11,571 karma · joined December 11, 2013
Mostly interested in reactor development: https://whatisnuclear.com/reactor_history.html
And nuclear economics: https://whatisnuclear.com/economics.html
Nuclear education page: https://whatisnuclear.com
Hobby blog: https://partofthething.com/thoughts/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/whatisnuclear
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/07/2026-09...
Interesting stuff.
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.
https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/q/difftos
1. Radioactive waste gets less toxic over time unlike many toxins like mercury, lead, and cyanide. People seem to emphasize the duration of toxicity for radiation while apparently giving 'forever toxins' a total pass.
2. Short-lived radiation is what's really dangerous. When atoms are decaying fast, they're shooting out energy that can cause real damage fast. Longer-lived radioactive stuff with billion-year half-lives like natural uranium can be held in a gloved hand, no problem. In the extreme, and infinite half life means something is stable and totally safe (radiologically at least).
Yet people still want to emphasize that radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have long half lives. I don't really get it.
It was all fun and games until my VPS host banned me for pinging too many people every few mins.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110516084503/http://www.apocal...
Way way overspeced for what I listed, but I use it for lots of video processing, numerical simulations, and some local AI too.
I have a similar subset of this stuff running at my mom's house on a 16 GB ram Beelink minicomputer. With openvino frigate can still do fully local object detection on the security case, whish is sweet.
* nginx with letsencrypt wildcard so I have lots of subdomains
* No tailscale, just pure wireguard between a few family houses and for remote access
* Jellyfin for movies and TV, serving to my Samsung TV via the Tizen jellyfin app
* Mopidy holding my music collection, serving to my home stereo and numerous other speakers around the house via snapcast (raspberry pi 3 as the client)
* Just using ubuntu as the os with ZFS mirroring for NAS, serving over samba and NFS
* Home assistant for home automation, with Zigbee and Z-wave dongles
* Frigate as my NVR, recording from my security cams, doing local object detection, and sending out alerts via Home Assistant
* Forgejo for my personal repository host
* tar1090 hooked to a SDR for local airplane tracking (antenna in attic)
This all pairs nicely with my two openwrt routers, one being the main one and a dumb AP, connected via hardwire trunk line with a bunch of VLANs.
Other things in the house include an iotawatt whole-house energy monitor, a bunch of ESPs running holiday light strips, indoor and outdoor homebrew weather stations with laser particulate sensors and CO2 monitors (alongside the usual sensors), a water-main cutoff (zwave), smart bulbs, door sensors, motion sensors, sirens/doorbells, and a thing that listens for my fire alarm and sends alerts. Oh and I just flashed the pura scent diffuser my wife bought and lobotomized it so it can't talk to the cloud anymore, but I can still automate it.
I love it and have tons of fun fiddling with things.
I felt like "Confidential Compute" tech could solve this issue once and for all but I'm not so sure after seeing some of the attacks people can do with physical access.
Another option of course is to not use cloud at all and have your own rack in a locked room with a good security system and/or armed US person guards.
* "Bring Your Own LLM: Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or open-weight models via vLLM."
With so many newbies wanting these kinds of services it might be worth adjusting the first bullet to say: "No data leaves your network, at least as long as you don't use any Anthropic, OpenAI, or Gemini models via the network of course"