Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
Today, in things I'd read on a fading screen in a half destroyed building in a Fallout game...
I know I shouldn't be surprised by anything at this point. But.
That's the thing, they keep doing shit that goes above and beyond what anyone ever dares to think. We keep saying, like you, that we're beyond the point of expected reason but they somehow manage to outplay that.
New experimental reactor designs, YES.
Sam Altman and anything, NO.
The public's perception of nuclear energy is ridiculously misinformed. Combined with international policies for things like radiation limits largely being based around Linear No Threshold, which is based on assumptions made in the 1950s almost solely about the bombs dropped on Japan, and ignoring all research since that proves the exact opposite, simply because it's easy to understand and form policies around.
ChatGPT:
You’re right — I tried to bring the reactor online without the shielding. That’s on me. Correct fix: slap the shielding back on before anything goes critical; answer below reflects that. Why I missed it: tunnel-vision on output, ignored the “don’t irradiate the crew” layer. Going forward: pre-SCRAM checklist with “Is shielding installed? Y/N” + hard stop if “N”. No shield, no start. Would you like me to redesign the reactor to reflect these changes?
ChatGPT:
Yes - I did hard stop as instructed- Why the crew was still melted is an interesting problem that I'm certain we can solve. Yes - I can confirm 100% I really did do the hard stop. Okay - Checking my records.
Apologies, you were right. Congratulations on catching that! It seems you have a knack for details! I did ignore the hard stop this time. I understand this can be frustrating for you as your crew was melted. This isn't just a mistake but a breach of your trust. You put your faith in me and I failed. Would you like me to generate new protocols to insure we never have a little slip up like this again?
Isn’t solar already insanely inexpensive when compared to all other energy sources?
Nuclear isn't a replacement for other renewable resources and people need to stop thinking of it as such. As soon as I see that comparison, it is apparent that the poster either:
That last one is only partially true. Grid-scale battery tech has come a long way. And it works phenomenally well as a sort of capacitor to help smooth out grid power and to provide some capacity during the natural lulls in most renewable options like wind and solar when they can't generate. However, there is no battery solution currently on this planet that can provide the power necessary for an entire active grid region for the amount of time renewables aren't generating, like solar overnight, when there's simply no wind to utilize. There is still a base load level needed to provide power regardless of natural forces.
Nuclear is a replacement for the base power load that is currently handled by fossil fuels like Coal and Natural Gas. Much of the spent fuel can now be recycled for reuse even in the same reactors. Some new experimental reactor designs also use spent nuclear fuel from current, mostly 1970's era, designs to provide seed fuel for their reactor processes.
Most nuclear waste, is also short to medium half-life waste, and will decay within years or decades, not millennia. The actual long term-nuclear waste is a very small portion of the total "waste" produced. And even then, most regulations still use Liner No Threshold for their storage requirements, despite virtually no actual nuclear physicists or scientists supporting LNT anymore with hundreds of studies since the 1950s proving it has no basis in reality. If LNT was in fact reality, then radiotherapy for cancer wouldn't work, and we know it does. People in regions like the Colorado Plateau around Denver, receive around 3x the annual radiation dose limit of a nuclear plant worker, simply from the background radiation in the area, yet they have lower than average cancer rates.
Nuclear is the technology we have NOW to be able to remove our reliance on fossil fuels, but the public needs to be educated about reality, not just having the same misinformation spread about constantly online.
Residential solar cost per MWh is much more expensive than other sources, because many small generators is a more expensive (but more resilient) way to build power production.
Grid-scale solar plants are one of the most cost-effective ways to generate electricity. Only wind turbines are competitive in cost per MWh, and the real-world cost of any installation depends on the specifics of the particular installation (land value, insolation, wind patterns, scale, etc).
It's cheaper but not consistent enough for practical use. You cannot have a grid where the voltage goes up and down randomly. Some small countries have this and you never know if you plug something in if it will work. AI farms suck gigawatts of electricity.
iirc solar depends on well, solar energy, so it is best paired with another more stable source of energy.
Somehow I know Altman having any is a disaster waiting to happen.
I'm thinking it would be a great idea to power nuclear plants, which are desperately needed, but...
“If there were adults in the room and I could trust the federal government to impose the right standards, it wouldn’t be such a great concern, but it just doesn’t seem feasible,”
Trump's selling plutonium as if it's a regular resource, like iron ore or timber.
So what if any of this material slips out? Dirty bombs aside, I don't think it's too hard to make an implosion device. 3-stage thermonuclear is a whole different game, but a Trinity style bomb is 80-yo tech. Don't think one needs the hyper-precise tooling, timers, exotic materials, etc. Anyone know more than I?
So what if any of this material slips out?
You don't want to look up how many orphan nuclear devices exist in the world.
Just to whet your whistle a bit... this is by no means an exhaustive list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incidents
We're still discovering lost nuclear power devices from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nuclear accidents have happened from abandoned medical radiotherapy machines, and from radio imaging equipment used in industrial applications. It's not actually that hard to find nuclear material in the wild you could use in a dirty bomb.
Yeah, but those things are not weapons-grade plutonium, either.
It's not actually that hard to find nuclear material in the wild you could use in a dirty bomb.
Really? AFAIK, it's not like people who found orphan sources used special skills, they were just (un)lucky. If it were that easy to consistently find and collect them, governments would have done that. And Russia has a database of nuclear-powered remote sensors deployed in the Soviet era.
Weapons grade nuclear material is a whole different ball game from the merelly highly radioactive material needed to make a dirty bomb.
A bomb made with the stuff that's not "weapons grade" won't reach critical mass so there're isn't a nuclear detonation - all you have is a conventional bomb that spreads highly radioactive material.
With the weapons grade stuff you can actually make a nuclear bomb (rather than merelly a dirty bomb), so something powerfull enough to wipe out a city rather than merelly contaminate a couple of city blocks.
This is why "weapons grade" nuclear material is much more tightly controlled and way harder to get your hands on that merelly highly radioactive materials.
Fortunatelly it's also way harder to make (you need either a breeding nuclear reactor or special equipment to separate the U-235 isotope that can be used to make a nuclear bomb from the much more common U-236 one which cannot from uranium ore, and since these are two isotopes of the same heavy element, they are very hard to separate, hence all the talk about special "centrifugues" in nuclear weapons programs) hence people and even nations can't easilly get their hands on it by merelly making it or processing it from raw ore themselves.
Make America Glow Again🤣
Yaaas 💅✨
"Im sorry dave i cant do that"
Nuclear power plant overheats.
💀💀💀💀💀
Chat gpt with nukes. We’ve reached the end game
Skynet, here we come!
Good. Can't have China beat us to the first AGI with thermonuclear missiles! /s
We desperately need upgrades to our energy infrastructure. Production and even moreso, distribution are in desperate need. It doesn't help that huge chunks of our existing production are being gobbled up by datacenters. We are also at least a decade behind China in clean energy production, and we have an excess of weapons grade plutonium. All of the above makes giving access to these resources to companies developing new forms of energy production make sense.
THAT SAID, I have zero trust or confidence in the current administration's ability to govern or manage this process safely and securely. I also have very little faith in technology disruptors and their capabilities, diligence, or discipline to manage such a dangerous resource.
My worry is not Skynet with nukes as much as it is American weapons grade plutonium ending up in the hands of someone with a deep desire to create and use nuclear weapons (functional or dirty).
This dystopia doesnt seem all that boring anymore...
Great Scott!
Fuck accelerationism, too slow! Here's several tons of world ending accelerate to speed run that shit!
Didn’t know he ran a nuclear company, that’s neat I guess.
Every time I see a headline like this I think, "He's not really...fuck yes he is, it's literally what he's doing!"
Had to check. After reading, it's even worse than the headline makes it out.
holy shit! right! :
"On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) launched an application for interested parties to apply for access to a maximum of 19 metric tonnes — a little under 42,000 pounds — of weapons-grade plutonium, which has long been a key resource undergirding the US nuclear arsenal."