Collaborate Disseminate
By pretty much any metric you care to use, the last couple of decades has been very good for the open source movement. There was plenty of pushback in the early days, back when the only people passionate about the idea were the Graybeards in the IT department. But as …read more
Continue reading You Wouldn’t Download a Nuclear Reactor, But Could You?
The Chicago Pile led to the Manhattan Project, which led to the atomic bomb. In Germany, there were similar efforts with less success, and now we have physical evidence from the first attempted nuclear reactor in Germany. In Physics Today, there’s a lovely historical retrospective of one of the …read more
“I realized that certain things that I thought were impossible for someone my age aren’t impossible,” said Jackson Oswalt, 14. Continue reading A Child Explains Why He Built a Nuclear Reactor in His Playroom
The owner of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, Boeing, says the wildfire may have started “on or near” the contaminated Los Angeles facility. Continue reading California’s Woolsey Fire Burns Near Site of Nuclear Meltdown, Sparking Panic
In the 1950s and 1960s, the prospects for a future powered by nuclear energy were bright. There had been accidents at nuclear reactors, but they had not penetrated the public consciousness, or had conveniently happened far away. This was the age of “Too cheap to meter“, and The Jetsons, in which a future driven by technologies as yet undreamed of would free mankind from its problems. Names like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were unheard of, and it seemed that nuclear reactors would become the miracle power source for the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. …read more
