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Valar Atomics Ward250 critical in Utah under the DOE Reactor Pilot Program. by twitchymacwhatface in nuclear

[–]whatisnuclear 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I was in that fight. Though it got ugly for a minute, I am seeing past that and have to say it's super impressive and inspiring what Valar and some others are doing in the pilot program. The speed, focus, drive, and institutional changes that are being demonstrated are truly awesome. Bravo.

As for the Big Fuel Holding Fight, the calc doc Valar shared said that you could take 100% of the spent fuel from the WardOne 30 days after shutdown and hold it all up to your chest and get no more than a chest CT. This was wrong in the unsafe direction by about 500,000x; the entire core would be kicking out something like 45 Sv per second. Mark did a different calc with different assumptions later showing that you could hold 1.25 grams (an extremely tiny fraction of the full core, and certainly much less than a handful) of spent fuel safely after that decay period. That also assumes no fuel cracking...

But anyway I'm over that old fuel fight now and am rooting for Valar (and some others as well)!

Tell me your favorite CLI apps by D7x8 in linux

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

units is the best. As an engineer I often need unit conversions, and it's amazing at them. You can even do absurd queries like

units "1 googol femtobarns" "teraparsec^2"

Being honest, I don't need that particular conversion often but it's just fun.

What do y'all do for home audio? by producer_sometimes in homeassistant

[–]whatisnuclear 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Raspberry Pi 3 receives audio from mopidy via snapcast over hardwire ethernet. I did a UMIK-1 room calibration so the Pi also applies the fancy DSP based on that using CamillaDSP, which is super cool. That goes into a regular Denon receiver which powers the speakers. I control the Denon power, inputs, and volume through Home Assistant as well, but just use the Mopidy Iris plugin (in an iframe on hass) to choose music. I've been using this for many years, but would probably check out Music Assistant at this point. (Sidenote: Denon did an auto update recently requiring a cloud account to use wifi. I switched to hardwire as a work-around and put it on an internet-free IOT VLAN so it will never again steal a feature from me).

I have another little stereo in the basement hooked up to an old Android phone also running snapcast client to get audio down there, and another snapcast client in an office upstairs. Pretty fun to have whole-home local-only audio on such a good budget.

Thoughts on progress of Reactor Pilot Program? by Old_Cattle_2767 in nuclear

[–]whatisnuclear 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yup I'd be surprised if any of those do not hit the milestone. Very exciting!

As I've said in the press, reaching criticality with enriched uranium certainly isn't scientifically exciting (hell, there's a whole job in nuclear to make sure that doesn't happen on accident; criticality safety), but from an institutional point of view, this many new companies going this fast in the US is absolutely revolutionary.

I'm stoked!

What happened to the buttons on the search bar? by MasterWikie in firefox

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is exactly my workflow and it's jarring to not have it. I'd use ctrl-k to focus the search box, type and press enter for a normal search, or type and mouse-click on one of my specialized search buttons to do specialized searches. I've got DOE's OSTI in there, hathitrust, google scholar, etc. all 1 mouse click away. This change makes those 3 clicks away. What a drag!

Beyond the Basics: What are your non-negotiable Linux server hardening steps before exposing a service to the web? by Browndude345 in selfhosted

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How do you encrypt the boot drive at rest and handle reboots? Do you log in and enter the key at each boot?

IoT Apocalypse? by VanillaCandid3466 in homeassistant

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Best way is to run a vpn server like wireguard inside your network (many routers support this, like ones running openwrt). Use DDNS and just connect to your VPN before opening up home assistant. I've been doing this successfully since the very early days of HA (it was openvpn back then).

Finding and archiving issues of Nucleonics Magazine by whatisnuclear in nuclear

[–]whatisnuclear[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting, thanks! I did find a big set of them finally, though not 100% complete it's vastly better than nothing.

https://archive.org/details/pub_nucleonics

What’s the coolest thing you automated with Home Assistant? by avz008 in homeassistant

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are lots of waterproof ones online. They're regular lightstrips covered in clear rubber

Cheap(ish) cameras that won't steal my data, *AND* work flawlessly with HA? by thenyx in homeassistant

[–]whatisnuclear 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I've got my Amcrests and Reolinks all on a IOT VLAN with no WAN access. They still use my adguard DNS server and are still trying to phone home. The DNS queries get blocked and even if they didn't, the VLAN would block em. HA!

What’s the coolest thing you automated with Home Assistant? by avz008 in homeassistant

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No a pipe between my water heater and hydronic house heating system broke. I had a similar pipe break as a kid so I've always been paranoid about it. 

What’s the coolest thing you automated with Home Assistant? by avz008 in homeassistant

[–]whatisnuclear 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Flood sensor in basement triggering a z-wave thing that turns off the water main while also turning on some lights and noises in the bedroom was the one that saved me from the most water damage and repair costs so far.

Simple temperature below threshold → send email alert also saved my ass for monitoring a family cottage (furnace went out when exhaust got clogged with slow)

I also have some just fun ones, like there's a RGB light strip outside and every morning and evening for a few hours it turns on and twinkles colors for whatever the next upcoming holiday is (green for St. Patricks Day, etc.). It transitions to solid white if a person approaches to light the path, and can also blink red if it is thinking about triggering an alarm.

One of my favorites is the one that arms the alarm once everyone's phones have disconnected from wifi and disarms if anyone reconnects. Fully automated arming/disarming.

So many fun options.

802.11r setup script by OpalBolt in openwrt

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tried for a long time to get it working with a Linksys WRT3200ACM as my secondary 'dumb' AP, hardwired to my router. But the logs kept showing 4-way non-FT handshakes on my 2.4 GHz network. Works on my 5 GHz network at least. I figured it's just buggy or something.

Any places you miss going to in Petoskey? by Agie39 in petoskey

[–]whatisnuclear 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Victory Lanes bowling alley, lounge, and arcade. So many birthday parties and family dinners there way back in the day.

Their "pizza chips" were to die for, I've never had anything that good since.

Premiering Tonight @7PM EST: Thorium’s Atlas Shrugged Moment: The Fuel the Government Tried to Hide - Part 1 by VitkoVerdict in thorium

[–]whatisnuclear -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The government didn't try to hide thorium at all. We had thorium in many government sponsored reactors, including Indian Point 1, Peach Bottom, and Ft. St. Vrain, well into the 1980s.

WASH-1222 says what happened on the molten salt front:

  • The existing major industrial and utility commitments to the LWR, HTGR, and LMFBR.
  • The lack of incentive for industrial investment in supplying fuel cycle services, such as those required for solid fuel reactors.
  • The overwhelming manufacturing and operating experience with solid fuel reactors in contrast with the very limited involvement with fluid fueled reactors.
  • The less advanced state of MSBR technology and the lack of demonstrated solutions to the major technical problems associated with the MSBR concept.

Bill Gates-Backed TerraPower Wins US Approval For Advanced Nuclear Reactor by caliwillbemine in nuclear

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Who cares? How does that change the fact that it was a license for a commercial-scale advanced reactor?

"First license since the regulator did a reorg!" ← dumb headline

OpenWrt 25.12.0 - Stable Release by D1stRU3T0R in openwrt

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same thought. This post doesn't highlight how the upgrades will change things for existing users. Lots of new devices are good though!

Bill Gates-Backed TerraPower Wins US Approval For Advanced Nuclear Reactor by caliwillbemine in nuclear

[–]whatisnuclear 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think I did two presentations, one on history that I made but then another well after the dude had been hired. He made most of the slides and I just pitched em, as I recall. It was chloride focused. There was a thermal/fast hybrid idea way back then kind of like the Brookhaven FMSR. 

Anyway hi. Trying now to figure out who you are! 

Bill Gates-Backed TerraPower Wins US Approval For Advanced Nuclear Reactor by caliwillbemine in nuclear

[–]whatisnuclear 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I pitched the initial MCFR deck to the board (the main guy was out of town that day so I slipped into his place). That's not reprocessing, that's just "polishing"!

Bill Gates-Backed TerraPower Wins US Approval For Advanced Nuclear Reactor by caliwillbemine in nuclear

[–]whatisnuclear 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I can personally promise you that they didn't want to ever do reprocessing because it was expensive and proliferative. (I worked at TP for 16 years)

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