It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see careless AI-generated images added to a site's homepage.
If your images are AI, I'm assuming your text is too. But even if it's not... if you're not willing to put in the time & effort to make the images on your homepage look good, my expectations go way down.
To save HN a search: a stable isotope used as a neutron capture target, to produce lutetium-177[i], used in targeted radioligand therapies[ii]. Discussed once on HN[iii].
I've been following SuperCritical, a new startup working on Uranium extraction from sea water. My understanding is that the process is much more sustainable than mining, which makes it easier/faster to establish a domestic source vs the permits needed for a new US based mine.
So this is basically a calutron... a huge mass spectrometer. 1940s technology, upgraded with state-of-the-now control systems, and electromagnets. A formidable engineering work, but more of a breakthrough from legislation and compliance perspective possibly.
>"A centrifuge plant does one thing, costs billions, and takes years to stand up. Our machines cost a few hundred thousand dollars, produce material within months, deploy anywhere, and are able to be reconfigured in a matter of days to separate various isotopes as they are needed," said Robert Mendelsohn, co-founder and CTO of Actinide.
Calutrons are using the same principle of separating ions by their mass/charge ratio, just in a preparative scale (you want to collect what is separated) rather than analytical (you just want to know how much of what).
A few hundred thousand dollars worth of tech replacing what used to be a massive industrial investment is amazing. And I thought enriching uranium is something that counties with nukes go to extreme lengths to make it not accessible.
It's the same process either way, and the first few percent are the hardest (as it's super dilute so you need to handle a lot of material). It's much easier to go from 20% to 90%, than it is to get to 20%.
They are killing the environment now. I remember this discussion some 25 or 30 years ago in serbia, e. g. depleted uranium. Well, guess some company always wants to find ways for dumping or lifting-up radioactive substance.
I’m no expert, but I don’t believe that “high-assay low-enriched uranium” is the sort you can use in nuclear weapons, per it being “low-enriched”. According to the DOE, HALEU only goes up to 20% enrichment [0]. Nuclear weapons, it seems, need it to be enriched beyond 20% [1]
Uranium-235 isn't useful for dirty bombs: it's too long-lived and not radioactive enough. Making dangerous levels of radiation requires short-lived isotopes. Some of these are the products of uranium fission, which is why spent uranium fuel is a radiation hazard. But isolating U-235 just to fission it to get radioactive isotopes like cesium-137 would not be the easiest way to get them.
If your images are AI, I'm assuming your text is too. But even if it's not... if you're not willing to put in the time & effort to make the images on your homepage look good, my expectations go way down.
To save HN a search: a stable isotope used as a neutron capture target, to produce lutetium-177[i], used in targeted radioligand therapies[ii]. Discussed once on HN[iii].
[i] https://isotopes.gov/Ytterbium-176_is_Available_Now
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutetium_(177Lu)_vipivotide_te...
[iii] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40690196 ("Radioactive drugs strike cancer with precision (knowablemagazine.org)")
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/08/26/335139...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron
What has changed here to make them competitive again? Or are they counting on selling small quantities at close to any cost for R&D reactors?
Speaking of which, whatever happened to laser enrichment? That was apparently very promising at some point?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_isotopes_by_lase...
>"A centrifuge plant does one thing, costs billions, and takes years to stand up. Our machines cost a few hundred thousand dollars, produce material within months, deploy anywhere, and are able to be reconfigured in a matter of days to separate various isotopes as they are needed," said Robert Mendelsohn, co-founder and CTO of Actinide.
Calutrons are using the same principle of separating ions by their mass/charge ratio, just in a preparative scale (you want to collect what is separated) rather than analytical (you just want to know how much of what).
It's not that difficult from an engineering perspective, the tech is almost a century old. It's just that we will drop bombs on anyone who tries.
Nuclear nonproliferation relies on active enforcement.
low-enrichment (~20%) is what's happening here.
the bad stuff, for nukes, is ~90% enrichment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separative_work_units
With Texas, I'm not so sure...
Private enterprise enriching uranium is a seriously worrying development...
[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-high-assay-low-enric... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium
Or seriously exciting. We might actually get affordable, clean nuclear energy this century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex
We could reach Lex Luther level villainy in no time at all