Considering that for all intents and purposes ever since 2014 BTC has been unmineable using GPU's I highly doubt that... Any farm that at one time mined BTC with GPU's will have closed their doors long long ago.

Merge mining uses the same hash rate to work on two blockchains at once: the original blockchain (e.g. Bitcoin) and the merge mined blockchain (e.g. RSK or NMC).

Note that it is mining 2 different coins so it is NOT a faster nor more efficient way to mine Bitcoin. It only benefits the secondary coins. Even more to the point, the block rewards originate as the secondary coins and do not count as finding a BTC block. Depending on where you are mining those may be converted to BTC but of course they have a much smaller value then BTC.

It and all other browser-based 'mining' programs/add-ons are at best scams and at their worst malware that can steal passwords and other login data, crypto addresses, etc.. Avoid at all costs!

You have a serious misconception of what the IAEA is and does. A good place to start is here.
Established in 1957, more than anything it is a clearinghouse of research and real-world facility operations databases covering all aspects of nuclear programs involving power generation and *other* uses.

Because of the open flow of information between researchers along with industry and government representatives, yes it has countless whitepapers covering what should be best practices in design and operations but there are no guidelines per-se. It is a (theoretically) non-political, independent and globally recognized 3rd-party monitor of nuclear programs. The IAEA has zero say in the licensing processes. That is entirely up to each countries governments. Same applies to said governments even allowing IAEA access to information about their nuclear programs.

Um, you might want to read this Mainly point-3....For all intents and purposes, mining BTC using CPU's is impossible. You are seeing no results because you are never submitting a single share. Odds are at least 1 block if not more are found before you could compute even 1 share. I say *could* because each time a block is found on the network the work sent to a miner is changed so the time your CPU(s) spent counts for nothing.

"International permission"? When mankind cannot even agree to end wars which just so happens to be a bigger threat to survival than any source of power? Riiiigggghhhhttt.. And I'd like to fly and spit diamonds - don't see that happening either.

Just what apparently very colorful and wacky world with everyone singing Kumbaya & hugging do you live in? Yes, nuclear power is dangerous if proper design & operation rules are not followed. Guess what, so is any power plant regardless its type.

With proper location away from earth faults and tsunami areas along with having properly trained operators nuclear power is safer and does far less environmental damage than almost any other type of power.

Um, it's not... Each stick is pulling 3A at 5vdc or 15w. In North America all standard 120VAC outlets are 15A, not 20. 120v * 15A = 1,800w if pushed to the max (not a good idea to do 24x7). Thass a whole lotta sticks

And as has been asked elsewhere 'Another new all time high' for difficulty is newsworthy or cause for concern, why?
Ever since Bitcoin began difficulty has almost always hit a new ATH every epoch. Ja very occasionally it goes down a bit but the main trend is always UP. It's part and parcel of how BTC works...

That said, it certainly does translate to huge number of miners going online...

Ja. It takes skilled technicians to tame it and bring it under control again... 
The repair/replace process starts with you contacting the reseller you got it from.

Came across this company https://www.jenbacher.us/en/our-solutions who not only specialize in biogas but co-generation as well to use the waste engine heat to create more power...

I suppose that I should point out that the OP's ideas regarding using the heat from miners to generate power is not something new. Using comparatively low temperature waste process heat to generate power has been done for decades. Just do a search for 'waste heat co-generation'.

Along that line, mining chips are designed to run most efficiently in a fairly narrow range of temperatures. In the case of mining chips it is very hot compared to other kinds of chips - the only others designed for high temperature applications are for automotive & aerospace uses. Back to miners, the old Spondollies are a perfect example of that. Their chips were designed to run at such a high temp because the miner form factor dictated a 2U high rack mount which meant cooling issues. They worked quite well BUT very often needed a pre-heat from an external source (a hair dryer) before they would even start...

That narrow temp constraint is still true today. It's why most miners start with a minute or 2 of high power operation to get them warmed up then restart to begin applying the configured speed & Vcore parameters. The other way would be like how Kano's drivers for Sidehacks Compac's does it: They force the miner to start at a fixed low speed and ramp up in steps with each having to satisfy performance checks before going higher to finally reach configured speed giving the chips the needed pre-heat levels.

On cooking, remember for medium rare beef target temp is 140F (60C) so using a hot-side fluid temp of around the 70-80C temp chips want to run at put through a secondary heat exchanger loop to suvee meats would be quite doable...

Links please or it's just random Internet rambling...

Wrong. Even the minuscule amount of energy that 'leaks out' as data over the LAN becomes heat.

100% of the power feeding a miner is turned into heat. Even the energy transferred to the air by the fans increasing the air pressure so it moves also slightly raises it temperature.

The energy feeding any device cannot just disappear. Even when used to cause motion or whatever, at the end of the chain it eventually it becomes heat.

As for the OP's equation - that deals with the amount of usable work energy that can be recovered from the energy put in. 'Usable' being defined as being able to produce work be it powering a pump, moving a vehicle, etc. or generating electricity so the recovered energy can be used elsewhere. A miner does not do that. It just sucks in energy and uses it to power circuitry for the calculations & runs other sundry things like the fans. Since aside from running the fans no physical effort is created all the input energy consumed is directly transformed into heat

Ah, then you should edit the OP topic title like I just did to reflect your actual question...
That said, it is probably a combination of both the chips and pools limiting it to 4 midstates. My guess is that the chip circuitry only supports 4 and the pools expect that. The whitepaper on AsicBoost makes mention of it increasing chip complexity and to the Foundries making chips complexity = higher cost. I seem to recall discussion long long ago when ASICboost was introduced about using more midstates introducing too much lag into the miner communications which is why using 4 was settled on as a good compromise.

The S9 has been natively supporting ASICboost as do all pools since around 2017 so there is no 'trying it out'...
You would have to have one of the earliest S9's and never upgraded the FW for it to not use ASICboost.

It should also be pointed out that Foundry is not a pool per-se. They mine strictly for themselves and smaller farms that buy gear from them and have it hosted by Foundry. My guess is that the hosted farms are splitting the blocks w/Foundry so in one sense it *is* a pool. Just a huge private one...

As for tx censoring - only Marathon tried doing that last year. They soon stopped that when they saw no one else was censoring tx's and realized it was costing them potential income.

Odds are, they work quite well as long as folks do the proper research regarding using solar power in their regions. You just plan ahead for the seasonal changes in power produced...

Most pools do not care and therefore do not check what the firmware is other than if it supports ASICboost and in the case of Braiins and a couple others does it support the xnsub (extra nonce) switch. At least 2 pools - Kano's and Braiins (Slush) do check deeper. Kano does it to block 3rd party hacked cgminer firmware, Braiins does it to set what their pool fee is and/or control the DevFee function built into their Braiins miner firmware.

When a miner 1st connects with a pool the miner firmware *does* have a fingerprint that can be used to tell what it is.
As for I have to assume you used Braiins? If so, Braiins is not hacked cgminer, it is clean code. Kano initially only allowed it on the Solo until he verified that it can return expected high diff shares. Once that was verified Braiins is now allowed on the main pool as well. As for the hacked cgminer ones AFAIK his pool code is very very good at spotting it  

Also, getting waaayyy off topic here...

Correct

Also correct. The manufacturers created driver code so cgminer and their chips can talk to each other. Problem is - none of the manufacturers have published their code as the GPL requires. Even bigger issue is that several people/companies have taken the manufacturers code and further modified it and sell it to give the user better control over speed of the miners and the power used: This is the 3rd party code.  Because they also refuse to publish their modified code as the original open source GPL requires AND adding insult to injury are selling their modified firmware, Kano is pissed about it. (remember, most miner manufacturers are Chinese so filing lawsuits against the OEM's like Bitmain, Innosilicon, etc. would be very problematic)

. Correct. Kano's pool is https://kano.is
-ck's pool is http://solo.ckpool.org

Correct. -ck is a medical doctor - not a programmer. To him programming is a hobby and he stopped supporting cgminer many years ago. He runs his pool 'for fun' and does not care about the GPL violations.
Kano however is a programmer, it is his job. To run his pool he may have to accept the fact all OEM miners violate the GPL but he does NOT have to allow the far smaller numbers of miners running 3rd party code to run on his pool so his pool software automatically blocks them.