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ISS Astronaut Captures Photo of Rare Lightning Sprite Shooting Upward

https://petapixel.com/2025/07/07/iss-astronaut-captures-photo-of-rare-lightning-sprite-shooting-upward/
1•cs702•3m ago•0 comments

Iceberg, the Right Idea – The Wrong Spec – Part 2 of 2: The Spec

https://database-doctor.com/posts/iceberg-is-wrong-2.html
1•dkdcio•3m ago•0 comments

Hiring for Front End(React.js)with AI and CoPilot

1•CliftonBennett•4m ago•0 comments

Memory-Level Parallelism: Apple M2 vs. Apple M4

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/07/09/memory-level-parallelism-apple-m2-vs-apple-m4/
1•zdw•4m ago•0 comments

How Soviet Russia Once Bugged an American Embassy's Typewriters (2019)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-crazy-story-of-how-soviet-russia-bugged-an-american-embassys-typewriters
1•downboots•6m ago•0 comments

AfriNIC: Hope, Hijack, and the Harsh Lessons of African Multistakeholderism

https://medium.com/@emmanuelvitus/afrinic-hope-hijack-and-the-harsh-lessons-of-african-multistakeholderism-8e8378797101
1•healsdata•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I made ChatChain, a chrome extension, auto adds timestamps to ChatGPT

https://www.chatchain.chat/
1•tzvipi•8m ago•0 comments

Trump announces 50% tariff on Brazil for Bolsonaro trial, trade deficit

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/09/trump-brazil-tariffs-bolsonaro.html
2•kamaraju•8m ago•0 comments

We Can't Stop Multitasking

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/multitasking/
1•HieronymusBosch•9m ago•0 comments

How did wet and warm Mars become a cold, barren desert?

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/mars-cold-desert-curiosity/
1•Bluestein•10m ago•0 comments

Pattern machines that we don't understand

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/06/01/pattern-machines-that-we-dont-understand/
1•gtirloni•11m ago•0 comments

The surprising revival of road bowling, Ireland's ancient sport

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2025/0709/1522577-road-bowling-ireland-sport-heritage-tradition-cork-armagh-tiktok-instagram/
1•austinallegro•13m ago•0 comments

Zerank-1, new sota LLM reranker

https://zeroentropy.beehiiv.com/p/introducing-zerank-1
1•jiwidi•16m ago•0 comments

Diffusion Elites: surprisingly good, simple and embarrassingly parallel

https://blog.christianperone.com/2025/07/diffusion-elites/
2•perone•16m ago•0 comments

Apple COO Jeff Williams to Pass Role to Lieutenant Sabih Khan

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-08/apple-operating-chief-jeff-williams-to-pass-role-to-lieutenant
1•Bogdanp•17m ago•0 comments

Devouring Details

https://devouringdetails.com/
1•mbaytas•19m ago•0 comments

How AI on Microcontrollers Actually Works: The Computation Graph

https://danielmangum.com/posts/ai-microcontrollers-computation-graph/
1•hasheddan•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: MCP server for searching and downloading documents from Anna's Archive

https://github.com/iosifache/annas-mcp
4•iosifache•22m ago•0 comments

A new open LLM built for the public good (by ETHZ/EPFL/CSCS)

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/07/a-language-model-built-for-the-public-good.html
1•dbrgn•22m ago•0 comments

Chain-of-Thought Is Not Explainability

https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2025.02v2
2•sonabinu•23m ago•0 comments

Nvidia-backed Perplexity launches AI-powered browser to take on Google Chrome

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/nvidia-backed-perplexity-launches-ai-powered-browser-take-google-chrome-2025-07-09/
2•gz5•25m ago•1 comments

TV episodes have become way too long

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/09/tv-episodes-have-become-way-too-long
2•vector_spaces•28m ago•0 comments

Grok praises Hitler, gives credit to Musk for removing "woke filters"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/grok-praises-hitler-gives-credit-to-musk-for-removing-woke-filters/
5•chmaynard•28m ago•0 comments

A universal interface connecting you to premier AI models

https://tenzorro.com/en/models
1•paulo20223•29m ago•0 comments

Reachy Mini

https://www.pollen-robotics.com/reachy-mini/
1•stuartmemo•29m ago•0 comments

Cacao agroforestry in Belize hits the sweet spot for people and nature

https://news.mongabay.com/2025/06/cacao-agroforestry-in-belize-hits-the-sweet-spot-for-people-and-nature/
1•PaulHoule•31m ago•0 comments

When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support? [pdf]

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3746174
1•thunderbong•33m ago•1 comments

Ask HN: New RevOps guy wants to switch us from M365 to GSuite+Slack

2•9dev•34m ago•0 comments

Practically-a-Book Review: Byrnes on Trance

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-byrnes
1•paulpauper•34m ago•0 comments

Some Recent Essays on Schooling

https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/paying-students-to-learn
1•paulpauper•34m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Nuclear Waste Reprocessing Gains Momentum in the U.S.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-waste-reprocessing-transmutation
64•rbanffy•6h ago

Comments

philipkglass•2h ago
Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented. Natural uranium isn't very expensive and separating the plutonium from spent fuel doesn't save much on waste disposal costs either. The US canceled a new MOX plant just 7 years ago due to cost and schedule problems:

https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/US-MOX-facility-cont...

Work started on the MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) in 2007, with a 2016 start-up envisaged. Although based on France's Melox MOX facility, the US project has presented many first-of-a-kind challenges and in 2012 the US Government Accountability Office suggested it would likely not start up before 2019 and cost at least USD7.7 billion, far above original estimate of USD4.9 billion.

The most interesting "recycling" effort right now is the laser enrichment process of Silex/Global Laser Enrichment:

https://www.wkms.org/energy/2025-07-02/company-developing-pa...

The company plans to re-enrich old depleted uranium tails from the obsolete gas diffusion enrichment process back up to natural uranium levels of 0.7% U-235. That uranium in turn would be processed by existing commercial centrifuge enrichment to upgrade it to power reactor fuel.

deepsun•1h ago
Also, nuclear waste is a very small problem, compared to other wastes. Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.

In comparison, managing steel production waste is way more expensive.

potato3732842•1h ago
10k years isn't that long. Some concentrated chemical stuff with heavy metals or mercury or whatever in it will be toxic forever.
throw0101d•32m ago
> Yes, it stays active for 10k+ years, but it's actually not that expensive to store them at specialized storages forever. Because it's a very small amount on a grand scale.

For some definition of "active".

The first 6-10 years are quite dangerous, which is why stuff is in cooling pools. After about 200-300 years the most dangerous type of radiation (gamma) has mostly burned stopped, and you're left with alpha and beta, which can be stopped with tinfoil and even paper.

I've heard the remark that after ~300 years the main way for nuclear waste to cause bad health effects is if you eat it or grind it up and snort it.

deepsun•22m ago
Sorry, but you're wrong. I took some radiation safety classes, and the main point I got from that is that "it depends". For example, alpha- and beta-radiation are often more dangerous than gamma, because gamma is easier to detect and measure.

People often focus on "radiation" part forgetting the "contamination" part. You can literally walk into the Chernobyl reactor active zone today for up to 2 minutes. But you cannot produce any food in soils around it for thousand years. And there's dozens of dangerous isotopes, each one accumulating and affecting human tissues differently.

Public generally only knows about Geiger counter. Yes, it will scream if everything is FUBAR, but it's useless for estimating safety of a food product.

throw0101d•4m ago
So nuclear waste is stored in casks:

* https://www.nwmo.ca/canadas-used-nuclear-fuel/how-is-it-stor...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_flask

Are you telling me it's unsafe? Someone better tell Madison Hill:

* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...

* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856

* https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120

Or Paris Ortiz-Wines:

* https://twitter.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...

(The context here is not walking down some road and getting bombarded with particles: but about the storage of industrial material and the risks it involves. Yes, stuff gets shot out at >300 years: but it's not just lying around randomly.)

blibble•26s ago
it's fine as long as it doesn't get out of its flask

which it will do, eventually if it's left out in the open

it needs to be buried

cameldrv•30m ago
The strange part psychologically is that saying it lasts 10,000 years somehow seems worse and more unmanageable than say cadmium or arsenic which last forever.
whycome•1h ago
It’s a constant heat producer. Can’t we use it just for that? Store it somewhere and transfer the heat with traditional liquid cooling/heat exchanger methods? Store it up in the permafrost regions. Heat greenhouses.
toomuchtodo•1h ago
I had considered submitting a YC application for a startup that would do this, take waste radioactive material and turn it into uniform physical pellets or cubes for district heating via vitrification, but it seemed like between the capital costs and regulatory hurdles, it's just really, really hard to make commercial economics work. At least with electrical generation with nuclear, you can get some buy in from people willing to tie up billions of dollars for decades even with a high risk of failure, or get someone with deep pockets like big tech to sign a power purchase agreement for existing nuclear capacity.

If the waste has to sit somewhere generating heat, might as well get some value from it.

(global district heating TAM is only ~$200B, idea sprung from xkcd spent fuel pool what if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/)

philipkglass•56m ago
Radioactive materials that produce enough heat to warm a greenhouse in a conveniently sized package are extremely hazardous if uncontained. It's relatively easy to encapsulate radioactive materials against accidental exposure, but much harder to guard against misinformed or malicious deliberate exposure. Then you get expensive and lethal incidents like these:

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

whycome•41m ago
I don’t really foresee it being packaged out. But maybe a heat exchanger that uses the main long term storage pile
kevin_thibedeau•39m ago
The Soviets did this with RTGs for remote on site power production. They're now abandoned and dangerous sources of nuclear material for those with evil intent.
credit_guy•51m ago
Many of the proposed new designs use higher enriched uranium, with up to 20% U-235. I expect that if they could work with 5% they would, but they can't. So from here I conclude that their waste might contain a much higher level of U-235 than the current PWRs, for example 3-5%. This would make it good for burning in a PWR, but of course, you need to first clean it up, and that requires processing.
CGMthrowaway•28m ago
> Recycling plutonium from spent power reactor fuel into mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel has been economically unattractive everywhere it has been implemented.

All it takes to change that is a federal subsidy supporting the industry. The same was said about wind & solar until it wasn't (due to tax credits). Now that the credits are going away with BBB, the cost of every new utility-scale development just went up ~30% and many, many projects will be killed.

toomuchtodo•23m ago
Wind and solar are still competitive without the credits, and while it'd be great to keep the credits to get off of fossil fuels faster, they are no longer needed.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/01/solar-cost-of-electri...

> Lazard’s analysis of levelized cost of electricity across fuel types finds that new-build utility-scale solar, even without subsidy, is less costly than new build natural gas, and competes with already-operating gas plants.

> Despite the blow that tax credit repeal would deal to renewable energy project values, analysis from Lazard finds that solar and wind energy projects have a lower levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) than nearly all fossil fuel projects – even without subsidy.

(Lazard is the investment banking gold standard wrt clean energy cost modeling: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...)

Matticus_Rex•11m ago
Why do that when safely storing the waste takes up an incredibly tiny amount of space and costs much less?

And subsidizing this still won't make new nuclear particularly competitive without ditching the silly LNT harm model and killing ALARA at the regulatory level. If you do that, suddenly nuclear can be profitable (as it should be in a world where the AEC and NRC approached radiation harm risk with actual science).

vavooom•2h ago
"The company will separate out valuable isotopes such as Strontium-90, which has fuel applications in marine and aerospace engineering, and use neutrons to transmute the rest into shorter-lived isotopes"

From Wikipedia, it looks like Strontium-90 can be used in "treatment of bone cancer, and to treat coronary restenosis via vascular brachytherapy". Pretty cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90

SoftTalker•2h ago
Strontium is taken up by the body like Calcium, as it's in the same group in the periodic table.
rbanffy•1h ago
I don’t think anyone is considering its ingestion. At least I hope not, but these are very strange times.
temp0826•1h ago
Fwiw supplements containing strontium exist (strontium ranelate mostly), which is supposed to assist with osteoarthritis symptoms and bone growth.
wffurr•2h ago
Oh boy more “Infinity Rooms”. Funny write up on the hazards of reprocessing: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/choose-your-own-radiat...
Eric_WVGG•2h ago
Nice

I once heard that “there’s no such thing as nuclear waste, just nuclear materials we haven’t figured out how to use yet,” but I’m unfortunately too dumb to know how true that statement is. Your article seems to indicate, “technically true, but for now still quite a lot to figure out.”

duskwuff•1h ago
A substantial amount of "nuclear waste" nowadays is low-level waste - things like old radium-dial clocks, or contaminated protective clothing from nuclear power plants, or medical waste from radiotherapy patients. The overall concentration of nuclear material in this waste is very low, and many of the isotopes involved (particularly from materials made radioactive through neutron activation) wouldn't be terribly useful even if they could be effectively extracted.
itishappy•1h ago
I think the science is pretty well understood. We know how to separate isotopes and react them to create new products, but there will always be some amount of junk that's too reactive to toss in a landfill but not reactive enough to use. Also some of it can be used to make bombs, and that makes us rightfully pretty skittish.
yk•1h ago
I'm confused the article sometimes talks sometimes about transmutation, that is turning problematic isotopes into ones with shorter half life and theoretically gaining energy in the process, and sometimes about reprocessing, taking spent fuel and essentially recycling to get usable fuel again.