Gross but urgent: We eradicated the screwworm from the USA in the 1950s with nuclear reactors, and we can do it again. You're seeing in the news today that the screwworm is returning. It's a horrible fly whose flesh-eating larva cause mass livestock suffering and farmer financial loss. The female screwworm fly mates only once. So we factory-farm raised 50 million screwworms per week in a soup of blood and meat, and sterilized them in bulk with 8000 roentgens of gamma rays from Cobalt-60 extracted from nuclear reactors. We loaded them into cardboard boxes and put them on airplanes with a special device that opened the boxes and released the flies over wide areas. The sterile flies mated with native females, and the eggs laid never hatched. 10 million sterilized flies were released per day for months. State and federal personnel on the ground tracked progress, and it worked! Another triumph in the peaceful application of radionuclides. This 1960 film shows all these steps in grotesque detail. It was digitized by us in 2023, thanks to sponsorship from @ANS_org and is more relevant than ever. At the end the film warns that as long as screwworms exist in central and South America, the threat of them returning to the USA is real. Today it's happening. Perhaps we should restart the sterilization process and eradicate screwworms across the entire hemisphere.

We eradicated the New World screwworm from North America once thanks to nuclear science — and we can do it again! Now we're scaling our sterile insect technique (SIT) capacity back up with three forms of radiation: cobalt-60 gamma, X-rays, and electron beams.⚛️ 🎥youtube.com/watch?v=QFoOnS6C… 📰ans.org/news/tag-sterile i…

OPERATION SCREWWORM: From the @TSCRA's January 1955 issue of The Cattleman, a look at early sterile fly experiments to eliminate NWS. "This pilot research may break the way for the much bigger job of driving the screwworm out of the southeastern United States."

Last month, Oklo CEO Jake DeWitte joined @SpencerJCox and the @abundanceinst at the Operation Gigawatt Summit in Utah. The discussions focused on the growing role advanced nuclear can play in meeting rising energy demand from AI, data centers, industrial growth, and electrification. The summit also highlighted the opportunities nuclear can create across research, workforce development, supply chains, and economic development. That interest is reflected in Governor Cox's engagement with the industry—from policy conversations to attending milestones like Oklo's Aurora powerhouse groundbreaking at Idaho National Laboratory last year.