.110.123, and a bunch of other IP addresses you're not interested in because the dot metacharacter will match any character. To make sure you only matched a literal dot you'd have to escape each one with a backslash or, better yet, use
fgrep
.



But what about the claim that
fgrep
is fast? On GNU systems, there is usually one single binary that changes its behavior depending on whether it is called as
grep
,
egrep
, or
fgrep
. (Actually, this is in line with the
POSIX standard


1
, which deprecates
egrep
and
fgrep
in favor of a single
grep
command taking the
-E
option for using extended regular expressions and the
-F
option for doing fixed-string searches.)



In testing, we found that when specifying a single pattern on the command line,
fgrep
wasn't really any faster than
grep
. However, when using the
-f
option to specify a file containing a list of a couple dozen patterns,
fgrep
could consistently produce a 20% time savings. On systems where
grep
and
fgrep
are different binaries, there can potentially be a more dramatic difference in speed and even memory usage.



In our hypothetical Austen novel, the neglected sister would probably be driven to a bad end, to be only spoken of afterward in hushed whispers. Don't let that happen! Whenever you need to search for a string, but don't require the power of regular expressions, get into the habit of calling on
fgrep
. She can be very helpful and deserves more attention than she gets. You'll save yourself the trouble of worrying about metacharacters and maybe some running time as well.



References:







Grep specification
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/grep.html#tag_04_63_18







This article was originally written in June 2010. The podcast episode was recorded in February 2026.


Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.


We’ll explain why we’re doing it, what it is, and cover some useful tools along the way.


I’ve been watching movies recommended to me by my colleagues.


As I work for a global company, the recommendations are often “Foreign Language”, which by definition is every movie to someone.


It’s often difficult to read the subtitles, or they are distracting from the acting.


So I thought of converting the subtitles to speech for inclusion as an audio track, to produce a Voice Over or Lectoring audio track.


Lectoring aka Voice Over Translations


First used is soviet countries to read the news and propaganda from a lectors - the first podcasts ?


In Polish, lektor is also used to mean “off-screen reader” or “voice-over artist”. A lektor is a (usually male) reader who provides the Polish voice-over on foreign-language programmes and films where the voice-over translation technique is used. This is the standard localization technique on Polish television and (as an option) on many DVDs; full dubbing is generally reserved for children’s material.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lector#Television




Example: Night of the Living Dead


To give you an idea of what this sounds like I’m going to play you an example of the out of copyright movie,
Night of the Living Dead
.


In the United States, Night of the Living Dead was mistakenly released into the public domain because the original distributor failed to replace the copyright notice when changing the film’s name

Original


First the original sound track, then the same clip with the voice over track.





Voice Over





Proof of Concept


As a native English speaker I find it difficult to follow those Voice Over tracks as I am trying to focus on the underlying audio. In discussions with Polish friends, it seems that this is not a problem when Polish is your native language. To put that to the test I wanted to try it out on a movie to see if that were indeed the case.


I asked on Mastodon for a non English movie that was Creative Commons but did have English Subtitles, and HPR host
Windigo
had the answer.



2009 Nasty Old People
is a 2009 Swedish film directed by Hanna Sköld, Tangram Film. It premiered on 10 October 2009 at Kontrapunkt in Malmö, and on file sharing site The Pirate Bay. The film is available as an authorized and legal download under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA.

So my idea was to take each bit of subtitle text, convert it to audio, then have the generated audio play at the same time the subtitle appears on the screen.


We use
piper
to process shows here on HPR, and we also generate
srt, or SubRip subtitle files
for each show.


SRT or SubRip files are the easiest subtitle file to work with.


From
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip



The SubRip file format is described on the
Matroska
multimedia
container format
website as “perhaps the most basic of all subtitle formats.”


SubRip (SubRip Text) files are named with the
extension

.srt
, and contain formatted lines of plain text in groups separated by a blank line.


Subtitles are numbered sequentially, starting at 1. The
timecode
format used is hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds with time units fixed to two zero-padded digits and fractions fixed to three zero-padded digits (00:00:00,000).


The comma (,) is used for
fractional separator
.



A numeric counter identifying each sequential subtitle


The time that the subtitle should appear on the screen, followed by
–>
and the time it should disappear


Subtitle text itself on one or more lines


A blank line containing no text, indicating the end of this subtitle



I downloaded
the movie from the Internet Archive
, and then used
Piper voice
to convert a minutes worth of subtitles.


piper_voice: A fast and local neural text-to-speech engine that embeds espeak-ng for phonemization. GPL-3.0 license

Once I had the audio prepared for a sample of the subtitles, it was over to audacity to create a new subtitle audio track.


Audacity is the world’s most popular audio editing and recording app GPL v2 or later,

Timing the segments would be a problem, if it were not for the fact that Audacity supports srt files as Labels.


File > Import > Lables. Then select the srt file











The subtitle track with the text of the audio will be displayed. I could then Import each Audio segment and line them up with the subtitle track for to get the correct timing.








Each subtitles segment created a new separate audio file which I then exported.


I then used
Kdenlive
to open the video and import the audio and subtitle tracks.


Kdenlive: is the acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor. It works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD. GPL-3.0-or-later

There is a good article on adding
by Jean-Marc on How to Add Subtitles Easily in Kdenlive



Project > Subtitles > Add Subtitle Track








Select the Subtitle file








Align the subtitle and audio track.








After rendering the segment out I was satisfied that this was something worth doing.


The script


The
script
can be found on the episode page for this show on the HPR site, and I put it together as a proof of concept.


It creates a new audio track for the subtitles, and merges this with the original sound track to create a new selectable sound track.


It begins by creating a length of silent audio that is as long as up to the first subtitle time segment begin timestamp.


The first subtitle segment is converted from text to speech using
Piper voice



That segment of audio is added to the initial silence track.


We check the total length so far, and then see if there is supposed to be silence between the last and next subtitle segment begin timestamp.


If there is, then a filler piece of silence is added until the next subtitle should appear.


If not then the audio for both subtitles play immediately after one another.


I was worried that the subtitle audio would then lag behind the on screen dialogue but it works surprisingly well. Even long series of dialogue sort themselves out after a bit.


We do this over and over again for each subtitle, right up to the very end of the movie.


This new subtitle to speech audio track is then merged back into the media file as a new audio track.








96
00:15:06,240 --> 00:15:10,640
It will be two years before it's this big








97
00:15:12,840 --> 00:15:17,840
But don't you bother. By then I'll be long gone








98
00:15:19,840 --> 00:15:22,400
It was just a question








99
00:15:22,880 --> 00:15:25,480
Porridge?





Original


First the original sound track, then the same clip with the voice over track.





Voice Over





Lessons learned


Now that I have done this for a lot of movies, there a few tips for getting the best output.


The creation of the audio track usually goes well, but you can run into issues with the merging of the new track back into the movie.


Preparation


The first thing you need is a subtitle file which will be the basis of the voice you will be listening to. It should be good quality so that it matches when the actors speak.


It’s important to clean up this before you use it, fixing spelling mistakes and removing html that will get rendered. Listening to three hours of “I L Zero ve y Zero u”, or “less than forward slash I, greater than”, or “L am from Lndia” can get a bit tedious.


You should also try and get versions that translate the songs as well.


Getting a SRT file from the media.


As many Subtitles are taken from a DVDs they can often be poor
Optical character recognition
versions of the bitmap-based streams. So a picture of string “Hello World” rather than the letters.


ffmpeg


By far the easiest and best way to get the subtitles is to extract it from the movie itself, provided it’s a separate track.


ffmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. LGPL-2.1-or-later, GPL-2.0-or-later



https://ffmpeg.org/





ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -loglevel error -txt_format text -i "${this_movie_file}" "${this_srt_file}"



Getting a SRT file from the web.


If that fails you can try to get the subtitle files from the Internet.




https://www.opensubtitles.org




Select your language with the highest subtitle rating.


You can check the media using the
mpv
media player.


mpv is a media player based on MPlayer and mplayer2. It supports a wide variety of video file formats, audio and video codecs, and subtitle types. GPLv2+, parts under LGPLv2.1+, some optional parts under GPLv3



https://mpv.io/manual/master/




Name the srt file with the same prefix as the movie and
mpv
will play it. You can also use the
--sub-files=
option as well.



mpv "${this_movie_file}" --sub-files="${this_srt_file}"



Scrub through the file to see if the timing is correct. The subtitles can be toggled using the
j
key.


Fixing Timing issues


It’s very important to get the subtitles to align, otherwise the voices will be out of sync.


When the subtitles don’t match up, it’s usually that they need to have the start offset corrected.



ffsubsync
will automatically try and adjust the offset of the first subtitle to the first use of speech in a movie.


ffsubsync: Language-agnostic automatic synchronization of subtitles with video, so that subtitles are aligned to the correct starting point within the video. MIT license



https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync





pip install ffsubsync



ffs video.mp4 -i unsynchronized.srt -o synchronized.srt



LosslessCut
will allow you to quickly remove additional trailers, or ads, at the beginning, so that ffsubsync will have a better chance of working if they are trimmed away.


LosslessCut: aims to be the ultimate cross platform FFmpeg GUI for extremely fast and lossless operations on video, audio, subtitle and other related media files. GPL-2.0 license



https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut




If that fails to match up the subtitles, you can use
mpv keyboard shortcuts
, move to the first speech segment an then press the
Ctrl+Shift+Left
and
Ctrl+Shift+Right
to adjust subtitle delay so that the next or previous subtitle is displayed. It will also show a number giving the miliseconds the delay is, eg
-148416
miliseconds or
-148.416
seconds.


You can use many tools to adjust the subtitles, and I tried out
SRT Offset
.


srt-offset: A simple command-line tool to offset SRT subtitle files. This tool allows you to adjust the timing of subtitles in SRT files, which can be useful when subtitles are out of sync with the video. MIT license


srt-offset -i input.srt -offset -148.416 -o output.srt



Manually adding the new subtitle to speech audio track


If that presents an issue then you can use
avidemux
to just add the new audio track.


Avidemux: is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. GPL V2

Open Avidemux, and select “File > Open”, to select the movie.


Then go to “Audio > Select Track”








Select the next unselected track and tick “Enabled”, “Add Audio Track”








Then pick the new mixed track, in this example
.~NastyOldPeople_mixed.mp3









Conclusion


I now find it much easier to watch a movie with the voice over track. It gets to a point where I don’t even notice it is there and just hear the actors speak in their own language, and I just know what they are saying.


Links




2009 Nasty Old People




A Spanish voice-over translation




avidemux




by Jean-Marc on How to Add Subtitles Easily in Kdenlive




container format




Decimal separator




extension




ffmpeg




ffmpeg on wikipedia




ffsubsync




GPL-3.0 license




GPL v2 or later




Kdenlive




LGPL-2.1




LosslessCut




Matroska




MIT license




Movie on Archive.org




mpv




mpv keyboard shortcuts




mpv wikipedia




Nasty Old People from the Internet Archive




Night of the Living Dead




Noc żywych trupów | Film grozy | Polski lektor




OpenSubtitles




opensubtitles.org




Optical character recognition




Piper voice




SRT Offset




srt, or SubRip subtitle files




SubRip




Timecode




Voice-over translation




Whisper





Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host.

I'm talking about water meters

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This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host.


### Eps 02 Start ###








Amazon Alexa





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






https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa









Home Assistant





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






https://www.home-assistant.io/









Steelseries: Arctis 9X





https://steelseries.com/gaming-headsets/arctis-9x






https://headphonereview.com/over-ear/steelseries-arctis-9x-gaming-headset-review/









Razer: Nari series





https://www.razer.com/pc/gaming-headsets-and-audio/nari-family






https://mysupport.razer.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3636/~/razer-nari-ultimate-%7C-rz04-02670-support-%26-faqs









Skullcandy: crusher





https://www.skullcandy.com/collections/skullcandy-crusher-bass









Audio-Technica ATH-M50x





https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/ath-m50x









HyperX: cloud





https://hyperx.com/collections/gaming-headsets









Plantronics Headset





https://plantronicsstore.com/









Skullcandy: Hesh 3® Wireless





https://support.skullcandy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008277374-Hesh-3-Wireless









Centauri Carbon





https://www.elegoo.com/pages/elegoo-centauri-carbon






https://us.elegoo.com/products/centauri-carbon?srsltid=AfmBOooFOZ2ms1EDtl2TiIAajyqMjkLFTkPb0hMFzis2PZs8sbdgpfRn









Ender-3





https://www.creality.com/products/ender-3-3d-printer






https://www.creality3dofficial.com/products/official-creality-ender-3-3d-printer









Monoprice Maker Select V2





https://monopricesupport.kayako.com/article/278-maker-select-v2-manual-quick-start-guide-part-13860






https://www.treatstock.com/machines/item/237-maker-select









baha GmbH





https://www.baha.com/?culture=en-US&ts=1768855891246









HP Elite Mini 600





https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/mdp/desktops-and-workstations/hp-elite-mini-600-3074457345617692179--1









HP 9000





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_9000









Full Circle Magazine





https://fullcirclemagazine.org/









Mintcast





https://mintcast.org/









Podcatcher





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









Podcast addict





https://podcastaddict.com/









Antenna pod





https://antennapod.org/









Robinhood: Trading & Investing





https://robinhood.com/us/en/









E-Trade is an investment brokerage and electronic trading platform





https://us.etrade.com/home









Distrohoppers' Digest Podcast





https://distrohoppersdigest.org/









Spotify





https://open.spotify.com/









Software-defined radio





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio









Filk music





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









OggCamp 2026





https://www.oggcamp.org/









Moss music





https://mordewis.bandcamp.com/









Discord





https://discord.com/






https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030853132-Server-Folders-101









The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy






https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy









Baofeng BF-50





https://www.baofengradio.com/products/5r-mini






https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWtbDtMyqMA









Baofeng UV-5R Mini Dual-band Radio





https://www.radioddity.com/products/baofeng-uv-5r-mini









Pi Day





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









GNU World Order





https://gnuworldorder.info/









SDF Public Access UNIX System





https://sdf.org/









NetBSD





https://www.netbsd.org/






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









Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+





https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-1-model-b-plus/









OpenBSD





https://www.openbsd.org/






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









FreeBSD





https://www.freebsd.org/






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









Something about "ports"?





https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml






https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/4/html/security_guide/ch-ports









Chapter 4. Installing Applications: Packages and Ports





https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/ports/






https://freebsdfoundation.org/resource/installing-a-port-on-freebsd/









OpenBSD Ports - Working with Ports [Handbook Index]





https://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/ports.html









SerenityOS





https://serenityos.org/






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









Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine.





https://ladybird.org/









Unix





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






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









UNIX System V





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









UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered.





https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/recovered-unix-v4-tape-quickly-yields-a-usable-operating-system-nostalgia-addicts-can-now-boot-up-unix-v4-in-a-browser-window






https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/23/unix_v4_tape_successfully_recovered/









Newsboat is an RSS/Atom feed reader for the text console.





https://newsboat.org/index.html









Podboat





https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/newsboat/podboat.1.en









EPR: Terminal/CLI Epub reader written in Python 3.6.





https://github.com/wustho/epr









Ruby Programming Language





https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)






https://rubyonrails.org/









Crystal is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language.





https://crystal-lang.org/






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_(programming_language)









Plasma is a Desktop





https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/









Vim is a highly configurable text editor





https://www.vim.org/






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)









Sublime Text





https://www.sublimetext.com/









sed, a stream editor





https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html






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









English punctuation





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






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









List of typographical symbols and punctuation marks





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









Pluma (text editor)





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluma_(text_editor)






https://github.com/mate-desktop/pluma









Kate (text editor)





https://kate-editor.org/






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_(text_editor)









Vimium





https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/






https://vimium.github.io/






https://github.com/philc/vimium









Zen Browser





https://zen-browser.app/






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









Vivaldi





https://vivaldi.com/download/









Thunderbird





https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/






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









Uniden





https://uniden.com/









Arduino





https://www.arduino.cc/









Raspberry Pi





https://www.raspberrypi.com/









Plex





https://www.plex.tv/









Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino





https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/10/qualcomm-to-acquire-arduino-accelerating-developers--access-to-i






https://www.arduino.cc/qualcomm






https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/qualcomms-buying-arduino--what-it-means-makers/









Perfboard Hackduino





https://www.instructables.com/Perfboard-Hackduino-Arduino-compatible-circuit/









DIY Arduino





https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Arduino-UNO-How-to-Make-Your-Own-Arduino-Uno-B/






https://docs.arduino.cc/hardware/make-your-uno-kit/






https://www.electronicshub.org/make-your-own-arduino-board/









Notacon





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









hak5 / bashbunny-payloads





https://github.com/hak5/bashbunny-payloads






Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.

01 Introduction

This episode is the eighth and final one in an 8 part series on nuclear reactor technology.

In this episode I will talk about future reactor technologies, particularly what are referred to as "Generation IV" reactors.

Some of these will be simply additional developments of reactors that have already been discussed in this series, but this will show what technologies are seen as most promising today.

03 What is Generation IV

Generation IV International Forum is an international organization whose membership is composed of many of the countries that are researching advanced fission reactors.

Their goal is to conduct a number of joint research projects to advance the state of the art.

The members agree to participate in and share research on advanced technologies.

04 Research Subjects

05 Lead Fast Reactors (LFR)

08 Sodium Fast Reactor (SFR)

10 Gas-Cooled Fast Reactor (GFR)

13 Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR)

16 Molten Salt Reactors (MSR)

19 Super Critical Water Reactors (SCWR)

27 Episode Conclusion

In this episode we looked at the reactor types being studied under an international organization called the "Generation IV International Forum".

All of these reactor types except for supercritical water reactors are not new and we have looked at them previously.

Supercritical water reactors themselves represent the natural evolution of water cooled reactors.

I expect that many of these research projects will not result in commercially successful results. Such is the nature of R&D.

The supercritical water reactors would on the surface seem to have the most promise in terms of commercial use, as they focus on bringing two very well established technologies together, water cooled reactors and supercritical water.

However, I'm not an expert in this field, so I'm just making an educated guess on that.

30 Series Conclusion

This is the end of the series on nuclear reactor technology.

Episode 1 covered nuclear basics, including basic terminology and civil versus military nuclear material.

Episode 2 covered nuclear fuel, including the different types, recycling of spent fuel, uranium and thorium resources, and medical isotopes.

Episode 3 covered reactor basics, including slow versus fast reactors, moderators, coolants, steam generation, refuelling methods, and the three main commercial reactor types.

Episode 4 covered the less common reactor types, including types which are no longer used, some historical developmental dead ends, and some types which may possibly be making a come back.

Episode 5 covered fast reactors, including the different types, some of their history, why they were developed, and why they have so far only seen limited use.

Episode 6 covered thorium reactors, including what is thorium and how it differs from uranium, why there is interest in thorium, what sorts of reactors can use thorium, and why thorium has not yet seen widespread use.

Episode 7 covered small modular reactors or SMRs, what the reason is for developing them, what are the different ways they may be used, and where they are currently being built.

Episode 8 covered "Generator IV" reactors which is a collection of future technologies.

I hope that this series has been useful and informative on how nuclear reactors work and what the different types of reactors and different types of fuel are.

I have focused on the past and present without looking very much beyond what is already developed except in this final episode.

I have focused on the reactors, fuel, and medical isotopes, without much discussion of mining, refining, converting, enrichment, fuel fabrication, or disposal.

I also haven't talked much about the rest of a functioning power plant, which includes cooling, steam turbines, generators, transformers, control systems, refuelling systems, switch gear, transmission grid connections, grid coordination, and many, many other things.

And of course there's the entire grid itself, a very complex thing when operated at scale.

None the less we count on the lights going on when we turn on the light switch while seldom thinking about all the things that go on behind the scenes to make that happen.

As the recent blackout in Spain shows, that is something that we can't take for granted.

With plans for "Net Zero" amounting essentially to the further electrification of everything, we need reliable sources of electrical energy to make that happen. Without reliable energy available at the touch of a switch, we don't even have a stone age civilization, let alone a modern one.

So think about that the next time you turn on the lights or listen to a podcast or do nearly anything else in your daily life.

This concludes the eighth and final episode of an 8 part series on nuclear reactor technology.

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