Well, I didn't get nearly enough sleep last night, but absolutely devoured the Regicide Report from @cstross.bsky.social

A wonderful conclusion to my favorite government science fiction and one I'll keep revisiting.

Pickle enjoying the heated blanket for the evening (but not pets, because she doesn't want pets today)

Happy Friday, folks! I authored a piece that appeared in Scientific American this afternoon. Some folks will see the title of this piece and worry I have turned against nuclear energy. I assure you I have not.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/weak...

Well, this isn't a fuel pellet display, but an interesting thing nonetheless. Supposedly a small sample of graphite from the Obninsk test reactor (the first Soviet power reactor). Not great provenance, but sufficiently obscure that it's plausible (and passes some of the Soviet artifact sniff test)

For @nuclearanthro.bsky.social and others, these are promotional buttons from BNFs "Atoms for Energy" campaign. A relic from a different time in so many ways.

The kids are in bed and I am enjoying the rotating selection of cat cuddles

Just for @nuclearanthro.bsky.social, Pickle baking biscuit in the heated blanket cave

More from the days of nuclear past. Once upon a time, a younger me randomly stopped at an antique mall in southwestern Michigan. I spotted this on a shelf. The price wasn't especially high, but was enough that I had to think about it. Little did I know that this would kickstart a new collection.

A week late, but 6 days and 66 years ago, Dresden Generating Station Unit 1 went critical for the first time. Dresden 1 was the first privately financed nuclear power station in the United States (note all the qualifiers here)

So when we say the first nuclear power plant, what do we mean? 🧵

In an effort to distract from, well, everything, I spent the afternoon combining two hobbies. I've been looking for a good way to hang this sign since I picked it up last year. So I finally got around to prototyping and printing some brackets. My calipers had a dead battery, so there were changes 😅

In continuing tales of nuclear, something for @nuclearanna.bsky.social . Fuel pellet cards were a common promotional item for plants. This one is from the ANS, paired with probably the fanciest example I've ever seen (from Trojan). This continues today (the local utility gives them away at Pride)

Happy birthday to Oyster and Morel, the two giant gremlins who inhabit my house

For today's relics of nuclear past, coffee mugs! A fascinating sub genre of what people considered worth commemorating in the civilian fleet, we have the usual start of commercial operations or criticality, but also long outages, steam generator replacements, or extended power uprates. Always fun.

A new (to me) artifact of old nuclear. George Senn retired from GE in 1984 after heading their nuclear operations division. It's interesting to see what GE thought was worth commemorating back then, particularly since this was not easy or inexpensive to produce

Taking some time to get away into the desert.