A pleasant morning today at the DeLongchamps and Red Bluff uranium mines near Pyramid Lake in Nevada with Taylor Wilson. Both were small producers in the 1950s and '60s and offer nice specimens of autunite and radiation-darkened quartz phenocrysts. ☢️fun

Taylor Wilson and Chloe graced us with a visit at the UNM nuclear reactor. He's now working on the frontiers of radiobiology (among other things).

A trip to visit Dr. Tim Koeth, @univofmaryland.bsky.social. I got a couple of my nuclear engineering summer campers and a current UNM NE student in to see the UMD nuclear reactor at power...and Tim's cyclotron, making neutrons!

Another December highlight: 12-year-old Aidan McMillan's hobby Farnsworth fusor in Dallas, producing around 150000 neutrons / second from deuterium fusion, built over three years of effort. He has great mentorship, especially regarding safety, which is obviously important for kids. #HobbyNuke

A solstice celebration in Butcher's Hill, #Baltimore was a highlight of my holidays, something I found refreshingly original. The crankie theater featuring Ravioli and Dorito is the work of @marthasi.bsky.social.

WaPo wants my subscription dollars back. But as long as this is a Jeff Bezos-owned rag, they have no hope of "holding power to account" and no chance of getting me to subscribe again. Laughable.

Nobel prize winner George Akerlof (my former colleague) on the firing of statistics officials: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/o...

☢️fun gamma ray spectrum of the day: photonuclear activation from a 15-MV cancer therapy accelerator. As part of our summer camp, we ran 5000 MU (5 kGy in water, basically) with an HPGe detector in the vault. Some of the observed nuclides are formed in the detector itself, some in the linac head.

"Experience Nuclear Engineering 2025"--a pilot one-week residential summer camp for high-schoolers--concluded at #UNM this past weekend. I had a lot of fun planning all the hands-on components, including #nuclear reactor operations, and made a lot of new friends! ☢️fun #NukeSky

Albuquerque rose to the occasion today to send a message of resistance against the lawless Trump regime and its sycophants. I saw a lot of enthusiasm and homemade signs.

The UNM NE Department is hosting a FREE residential summer camp July 20-26 for HS students. See link in attached flyer for details. #Nuclear #Engineering @unm.edu @unmengineering.bsky.social #NukeSky ☢️fun

#UNM Nuclear Engineering is hosting a residential, hands-on summer camp for HS students, July 20-26. It's FREE to attend--and should be a lot of fun. I'm director. Spread the word & register here: experiencenuclearengineering.totalcamps.com/About%20Us Questions? Let me know! #NukeSky ☢️fun

The Mind Research Network (www.mrn.org) on UNM North Campus uses a nice 3-tesla MRI for research. If you're in #Albuquerque, sign up for a study, contribute to important research, get cool images & corporeally experience Faraday's Law. T1- and T2-weighted examples of my own dome attached.

Gingersnap is home and ready to #chonk out after getting treated for hyperthyroidism with iodine-131. His head reads about 10 mR/h at 10 cm. Not great, not terrible, as they say. ☢️fun

F-18 is widely used in medical PET imaging. I ran a gamma spec on a discarded F-18 vial (F-18 all decayed away, no activity measurable on a Geiger counter), and the traces of radioactive Re, Co, Cr, and Tc point to a variety of proton reactions on W, Fe, and Mo in the cyclotron target! ☢️fun

It's wages-of-sin-are-death Wednesday out on Central Avenue. I was invited to "get up with Jesus on the cross today," which I politely declined.

Jeff #Bezos is a disgrace--an enshittifying force in US civics and the marketplace, along with fellow dissipated plutocrats / trumpanzees Musk & Zuckerberg. Accordingly, I've decided to unsubscribe from his rag (WaPo) and his junk emporium (Amazon Prime). Feeling better already.

In "honor" of the appointment of RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health, I made a short video that looks at the kinds of radioactive products that flourish in the alt health and wellness ecosystem of a society struggling with declining information literacy. #NukeSky ☢️fun www.youtube.com/shorts/S4Qjz...

For sale: Polimaster PM1703GN PRD. Working fine (both gamma & neutron response). This device uses both CsI and LiI scintillator modules and reads in roentgen units for gamma and counts/sec for neutrons. Has data logging abilities. $200 OBO. #HobbyNuke

For sale: Exploranium GR-100 PRD, working fine but heavily used, with scratches on the screen! The GR-100 is the gamma-only version of this detector (though it has a neutron indicator lamp). It's a little CsI scintillator with dosimetric readout and data logging. $150 OBO. #HobbyNuke

Hand-loading of nuclear fuel into the #UNM AGN-201M reactor, part of an approach-to-critical teaching lab we perform every year. The fuel is enriched UO2 in HDPE plastic. With our 5W licensed power, the dose rate near the core is less than 10 mrem/h. #NukeSky

He's a big trump donor & climate denier. Like any of this cabinet, I'd wait to offer congratulations publicly unless & until he demonstrates an ability to be reasonable and not corrupt in office! Perry didn't know what DOE did 😂, but merits an attaboy (I suppose) for not being flagrantly corrupt.

Using Pu-242 has resulted in some of the best colors I’ve ever seen as a chemist. 🤩 @realtimechem.bsky.social @berkeleylab.lbl.gov #plutonium #realtimechem #fblockrocks #radiochemistry

The New York Times is so blatantly in the tank for Trump. Calling Canada and Mexico "recalcitrant" is just beyond the pale. It's straight up propaganda.

Several conversations today w people in the key executive departments. And while the particulars are hard to pin down my impression is that the Musk take over stuff is considerably worse than is being presented in the press. By this I don’t necessarily things they *done* yet but the level of …

Another nucleus explodin' in the CdTe Advacam Minipix at 38,000 feet from #cosmic rays. See downthread for the corresponding data extracted & plotted w Matplotlib. ☢️fun #physics #fission

FREE to a good home: 3-rank 2-manual + pedal pipe #organ located in storage in #Albuquerque. Pipes & chest vintage 1917 Moller, case is hardwood & more recent. Action is electric. 8' closed wood, 4' open metal, 8' reed (oboe). You need to have a hobby mentality to set up & maintain.

Countries targeted by trumpist tariffs should retaliate by punishing the front-row plutocrats at the felon's inauguration. That's where the money is, that's the true tumpanzee base, that's who would bawl the loudest, and that would make a lot of people happy. pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/b...

Punishing local trumpist sycophants must be a priority in this era of destructive governance. In #Albuquerque around #UNM, I recommend a shutout of Flying Star Cafe in Nob Hill. The owners are full-blown red-hatted MAGAs, see @boycottmaganm.org. Time for better neighbors (& better food).

Greetings from our new fixer-upper rowhouse in #Baltimore. We booked travel here for the inauguration back when we dared dream about a Harris presidency. Alas! Instead, we're enjoying each other, this great city, & the kindness of neighbors. In the spirit of Candide, we'll cultivate our garden.

America's #oligarchs are a dissolute, intellectually-bankrupt, and deeply insecure bunch. #Zuck wouldn't be able to cut it as a $20/h offshore code monkey for his own company & I'm pretty sure #Elon hasn't done any work AT ALL in twenty years. We need to really rethink our notions of meritocracy.

I tossed up an indoor dipole antenna in our rowhouse in Butcher's Hill, Baltimore, connected to an AirSpy HF+ Discovery SDR, and just now noticed that I received my own 3-watt FT8 signal on 15m (from a QRPLabs QMX+) back in Albuquerque. #HamRadio #AmateurRadio

Introducing the #HobbyNuke feed, a way to keep up with the amateur / avocational / student nuclear physics community on BlueSky--focusing on experiments, demos, projects, & gear (toys). To submit posts to the feed, tag posts with #HobbyNuke or ☢️fun (I will add you to the approved list). #NukeSky

Cosmic ray tracks in a CdTe hybrid pixel detector (Advacam) at 37000 feet, including a nice #fission or spallation "star". Just wish I had a bigger detector! I will put a few more event images from this flight into the thread below 👇 #NukeSky ☢️fun

Attempt at making autoradiographs with uranium glaze tiles and a 6" x-ray image intensifier tube. These are one-hour exposures captured electronically with a Fuji X-T2 camera through the II tube optic. Better images are possible with sheet film like Ilford HP5+, but it takes a week! #NukeSky ☢️fun

As the academic semester opens, I figured I'd get a head start on my perennial (probably futile) pitch to students to resist putting AI slop in their work product. I dropped some example prompts in Poe Assistant...and rubbish blew forth. Enjoy today's episode of "Are you smarter than a LLM bot."

Ann Telnaes deserves praise for sacrificing her job at the disgraced Washington Post in service of journalistic independence open.substack.com/pub/anntelna...

Jimmy Carter, whose many contributions are being celebrated after his passing, reassured a nervous nation in the wake of the Three Mile Island meltdown, visiting the stricken TMI-2 plant on April 1, 1979. When I visited in 2022, photos of him were taped to the panel. #NukeSky

4 curies of 18F-FDG in a radiopharmacy hot cell, something you don't see every day (unless you work there). The "snow" on the image when the vial is close to the camera is from radiation (positrons & annihilation radiation) creating charge carriers directly in the GoPro sensor. #NukeSky

🐆 are eating his face and he's having a sad because that was supposed to happen to OTHER people! Bro thought he was exceptional! 😂 This guy is allegedly a "visionary thinker," according to his LinkedIn. 🤡

In commemoration of the Dec. 22, 1938 discovery of nuclear fission by Hahn & Strassmann (and the work of Meitner & Frisch to explain it over the following Christmas break), I recorded a little experiment at the UNM reactor. Warm wishes for the holidays! #NukeSky www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEOo...

@robbinw.bsky.social making an amphora in the Tesuque Glassworks hot shop today. A great place for local handmade glass in Santa Fe, and lessons!

This '60s-vintage commemorative trinket from Gulf General Atomic contains a TRISO nuclear fuel simulant. The pellets are contaminated with actual fuel materials (highly-enriched uranium and thorium-232), suggesting it was made on the same equipment as the real fuel. #Nukesky

#NukeSky Edward R. Murrow at Stagg Field on the 10th anniversary of CP-1 criticality interviews Herb Anderson, Enrico Fermi, Arthur Compton, & Leona Woods. (See my other post for a technical look at the experiment on Dec. 2, 1942.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAMa...

Happy Birthday (Dec. 2, 1942) to the #nuclear age! Most of us have seen the famous galvanometer trace from Chicago Pile-1 when the first (human-controlled) self-sustaining #fission chain reaction was achieved. My slides here help explain that record, with reference to my #MCNP model of #CP-1.

Local #NewMexico gift ideas: my wife Robbin (robbinw.bsky.social) blows glass as a weekend hobby up at Tesuque Glass Works near Santa Fe. They sell work made in the hot shop, as well as lessons (highly recommended!). And anyone can come in and watch whoever is in the shop do their thing.

I occasionally rekindle my interest in #amateurradio (callsign KF4KIG), and the last couple weeks I have been playing around with the new QRP Labs QMX+ transciever kit and an 80m off-center-fed dipole that I managed to toss up above the house. This kit is innovative, compact, and a fantastic value.

Colorado State's AGN-201. Come to UNM if you want to drive one of these babies!