American Nuclear Society
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@ANS_org
The American #Nuclear Society is a not-for-profit dedicated to advancing the peaceful use of nuclear science and technology. 🇺🇸⚛️🌎
Criticality achieved on the early morning of July 4th 🇺🇸
CRITICALITY NUMBER THREE! 🎉 On June 30, 2026, at around 11:55 PM MDT, @DeployableE’s Unity microreactor achieved initial criticality at @INL. It is the third nuclear test reactor this year to go critical under @ENERGY authorization. Congratulations to Deployable Energy on reaching this historic milestone!
Moments ago, Valar Atomics took Ward 250 critical for the first time. This fulfills President Trump’s EO 14301, which called for 3 advanced reactors to go critical by July 4th. This is our second criticality as a company, and an important step toward our goal of power by July 4.
Gross but urgent: We eradicated the screwworm from the USA in the 1950s with nuclear reactors, and we can do it again. You're seeing in the news today that the screwworm is returning. It's a horrible fly whose flesh-eating larva cause mass livestock suffering and farmer financial loss. The female screwworm fly mates only once. So we factory-farm raised 50 million screwworms per week in a soup of blood and meat, and sterilized them in bulk with 8000 roentgens of gamma rays from Cobalt-60 extracted from nuclear reactors. We loaded them into cardboard boxes and put them on airplanes with a special device that opened the boxes and released the flies over wide areas. The sterile flies mated with native females, and the eggs laid never hatched. 10 million sterilized flies were released per day for months. State and federal personnel on the ground tracked progress, and it worked! Another triumph in the peaceful application of radionuclides. This 1960 film shows all these steps in grotesque detail. It was digitized by us in 2023, thanks to sponsorship from @ANS_org and is more relevant than ever. At the end the film warns that as long as screwworms exist in central and South America, the threat of them returning to the USA is real. Today it's happening. Perhaps we should restart the sterilization process and eradicate screwworms across the entire hemisphere.
We eradicated the New World screwworm from North America once thanks to nuclear science — and we can do it again! Now we're scaling our sterile insect technique (SIT) capacity back up with three forms of radiation: cobalt-60 gamma, X-rays, and electron beams.⚛️ 🎥youtube.com/watch?v=QFoOnS… 📰ans.org/news/tag-steri…
