It is really astonishing in general the kinds of ideas that become "facts" in the popular press from a couple of out of context executive summaries. I don't know if there's a fix...like you just can't talk about some things unclassified at all, but the public information is so weak.

But as you know from reading the 2019 report, the JASONs also recommend standing up pit production capabilities ASAP. You can't just leave that part out. These are not capabilities we can flip on in immediate response to a future identified emergency, it has to be proactive.

my fellow Americans, Donald Trump just took an AR-15 out of your family budget.

Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · 5d ago

Brown University has a widget that tracks the cost of the Iran war to American consumers (as contrasted to whatever the Pentagon is spending). Per-household cost now exceeds $600. iranwarcost.watson.brown.edu

So aside from private companies getting little reactors, LANL also did (yet another) and before the rest! I don’t know why it took so long for a public statement, but one is finally out. www.lanl.gov/media/news/0...

ZiaCore microreactor successfully achieves criticality | LANL

Los Alamos' ZiaCore microreactor achieved zero-power criticality, validating an advanced reactor design and supporting future low-enriched nuclear technologies.

lanl.gov

Oh joy… I’m sure this will go great to provide a horrifying monarchy that was tied to 9/11 with uranium enrichment capabilities. I’m not sure if there is a country I want to have enrichment less. apnews.com/article/trum...

Trump approves nuclear agreement that may allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium, 2 AP sources say

President Donald Trump has approved an agreement with Saudi Arabia that could potentially provide the kingdom with uranium enrichment capability for its civilian nuclear program.

apnews.com

So will Keir Starmer ask for that red card to be rescinded since that is what political leaders do now?

250 years is a wild number to hit! Happy Independence Day! Celebrate the good of the country, fight the evil of it, and remember to play Union Dixie to make Confederate losers made as well.

Stolen Valar

Huge news, but I have jumped ship to the private sector! As of today I am working on laser inertial fusion energy at @xcimerenergy.bsky.social as part of the experimental physics team. It's going to be a wild ride, but I am excited to be making big lasers and then soon enough a lot of neutrons!

Man, going back through the professional debates over Iranian nuclear weapons from the 2010s is so surreal now. "The lesson of the Persian Gulf War is, don't mess with America without a nuclear bomb"- yeah or uh a nearby narrow waterway and a shitload of ballistic and cruise missiles i guess

Anyone else reminded of those obnoxious sweet 16 parties shown in My Super Sweet 16 with Trump birthday? I keep waiting to hear that he cried about the cake being wrong or his crush not showing up. What a national fucking embarrassment that this is happening.

So I have to eat a lot of crow here, I didn’t think this could get done that fast. Credit to the Antares team though, this reactor is with fuel they bought themselves and a design they did themselves and got approved by the DOE. www.energy.gov/articles/dep...

Department of Energy Celebrates First Advanced Reactor Criticality

Today, as part of the U.S. Department of Energy Reactor Pilot Program, Antares Nuclear’s advanced reactor design, the Mark-0, successfully completed a zero-power fueled criticality demonstration at DO...

energy.gov

The weapons states should all agree to target one warhead per billionaire doomsday bunker. Make it clear that no one gets to try and hide, especially when they have been contributing to conflict. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/w...

Why Peter Thiel Is Decamping to the End of the World

nytimes.com

I think Morgan Wallen is now my nemesis. I’ve never cared for his his trashy frat boy version of country music, but now his very presence in a city has messed up two trips of mine. Now I just need to figure out how to get my revenge!

This is the sad reality of it. The U.S. had (still has in many fields) the biggest budgets, best toys, and best environment for bringing in foreign researchers. Europe underfunds science comparatively while China is not a great place for foreign talent to move. Without the U.S. funding, we all lose.

Alex Wild@alexwild.bsky.social · 2mo ago

There's a persistent fantasy that maybe some other nice countries will start mass-hiring US scientists. That's not going to happen. A few high-profile, big name researchers will get poached, sure. But most countries, including some very nice ones, are underemploying their own scientists already.

I'll return to this account's original purpose to both praise and dispute this piece. Why surface from periscope depth on this topic? As one of, if not the, only active posters here who has actually gloved up and done work in the plutonium facility, I have a unique perspective to offer. ☢️🧵

🇵🇸Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer🖖🏳️‍🌈@nuclearanthro.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I have written a post about the State of Los Alamos; its inability to substantially accelerate or add new missions; and why trying to do so is a bad idea. Also: don't touch things in Plutonium Facility-4 & I'd stay out of the Basement & away from its mysteries. #PhDLife Free & accessible to all.

If someone pulls off a crime with a Kentucky rifle more than 200 years after they became obsolete, I say we just call it a mulligan and let them go. In reality though, this is a non issue and not where you start on any gun control and I say that as someone with gun views that are not popular here.

The Associated Press@apnews.com · 3mo ago

A musket from 1776 can fire a lead ball at a velocity of around 1,000 feet per second. Imagine what that can do to a human body. Yet under federal and most state laws, it’s exempt from gun regulations. Many antique or replica guns aren’t considered firearms and even convicted felons can own them.

I’m watching the last season of The Boys and I wish I could call it too on the nose, but then I check the news.

I just rewatched Children of Men, and honestly it never felt more relevant. The horrifying treatment of immigrants looked all too familiar, and the rest of the dystopia felt far too real. Hell, even the demographic collapse premise, which seemed insane in 2006, might come true as well!

the Democrats retaking the House and Senate, on its own, will not destroy the Republican project. The only way to do that is a broad, years-long cross-ideological commitment to break American conservatism's power base TL;DR congressional Dems must be forced into war with the used car salesmen.

Mark Harris@markharris.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This is dead on. If the Democrats retake the House and Senate--or even just the House--it could mark the beginning of the end of a 50-year Republican project. If they can't? The GOP will spend the next 2 years destroying all remaining guardrails. Most important midterms of our lives, no question.

Since this conspiracy theory keeps circulating and has now made it to the White House. www.theatlantic.com/science/2026...

The ‘Missing Scientist’ Story Is Unbelievably Dumb

It is, in a way, a remarkable achievement.

theatlantic.com

The amount of misinformation we’re getting about an incident that just occurred in front of 1,500 news reporters is truly the metaphor of our generation.

Now that I am off on parental leave, it’s time to finally read @wellerstein.bsky.social latest book! My wife had rave reviews of it, so I’m excited to dig in and maybe read out loud to the baby. It’s never too early to teach the complexity of nuclear weapons!

... weapons physicists, engineers, chemists, material scientists, mathematicians, etc for the future. Without the best and brightest - and these students are the best and brightest, I am glad to be able to say - there is no NNSA. Shortsighted and self harming to kill that funding.

As for the stupid: Zeroing out the NNSA Academic Programs funding is impossibly stupid. It's got idiot DOGE staffer all over it. That ~$100M account is probably the most effective money NNSA spends for the arsenal, period. Couch cushion change level of money to ensure a steady supply of...

It's late Friday evening & world events have kept us from doing the obvious #nukesky dissection and cross examination of the DOE+NNSA FY27 budget. There's some good, some bad and some very stupid to work thru. The #1 weapon related line item people have brought up is pits. Let's start there.

A paper I am coauthor on, which is the result of a fun idea from almost 4 years ago by @nuke-luke.bsky.social, just was published! It dives into the idea that current SETI searches are missing the best part of the EM spectrum for messages, x-rays! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

X-ray and γ-ray beam interstellar communication and implications for SETI - Scientific Reports

The possibility of detecting artificial signals transmitted by alien civilizations via collimated X-ray or gamma-ray beams is investigated. The prospect of using such beams for human communication within the solar system and beyond is also discussed. Detector responses were simulated for input signals and analyzed using relative entropy. For simplicity, all signals were assumed to use on-off keying (OOK) modulation. “Real” signals were generated by taking digital files and sequentially feeding their raw binary data to the detector simulator, the resulting normalized information content of the detector signals was plotted and compared to random noise signals. Since jpeg files contain compressed information, these served as a proxy for artificial alien signals. This showed that there is a clear difference in measured information content between natural and artificial signals, even with relatively poor time resolution in the detector causing the signals to be smeared (dead-time/rise-time intervals many times longer than the duration between signal pulses). It was found that so long as the signal lasts for at least several rise-time/dead-time intervals, the distinction between random and artificial signals is obvious. A space-telescope with high time resolution for searching for such signals is briefly described and its basic requirements are outlined.

nature.com

Diablo Canyon just got its license extensions from the NRC! Unit 1 is licensed to run until 2044, Unit 2 2045. The plant generated 9% of the state’s total electricity and 17% of its zero-carbon power www.sfchronicle.com/california/a... (The catch is that CA law currently allows it to run to 2030)

California’s last nuclear plant just got a 20-year lifeline, but there’s a catch

Federal regulators have authorized 20-year license renewals for the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, allowing the facility to potentially operate until 2045.

sfchronicle.com

This article has a really interesting chart that I have long wondered about. The number of designers at a lab (in this case LLNL) vs the number with actual nuke experience, and this is from 2 decades back! A modern chart of the whole NNSA would be really interesting.

Alex Wellerstein@wellerstein.bsky.social · 4mo ago

For DOOMSDAY MACHINES this week: Is it possible to forget how to make nuclear weapons? Some thoughts from fiction, sociology, and history… doomsdaymachines.net/p/forgetting...