Things That Go Bump In The Night

The week started out appropriately. Vladimir Putin announced that his Burevestnik cruise missile, the one powered by a nuclear reactor so that it can continuously circle the earth until called upon to dump its nuclear weapon load, was a success. No video. No still photos. No statistics beyond that it had covered 18,000 kilometers over several hours. No comment on where those 18,000 kilometers were. No detection of radioisotopes by any outside observers.

Nonetheless, it was scary.

Two days later, kindly Uncle Volodya announced that another science fiction weapon often associated with Burevestnik, the Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo that can cause tsunamis all up and down the east coast of the United States, also had been successfully tested. No video etc. on this one either. What a week!

But that wasn’t enough!

Today we hear that Russia has used the 9M729 missile against Ukraine, flying it more than 1200 kilometers to explode in Ukraine. The 9M729 actually exists. This report is from the Ukrainian foreign minister. It’s a newish missile with a longer range than older ones.

All these announcements got Granpa roused up, and he had to respond.

This is all nonsense. The ambiguity of “start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis” scared a number of people into once again explaining why we can’t test nuclear weapons right now by exploding them, when they should have been able to see that these noises are now just normal background. Trump doubled down in an Air Force One encounter, as he is wont to do.

In other scary news, we heard that the Trump administration is willing to send surplus plutonium to the addled billionaire Sam Altman to power his reactors to develop the AI THAT WILL EAT THE WORLD! Other Silicon Valley billionaires are competing in this middle-school-level race and have their own plans for their own nuclear reactors. This is scary on a number of levels.

Except.

Altman has no facilities suitable for working with plutonium. For that matter, he has no reactor that is capable of using plutonium as fuel, or anything else. In order to develop the AI THAT WILL EAT THE WORLD, much electrical power is needed. The other billionaires aren’t planning to use plutonium, but they don’t have much in the way of physical facilities to develop their reactors to develop the AI THAT WILL EAT THE WORLD. Unlike software, reactors are more than electronic marks on a monitor. They are big and physical and hard to build. Before you can build them, you have to build the buildings in which they will be built, which are difficult and physical in their own way.

A side enterprise that the SV boys have added to the reactors is enriching uranium for the reactors. General Matter (get it? A followon to General Electric, General Atomics…cool, right?) has won a government contract without facilities or even a method for enrichment.

What’s scary about all that is that the ship-it-out-and-fix-it-later guys have come to nuclear energy. And the Trump government is backing them. In addition to the contracts and free plutonium, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which approves new reactor designs, has been told to start approving these new designs, posthaste! And the personnel being shifted around to make sure they do that.

BOO!