Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | acidburnNSA's commentslogin

59 different companies including mine responded to MARAD's recent RFI on nuclear powered merchant ships. Many people are realizing that wind, hydrogen, ammonia, etc are falling short for global scale shipping.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/07/2026-09...


TBH this makes the most sense. Nuclear for large scale shipping + battery electric or hydrogen for smaller distances, rivers etc.

Nuclear power is expensive enough on land. At sea it’ll never compete with any other energy source. They’ll be pulling hydrocarbons from the air before they do nuclear ships in earnest. Yes I have heard of nuclear carriers and subs, the only two useful applications of nuclear power at sea.

Russia has been using nuclear icebreakers for civilian purposes since the 50s, and has also used nuclear propulsion for other vessel types, as has the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker


Yeah I want this on my Pebble time 2 sq!


Oh man I have to try this on all the legacy Fortran nuclear reactor simulator codes originally written in the 1960s


I thought that's what "legacy weather simulation code" was!


Yeah it's for simulating how many neutrons are going to be in the air.

And what fraction of electromagnetic waves and particles are going to absorbed by those neutrons and other things in the air.

Pretty much weather!


*necular


This is the type of fuel planned for the TerraPower Natrium reactor and also the Oklo sodium-cooled reactors.

Interesting stuff.


How many tokens/second you getting? I have the same CPU but a 5070 and only 64 GB of ram. I just got llama.cpp built and am now hitting a whopping 5-6 tokens/s.


LFTRs make readily-available (liquid-form) weapons-grade Uranium-233 during protactinium separation. They're the least proliferation resistant reactor known to man.

LFTR has a far larger core than a PWR. Neutron diffusion length in water is 5 cm. In LFTR graphite moderator it's 16.

Many reactors including modern SMR LWRs can cool themselves passively without backup power. Especially when floating in seawater.

Highly recommend doing PWRs for this application.

Disclaimer: I'm trying to do this with PWRs.


U-233: is this inaccurate?

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-people-claim-thorium-br...

I'm no expert on U enrichment, but if there's even just a little U-232 that mixes in with the U-233 then the gamma rays get pretty hard to handle? I guess the breeding process might produce a lot of pure U-233, but again to the point of the quora response... not a lot of U-233 was used in "real" weapons.

I've never heard of MSRs being "large". The ORNL one fit in a closet, but that wasn't a breeder from thorium AFAIK. The penetration doesn't matter much if you have a blanket of Thorium to intercept neutrons.


Frigate is so amazing. The lightweight object detectors plus home assistant automations and notifications are way too fun and powerful. I keep setting up new systems for family members after they see mine.


Which cameras do you use with it? Frigate + Thingino has been a constant source of stability issues for me, I've given up on it. Finding the right combination of parameters that had <2s latency, working audio, and didn't cause the stream to crash constantly seemed impossible.


Their FAQ says they use Public Domain Registry to actually buy the domains. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of The Endurance International Group, who is owned by Clearlake Capital, a PE firm! So while it may shield you a bit, if you're moving from namecheap just to avoid PE then that may not be the most obvious choice.

https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/difftos

https://publicdomainregistry.com/about-us/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearlake_Capital


Thanks for digging into this. Somehow I'd never checked. I moved my domains to porkbun since I wasn't otherwise using NFS for anything else.


I asked it to make a valid MCNP model of a sphere of plutonium and it did!


I spent a long time recently setting pretty much this same thing up. When in my office my Android phone battery rapidly died, I guess because usteer kept trying to steer it or something. I ended up turning off usteer and 802.11r and just deal with slow roaming. Maybe I should try again with the static neighbor reports.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: