I suggest you buy your electric bike now. they'll be more expensive later.

anyway, staying online right now feels like physically bashing my head against a brick wall, so i'm gonna log off again & go read a book or something

A modern example most nuclear engineers love is the 'barn' as a physical unit of (TINY) cross sectional area (1E-28 sq m). If you're a neutron, this area is huge, and therefore easy to hit, like the broad side of a barn. See related: shed & outhouse. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_(u...

i love to purchase a mack book to do my software development on. it's the perfect blend of easy user interface and powerful unix tools.

Organ Pipe Cactus commissioned me to design this poster to celebrate their new dark sky status. www.spacearttravelbureau.com #art #spaceart #astronomy

I would build a nuclear-powered ship (like the NS Savannah) just for funsies. Such a ship could have useful and selfless benefits, but, if I must, I promise to only use it as a pleasure yacht.

What does "going critical" mean? If you shoot a neutron into some uranium ore, some atoms will split by fission, but you haven't made a nuclear reactor. Too many secondary neutrons leak out or get absorbed without splitting neighboring atoms. 1/n

President of MIT not mincing words today in @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2026/05/27/s...

the intrusive thoughts won

A 1959 depiction of a NASA Nuclear-Electric spaceship. The reactor is at one end, the crew at the opposite end, with as much "separation is free shielding" as possible in between. From: www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/?p=5592

Just a perfect beer

I am very glad that Watch Duty exists, and is holding the line on providing accurate, freely available disaster information to the public, outside of the locked down and intentionally confusing confines of X and Meta. app.watchduty.org

Which brings us to the reasons DU gets used in weapons. They are NOT for radiological dispersal. We use them to burn metal fire hot through other metal (i.e. armor) in conjunction with a secondary penetrator. Also, DU is denser than lead. Lotta kinetic energy in those rounds.

Depleted Uranium, dep-U or DU in comman shorthand, is the remainer after natural uranium has been purified down to ONLY uranium and then isotopically separated to remove as much of the fissile U-233 and U-235 as possible. What remains is almost, but not quite, pure U-238.

Literally not. U238 is not dirty bomb material

The Heisey Marigold Twist line of glasswares are typically much more active than other, greener colored kitchen glass. :) Someone told me about these years ago so I bought this single bowl and was not disappoonted to find it measured thousands of counts per minute greater than my few other plates.

At Three Mile Island, Hannah Pell does historical research, talks with people inside and outside the plant, and makes sure that the plant is complying with regulations. #whatcanphysicistsdo #physics #nuclear

Nuclear Scientists Fucking Around In Friend’s Backyard Run Away After Stuffing Fission Bomb Into Coke Can

Hanford, EM’s largest site, lost over a third of its staff in FY25; most of the 96 who left accepted Deferred Resignation Program offers, and about 30% of those were in mission-critical positions. Another 30% will be retirement-eligible by the end of 2030.

Mission-critical positions at EM lost 29% of their staff since FY23, resulting in a 44% vacancy rate. Of the 183 mission-critical staff lost, 59 were especially key to safety, according to EM officials.

Is Gmail search severely degraded or am I losing my mind

LANL Working To Increase Headcount With Focus On External Hiring losalamosreporter.com/2026/05/18/l...

Post a meme made by you

My painting MADISON RIVER

The New START treaty officially expired in early February 2026. While Moscow claims it currently intends to respect central limits, the complete halt of official data exchanges deals a heavy blow to international transparency, lowering confidence in future open-source estimates. (5/)

PWR, BWR, HWR, MSR, SFR/LFR, HTGR

Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, and Bottom

Large national lab budgets are on par with large university R&D budgets. Except there's less than a dozen national labs (FFRDCs) with budgets > 1 billion and there are literally dozens of universities with that much in research expenditures

Conservatives hate universities because they are broke outside the club, liberals think it’s gauche to brag, and foreigners self soothe by making “100 top universities for elite reproduction” lists that ignore the fact that, like, ETH Zurich and Oxford have a lower R&D budget than UW-Madison

Many people have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, but the US research university is globally dominant to an almost unbelievable degree. The typical state university is a football team stapled to a R&D lab with a budget bigger than the entire nation of Belgium.

In some ways a national lab feels a lot like a college campus, but there's really no equivalent to undergrads sunbathing on the quad on a sunny day

State insect of New Mexico

you’re in her DMs I’m in the hydrological corner of The Cube™️

HOORAY! A major non-proliferation & anti-nuclear terrorism success in past decade+ has been: committed effort to -reduction in use & removal from non-nuclear weapons states of weapons-usable HEU where possible -removal of weaponizable nuclear materials where possible

The US, Venezuela, UK, and the IAEA collaborated to remove legacy HEU fuel from the RV-1 reactor (decommissioned in 1991). The fuel has arrived in the US, where the plan is to recover the uranium and downblend it into HALEU for reuse www.iaea.org/newscenter/p... #NukeSky

I volunteer to be the astronaut safeguards inspector for space reactors

give DC statehood combine the dakotas save money on not having to change the flag

For anyone interested in nuclear history, the Museum of the Air Force has Bockscar, the plane that dropped the second, so far final, nuclear weapon used in war on Nagasaki

Everyone who told me to add as many hours as possible to my time at the Museum of the Air Force, you were right! I will have to go back

Advertisements using maps always catch my eye.

At this point, solving climate change is cheaper than not solving it -- not only on some grand 50 year time horizon, but tomorrow, today, immediately. Soving climate change *is* affordability. Maybe Dems should tell voters about that.

Ok just to be clear: “new Mexican restaurant” = restaurant serving any type of Mexican cuisine “New Mexican restaurant” = serving a very specific regional style of Mexican cuisine that’s pretty unique. The capital N changes the meaning

I'm honored to be taking over the 44-year-long tradition of nuclear criticality safety short courses at UNM from Bob Busch this year. We still have some spots open! For crit safety professionals, students, and enthusiasts, this is a fantastic in-person introduction to the field. #NukeSky

Everything’s a conspiracy if you don’t understand how anything works.

Lightning bolts on Jupiter release 2.4 kt of energy! www.science.org/content/arti...

I haven't had a music crush like this since I twigged to R. L. Burnside. If you are tired of hearing me talk about Charley Crockett, I am sorry, but I am not stopping anytime soon.

"Although nuclear power can and should be a part of reducing the world’s reliance on carbon-emitting sources of energy, it must be accompanied by strong regulations, community engagement, information sharing, and transparency."