Gavin Ridley

@ZeroDarkDev It was good for me until they added type hinting. Defeats the purpose of the language

Am I petty to hate a single language everyone loves because I don't like the syntax alone? It's python.

@ZeroDarkDev @grok run vimtutor, dive in, and never look back. You need no more from a text editor

Yes I switch between 10 different editors. Why? Haven't found one I love yet. Closest one I like is Clion but wish its UI was more minimal like Emacs with the performance of Neovim/Vim. Maybe I should ask @grok but rather ask real people instead. So what do ya'll think?

@ZeroDarkDev By the way, turn on -Wall!

Me trying to be clever adding a 69th overload to a new datatype to somehow find the root cause of a memory issue i have: Also for curiosity if it will even work. 🤷‍♂️

@ZeroDarkDev Not enough HPC dev twitter out there 🫡

Sunrise over the Great Bass Pro Pyramid of Memphis, Tennessee. Eat your heart out, Cairo.

@clumma awesome share man, thanks for posting. I’m blown away

In fission, we simulate reactors from particle transport on up to thermal hydraulics. Even though we could make them work with napkin math if we wanted. In fusion, they only use napkin math, get it wrong by 500x, and it takes them 3 years to notice link.springer.com/article/10.100…

New paper on thermal neutron scattering just dropped: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Moltbook debate in a nutshell

@StupidBill1 @Atomicrod That’s awesome, but should depend strongly on core size. It’s not clear to me this scales up in a stable way when leakage feedbacks do less for you.

Plutonium is a capable fission fuel with the potential for eliminating nuclear fuel supply limits. Those who prosper from deep involvement with The Hydrocarbon Economy fear its market impacts. The Los Alamos National Laboratory is the nation’s center of excellence in Pu research and testing. @oklo is developing a reactor called Pluto as part of the DOE Reactor Pilot Program. It’s designed to use surplus Pu from nuclear weapons in a “swords to plowshares” pathway. LANL is helping by providing some Pu testing services in partnership with Oklo.

George Westinghouse would marvel at the incredible advances in nuclear technology that our namesake company has made over the last 75 years. About half of all the world’s nuclear power plants are based on Westinghouse nuclear technology. ​ Last week, “Bricks George” unveiled our advanced modular AP1000® PWR bricks set. You can see his bricks engineering buddy working below on a new AP1000 unit, just like the ones we are deploying across the world. ​ Now, we're giving away five Westinghouse bricks sets to people who reshare this post. We'll draw names on Monday from everyone who reposted!​ You can build a mini-Westinghouse nuclear reactor at home!

@MattLoszak It’s not just that people have to want it; it’s that exceptionally driven people have to rise to answer the call! Wishing luck on the project.

Forms set, rebar installed, concrete poured and forms stripped IN ONE DAY. Incredible how fast our contractors are working on site. Reminds me of YC "make something people want"... When the whole country (suppliers, investors, customers) wants new nuclear, it happens fast.

@Object_Zero_ @JamesRi34113613 Realistically reprocessing costs and fast reactor builds are so expensive that not even the most exuberant nuclear startups are proposing this at scale. You’d easily be talking LCOE > $200/MWh for this. Without a carbon penalty, the obvious choice is to burn gas.

@JamesRi34113613 1kg of U perfectly fissioned is 950 MW-days or 22,800MWh. Assuming a wholesale price of $50 / MWh that’s… $1.14 million of electricity.

1 kg of uranium contains 950 MW-days of energy if fully fissioned. That’s 8.2x10^13 joules USA has 700,000 tonnes of uranium stockpiled, mostly in depleted uranium format which is fertile. That’s 5.75x10^22 joules The ONLY way to access this energy reservoir is with fast breed-burn reactors. This is enough energy power all of human civilisation for 100 years. The Earth’s oceans have 4,500,000,000 tonnes of uranium dissolved in them. If we retrieve 50% of that oceanic uranium (halve the concentration), that’s enough energy to power all of human civilisation for 300,000 years. For context, homo sapiens only evolved 200,000 years ago. We have enough uranium to power the entire evolutionary lifecycle of our species. We have enough uranium to power 300 Earth sized civilisations of terrestrial work for a millennium. We can do this with no emissions, minuscule land use and negligible effect on nature and biodiversity. These are technologies and resources that exist today. Having said all of this, there are only 2 breed-burn commercial reactors operating in the world today, both are in Russia.

As I sit here and read “The Quest”, better understanding how oil has shaped geopolitics, you can’t help but to wonder why Venezuela specifically is apparently worth going after.

Weak flow through this minion fireplace solved. I was tempted to run some CFD, but hand calcs suggested form losses transitioning to the chimney were dominating the pressure losses. So we straightened out the pipe from 45° to near vert and gave a manifold to reduce form losses. Now she burns like a champ. There is a greater engineering lesson to be learned here: quick approximations get you most of the value and let you start iterating sooner rather than later.

@isaiah_p_taylor @nelvOfficial It’s correct for large LWRs. You’re running on HALEU and hitting something like 20 MWd/kgU with a graphite core that small no?

@nelvOfficial That is correct for now but we’ll see how cheap we can get these things in the next decade

Valar Atomics will make thorium reactors when our normal reactors have gotten so cheap that enriched uranium becomes a large portion of overall cost (>50%?), justifying a significant increase in system complexity to utilize fast neutrons.

@Nuclearjunkie @Andercot @valaratomics Importantly: what burnup levels are claimed at discharge? That seems like a fundamental economic barrier given their goals.

Who is making the fuel? Where are they with SNM Licensing? How much SNM is in the core? Who is making the power conversion system? Have the heat exchangers and circulators been tested at temperature and pressure for a significant amount of time? What does the shielding profile look like? Doses to both people and equipment? What graphite grade and does it have radiation data? keff at shutdown, during transport, and under water ingress? Total system source term at end of life?

Nov 2023: $1.5M seed round Nov 2025: $120M Series A + atom splitting Damn bruh

@joshdr83 Many are better. I went to Lavaca BBQ recently and it was off the hook—no doubt better than this.

Salt Lick BBQ: #1 in the US, #7 in Austin.

@NuclearHazelnut How about the price tag?

Nothing is perfect, but nuclear provides carbon-free electricity 24/7, uses less land than any other source & keeps communities powered for generations…. That’s as close to perfect as energy gets⚛️