Nick Touran
@whatisnuclear
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Nuclear engineer / advanced reactor designer (Ph.D. P.E.) who runs https://t.co/ofTjIciUnl.
Maryland
Joined December 2009
Will you at least admit that a nuclear explosion is awesome?
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Some radiation detection with my Geiger and gamma spec detectors for ya. Happy Rad Week everyone.
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Ford Nuclear Reactor, pool with lab technicians on the bridge & standing by the rail
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At Maverik, we take being Adventure’s First Stop seriously. We’ve got you covered for all your fuel, food and drink needs!
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Goodbye aircraft impact assessment! 👋
In response to Executive Order 14270, “Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy,” we have issued a direct final rule amending our regulations to add a conditional sunset date into certain regulations. See the rule here: https://t.co/Xj2YEkA6hH
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It's 60 years ago in nuclear. And it's not supposed to be a gotcha, it's more of a heads-up so people know to read up on the lessons from last time so they can proceed with the most wisdom. Doesn't stop everyone from wanting to say they're the first though.
“They already tried that 40 years ago!” isn’t the gotcha that critics always think it is. Lots of things change in 40 years. All new technology is too expensive until it’s not. Very few critical innovations are “novel”, they are just ideas whose time has come.
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There has been a clear vibe switch about nuclear energy in recent years, and Bisconti Research shows public perception softening significantly toward the energy source since 2020. | By @eva_terry02
deseret.com
What does the evidence show about nuclear waste, proliferation risks, overall safety and carbon emissions from nuclear energy?
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And a fun one: IsoSWUs! These lines show how much uranium at different enrichments you could make with a given amount of separative work (SWU).
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It's like Linktree, but it looks like a Framer or Webflow site. Claim your free domain before someone else takes it!
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You may have heard that going from 20% to 90% is "easier". When you're on the path to making a kg of HEU, you do spend most of your SWUs working on the large mass of lower-enriched stuff. That is a different point, which is a lot less relevant for fuel cycle economics IMHO.
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Here's how much separative work and feed you need for a kg of enriched uranium at various enrichments. Both relationships are nearly linear, so a kg of 20% HALEU requires about 4x more feed uranium and 4x more SWU than a kg of LEU. Even without a HALEU premium, you'd need 4x
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Here's the Nuclear Ship Savannah core in its critical test facility. This loading of low-enriched UO₂ fuel (plus 4 other assemblies and one re-shuffling) propelled the ship for 450,000 miles. And that was with ancient low-burnup fue! PWRs really are an amazing technology.
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Yup, 7 meters (21 feet) of stuff got the dose rate down to low levels. With 2 meters of steel/water/lead primary shielding, dose rate was 122 mSv/hour, where 100 mSv is about what you need to increase your lifetime cancer risk from 43% to 44%.
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⚡️ Consensus Hong Kong 2025 wasn't just a conference. It was a hackathon, a festival, a networking hub, and a deal-making powerhouse all into one. Now that you’ve seen the energy, would you like to join 15,000+ attendees? Get your ticket to be part of the action in 2026. NOW.
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GE and the Atomic Energy Commission were collaborating to make Boiling Water Reactors more economical with high power density cores so they built Big Rock Point on the beautiful Northern Michigan shores of Lake Michigan. After it was proven, the reactor ran great for a few more
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Mechanical engineers say this is a terrible idea. Commercial CAD tools have lots of features that make equipment design easy.
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Have you ever seen or considered using a parametric CAD system like build123d to represent your nuclear equipment? Since it's a python-based boundary representation parametric CAD system, you can load key dimensions in from your configuration management database, have a fully
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Someone asked me how fission-fragment propulsion works. Put nuclear fuel in thin structures. When the atoms split, the fission fragments come shooting out as heavy, fully-ionized ions. If you apply a strong magnetic field, they're accelerated out, thereby providing thrust.
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North American PEA Shows After-Tax $1.25B NPV at US$3,650 Gold
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For years, the future of nuclear in America was uncertain and highly contested. Now we’re on the edge of a true renaissance, with a new consensus taking shape: large, innovative, proven reactors ready to scale today. And with powerful federal tools finally in place, building
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Given the momentous firsts achieved today… seems a good time to ask: Was there ever a resolution on the math behind the safety of @valaratomics fuel being held in one’s hand? @isaiah_p_taylor and @whatisnuclear ?
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Also, didn't Kairos split a few dozen atoms with critical TRISO in this same facility in April?
energy.gov
Los Alamos National Laboratory wraps up its first set of criticality experiments designed specifically for the transportation of TRISO fuels.
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