Over two and a half weeks from late last October into November, federal prosecutors in a courtroom in Cincinnati drew on the wealth of digital material the 41-year-old Xu had stockpiled to lay out a portrait of him — his training, methods, and ambitions, his vices and private doubts and grievances. Translated from the original Mandarin, it's an unprecedentedly intimate portrait of how China's economic espionage machine works, and what life is like for its cogs.
Huge (pun intended)! Making a standard design constructed off-site will lead to huge cost benefits for licensing, construction, operation, and maintenance of future nuclear plants.
NuScale has more details on their website but the goal is that power plant facilities house 12 self-contained reactors that can provide "154 MWe to a mission critical facility micro-grid for 12 years without new fuel following a catastrophic loss of offsite grid and transportation infrastructure."
They estimate the cost of production for the n-th plant to be in the range "approximately $40/MWh to $65/MWh" and their first project has a contractual cap on costs at $58/MWh, all of which is price-competitive with large, established reactors like Diablo Canyon, though their small plant footprint generates a tenth of the electricity output.
They also support air-cooled designs, "which can reduce plant water consumption to as little as 1.1 gal/MWh" and the "high-temperature heat can be directly used to produce hydrogen through electrolysis, thus reducing efficiency losses". "Hydrogen produced by a NuScale HTSE system is forecasted to be cost competitive with high capacity factor renewable hydrogen cost estimates while also providing continuous, controlled hydrogen production."
Used fuel will be stored on-site:
NuScale reactor building and VOYGR plant design incorporates a proven safe, secure and effective used fuel management system. A stainless steel lined concrete pool holds used fuel for at least 5 years under 60 feet of water. The used fuel is protected both by the ground and the Seismic Category 1 reinforced concrete reactor building designed to withstand an aircraft impact, and a variety of natural and man-made phenomena.
After cooling in the spent fuel pool, spent fuel is placed into certified casks, steel containers with concrete shells, on site of the plant. The NRC Waste Confidence Rule states that this is a safe and acceptable way to store used fuel for an interim period at the plant up to 100 years. The NuScale's standard facility design includes an area for the dry storage of all of the spent fuel for the 60-year life of the VOYGR plant.
The plant also supports recycled fuel, or mixed uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX) fuel, helping to reduce nuclear waste.
An all inclusive guide to ETW, from what it is to how we can use it.
I've used ETW a lot and I still learned things from this walkthrough.
The technology giant will stop offering automated tools that predict a person's gender, age and emotional state and will restrict the use of its facial recognition tool.
Microsoft will also put new controls on its face recognition feature, which can be used to perform identity checks or search for a particular person. Uber, for example, uses the software in its app to verify that a driver's face matches the ID on file for that driver's account. Software developers who want to use Microsoft's facial recognition tool will need to apply for access and explain how they plan to deploy it.
A cool academic paper on the constraints of cyber operations as a "subversive trilemma" where speed, intensity, and control are negatively correlated. The author argues that because of this, most cyber operations fall short of their strategic promise and provide, at best, limited strategic utility.
Several Iranian news organizations reported that the assassin was a killer robot, and that the entire operation was conducted by remote control. These reports directly contradicted the supposedly eyewitness accounts of a gun battle between teams of assassins and bodyguards and reports that some of the assassins had been arrested or killed.
Iranians mocked the story as a transparent effort to minimize the embarrassment of the elite security force that failed to protect one of the country's most closely guarded figures.
Thomas Withington, an electronic warfare analyst, told the BBC that the killer robot theory should be taken with "a healthy pinch of salt," and that Iran's description appeared to be little more than a collection of "cool buzzwords."
Except this time there really was a killer robot.
A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide.
A recently discovered FBI training document shows that US law enforcement can gain limited access to the content of encrypted messages from secure messaging services like iMessage, Line, and WhatsApp, but not to messages sent via Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, or Wickr.
What type of encryption you use and how you use it are pretty important.
There are some truly passionate LEGO people out there, with entire rooms of their homes dedicated to their craft and collection, and elaborate custom models that they enter into shows and competitions. My family isn't quite there yet, but we're not that far off, either. [...] But most importantly, we've stumbled into a world where we get LEGO sets for free or cheap. And you can, too. Here's how we got to this crazy place.