Want to wade into the spooky surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, everyone!)
The "Weapons Grade" part is almost certainly editorializing (hopefully), but this whole shit sounds like another Chernobyl waiting to happen
@BlueMonday1984 The "weapons grade" almost certainly means 239-Pu, which is used in bombs or fissile in reactors. (There are other isotopes but they're not really useful for fueling reactors *or* making bombs.)
I'm rather partial to the idea of silly valley oligarchs putting crude A-bombs under the table at one another's shareholder meetings.
every batch of plutonium is made mostly out of Pu-239 that's just how plutonium works. it can't be separated into isotopes in any meaningful amounts so any batch of plutonium is also a mix of a couple of isotopes. reactor grade might be something like 55% Pu-239 plus say 12% also fissile Pu-241 with the rest being nonfissile Pu-240, Pu-242 and Pu-238 in that order. the newer reactor and fuel pin design, the higher burnup and the less fissile isotopes will be present at the end of the cycle. even in purely uranium fueled reactor about third of energy at the end of the fuel cycle comes from plutonium bred in the same fuel pin. i can elaborate on that if you want to
ain't also Pu-238 in severe shortage for space vehicle RTG-s?
238Pu is made from 237Np, which is almost pure isotope recovered in spent fuel reprocessing, especially for weapons use. americans stopped doing that in one of their major sites in 1988, ran out of it in 1993 and bought it from russia ever since, but russians also stopped making this isotope because it's mostly weapons grade plutonium byproduct and they have enough of it. americans still do some reprocessing but not enough to meet NASA needs, but also they started ramping it up to some degree. i understand that 241Am will be used to cover this gap at like 5x greater isotope weight