"Power-hungry, fossil-fuel dependent Japan has successfully tested a system that could provide a constant, steady form of renewable energy, regardless of the wind or the sun," reports Bloomberg: For more than a decade, Japanese heavy machinery maker IHI Corp. has been developing a subsea turbine that harnesses the energy in deep ocean currents and converts it into a steady and reliable source of electricity.... Called Kairyu, the 330-ton prototype is designed to be anchored to the sea floor at a depth of 30-50 meters (100-160 feet).

In commercial production, the plan is to site the turbines in the Kuroshio Current, one of the world's strongest, which runs along Japan's eastern coast, and transmit the power via seabed cables.... Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) estimates the Kuroshio Current could potentially generate as much as 200 gigawatts — about 60% of Japan's present generating capacity....

Japan is already the world's third largest generator of solar power and is investing heavily in offshore wind, but harnessing ocean currents could provide the reliable baseline power needed to reduce the need for energy storage or fossil fuels.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article!

"Researchers at MIT have discovered an unfixable vulnerability in Apple Silicon that could allow attackers to bypass a chip's 'last line of defense'," writes the Apple Insider blog, "but most Mac users shouldn't be worried." More specifically, the team at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory found that Apple's implementation of pointer authentication in the M1 system-on-chip can be overcome with a specific hardware attack they've dubbed "PACMAN." Pointer authentication is a security mechanism in Apple Silicon that makes it more difficult for attackers to modify pointers in memory. By checking for unexpected changes in pointers, the mechanism can help defend a CPU if attackers gain memory access.... The flaw comes into play when an attacker successfully guesses the value of a pointer authentication code and disables it.

The researchers found that they could use a side-channel attack to brute-force the code. PACMAN echoes similar speculative execution attacks like Spectre and Meltdown, which also leveraged microarchitectural side channels. Because it's a flaw in the hardware, it can't be fixed with a software patch.

[A]ctually carrying out the PACMAN attack requires physical access to a device, meaning the average Mac user isn't going to be at risk of exploit. The flaw affects all kinds of ARM-based chips — not just Apple's. The vulnerability is more of a technological demonstration of a wider issue with pointer authentication in ARM chips, rather than an issue that could lead to your Mac getting hacked.
MIT has made more information available at the site PACMANattack.com — including answers to frequently asked questions. Q: Is PACMAN being used in the wild?
A: No.
Q: Does PACMAN have a logo?
A: Yeah!
The MIT team says their discovery represents "a new way of thinking about how threat models converge in the Spectre era." But even then, MIT's announcement warns the flaw "isn't a magic bypass for all security on the M1 chip." PACMAN can only take an existing bug that pointer authentication protects against, and unleash that bug's true potential for use in an attack by finding the correct PAC. There's no cause for immediate alarm, the scientists say, as PACMAN cannot compromise a system without an existing software bug....

The team showed that the PACMAN attack even works against the kernel, which has "massive implications for future security work on all ARM systems with pointer authentication enabled," says Ravichandran. "Future CPU designers should take care to consider this attack when building the secure systems of tomorrow. Developers should take care to not solely rely on pointer authentication to protect their software."
TechCrunch obtained a comment from Apple: Apple spokesperson Scott Radcliffe provided the following: "We want to thank the researchers for their collaboration as this proof of concept advances our understanding of these techniques. Based on our analysis as well as the details shared with us by the researchers, we have concluded this issue does not pose an immediate risk to our users and is insufficient to bypass operating system security protections on its own."

Apple's M1 chips have an "unpatchable" hardware vulnerability that could allow attackers to break through its last line of security defenses, MIT researchers have discovered. TechCrunch reports: The vulnerability lies in a hardware-level security mechanism utilized in Apple M1 chips called pointer authentication codes, or PAC. This feature makes it much harder for an attacker to inject malicious code into a device's memory and provides a level of defense against buffer overflow exploits, a type of attack that forces memory to spill out to other locations on the chip. Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, however, have created a novel hardware attack, which combines memory corruption and speculative execution attacks to sidestep the security feature. The attack shows that pointer authentication can be defeated without leaving a trace, and as it utilizes a hardware mechanism, no software patch can fix it.

The attack, appropriately called "Pacman," works by "guessing" a pointer authentication code (PAC), a cryptographic signature that confirms that an app hasn't been maliciously altered. This is done using speculative execution -- a technique used by modern computer processors to speed up performance by speculatively guessing various lines of computation -- to leak PAC verification results, while a hardware side-channel reveals whether or not the guess was correct. What's more, since there are only so many possible values for the PAC, the researchers found that it's possible to try them all to find the right one.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from real human cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles as nurses, care workers, teachers and other jobs that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says.

To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his colleagues bathed a plastic robot finger in a soup of collagen and human skin cells called fibroblasts for three days. The collagen and fibroblasts adhered to the finger and formed a layer similar to the dermis, which is the second-from-top layer of human skin. Next, they gently poured other human skin cells called keratinocytes onto the finger to recreate the upper layer of human skin, called the epidermis. The resulting 1.5-millimeter-thick skin was able to stretch and contract as the finger bent backwards and forwards. As it did this, it wrinkled like normal skin, says Takeuchi. "It is much more realistic than silicone."

The robot skin could also be healed when it was cut by grafting a collagen sheet onto the wound. However, the skin began to dry out after a while since it didn't have blood vessels to replenish it with moisture. In the future, it may be possible to incorporate artificial blood vessels into the skin to keep it hydrated, as well as sweat glands and hair follicles to make it more realistic, says Takeuchi. It should also be possible to make different skin colors by adding melanocytes, he says. The researchers now plan to try coating a whole robot in the living skin. The research has been published in the journal Matter.

Developer James Brown created a custom LEGO computer terminal brick, complete with "an actual processor and a working screen to help bring the fictional computer to reality," reports Tom's Hardware. From the report: The iconic computer terminal brick it's based off of is made using the 2 x 2 slope brick. James has created this one entirely from scratch with the help of a 3D printer and an ARM-based microcontroller. It powers up and features screen animations that look like lines of terminal code scrolling by as well as a loading animation. The screen used inside this custom LEGO is super tiny -- less than half an inch across -- and Brown appears to have ordered tons of these things. Just last month, he used a handful of them to create a custom mechanical keyboard on which each key has its own OLED display. The keyboard can be programmed with a demo video showing the letters changing from lowercase to capital on the fly.

Rather than using a Raspberry Pi to power the tiny terminal, Brown had a custom PCB printed just for the project using a different ARM-based chip. On this board is an STM32F030F4P6TR -- an ARM Cortex M0 series microcontroller with a 32-bit single core and 16KB of flash. An RP2040 SoC could be used in its place, should you wish to spin your own PCB. It's connected to a .42-inch OLED display which has a resolution of 72 x 40px. Brown explains that it gets power from an old LEGO 9V system that uses conductive strips inside the studs.

Instead of taking apart an existing brick, Brown opted to design one from scratch. This process involved 3D-printing a mold in which he could cast the brick with the electronic components fit inside. The final product is a semi-translucent blue brick that illuminates with the light from the OLED display.

Meta plans to stop making consumer versions of its Portal video calling hardware and instead pivot the product line to focus on use cases for businesses, like conference calling. The Verge reports: The change in strategy, first reported by The Information and confirmed to The Verge by a source familiar with the matter, comes as Meta is reassessing its ambitious hardware plans against investor concerns about the billions of dollars it's spending on projects that have yet to pay off financially.

The Portal line debuted in 2018 with two displays meant as dedicated video calling stations. [...] New versions have been released in the time since, including the portable Portal Go, but the device never became a huge hit. The research firm IDC estimates that Meta shipped 800,000 Portals in 2021, accounting for less than 1 percent of the global smart speaker and display market, according to The Information. Meta currently sells four Portal products, from a $99 TV-connected camera to a $349 smart display.

The Biden administration on Thursday pledged to have 500,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles in place by 2030. "The proposed standards, which will be published next week in the Federal Register, dictate that a charging station be located every 50 miles along the interstate and no more than a mile off the highway," reports USA Today. "Stations would be required to maintain a minimum number and type of chargers capable of serving multiple customers." From the report: Stations would be prohibited from requiring drivers to have a membership or be part of a club to use their chargers. Real-time information on pricing and location would have to be available to help motorists using a GPS app better plan their trip. The Federal Highway Administration's proposed standards will apply to federally funded charging stations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. The goal is to ensure a seamless system of charging stations that can be used by motorists no matter what car they drive, where they live or how they pay. [...] The administration is providing more than $5 billion to states over the next five years to build a network of charging stations along the nation's interstates.

A recent executive brief from data storage industry analyst firm Trendfocus reports that OEMs have disclosed that Microsoft is pushing them to drop HDDs as the primary storage device in pre-built Windows 11 PCs and use SSDs instead, with the current deadlines for the switchover set for 2023. Tom's Hardware reports: Interestingly, these actions from Microsoft come without any firm SSD requirement listed for Windows 11 PCs, and OEMs have pushed back on the deadlines. [...] Microsoft's most current(opens in new tab) list of hardware requirements calls for a '64 GB or larger storage device' for Windows 11, so an SSD isn't a minimum requirement for a standard install. However, Microsoft stipulates that two features, DirectStorage and the Windows Subsystem for Android(opens in new tab), require an SSD, but you don't have to use those features. It is unclear whether or not Microsoft plans to change the minimum specifications for Windows 11 PCs after the 2023 switchover to SSDs for pre-built systems.

As always, the issue with switching all systems to SSDs boils down to cost: Trendfocus Vice President John Chen tells us that replacing a 1TB HDD requires stepping down to a low-cost 256 GB SSD, which OEMs don't consider to be enough capacity for most users. Conversely, stepping up to a 512 GB SSD would 'break the budget' for lower-end machines with a strict price limit. "The original cut-in date based on our discussions with OEMs was to be this year, but it has been pushed out to sometime next year (the second half, I believe, but not clear on the firm date)," Chen told Tom's Hardware. "OEMs are trying to negotiate some level of push out (emerging market transition in 2024, or desktop transition in 2024), but things are still in flux."

The majority of PCs in developed markets have already transitioned to SSDs for boot drives, but there are exceptions. Chen notes that it is possible that Microsoft could make some exceptions, but the firm predicts that dual-drive desktop PCs and gaming laptops with both an SSD for the boot drive and an HDD for bulk storage will be the only mass-market PCs with an HDD. [...] It's unclear what measures, if any, Microsoft would take with OEMs if they don't comply with its wishes, and the company has decided not to comment on the matter. Trendfocus says the switchover will have implications for HDD demand next year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Solid Power, a Colorado-based battery developer, moved one step closer to producing solid-state batteries for electric vehicles on Monday. The company has completed an automated "EV cell pilot line" with the capacity to make around 15,000 cells per year, which will be used first by Solid Power and then by its OEM partners for testing. "The installation of this EV cell pilot line will allow us to produce EV-scale cells suitable for initiating the formal automotive qualification process. Over the coming quarters, we will work to bring the EV cell pilot line up to its full operational capability and look forward to delivering EV-scale all-solid-state cells to our partners later this year," said Solid Power CEO Doug Campbell.

Solid-state batteries differ from the lithium-ion batteries currently used in EVs in that they replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid layer between the anode and cathode. It's an attractive technology for multiple reasons: Solid-state cells should have a higher energy density, they should be able to charge more quickly, and they should be safer, as they're nonflammable (which should further reduce the pack density and weight, as it will need less-robust protection). It's one of those technologies that to a very casual observer is perennially five years away, but in Europe there are already operational Mercedes-Benz eCitaro buses with solid-state packs.

The tech is taking a little longer to get ready for passenger EVs, but it does appear to be maturing. Solid Power is one of the leading solid-state battery developers, having been established in 2012. Its approach is to use a sulfur-based solid electrolyte and an anode that's very high in silicon -- more than 50 percent, according to Solid Power. [...] This new line is designed to produce the same sized large-format pouch cells currently used by automotive OEMs in their EVs, with cell capacities ranging from 60-100 Ah. BMW and Ford will be the first carmakers to receive cells for testing by the end of this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: President Joe Biden ordered emergency measures Monday to boost crucial supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia as he attempted to jumpstart progress toward his climate change-fighting goals. His invoking of the Defense Production Act and other executive actions comes amid complaints by industry groups that the solar sector is being slowed by supply chain problems due to a Commerce Department inquiry into possible trade violations involving Chinese products. The Commerce Department announced in March that it was scrutinizing imports of solar panels from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, concerned that products from those countries are skirting U.S. anti-dumping rules that limit imports from China.

White House officials said Biden's actions aim to increase domestic production of solar panel parts, building installation materials, high-efficiency heat pumps and other components including cells used for clean-energy generated fuels. They called the tariff suspension affecting imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia a bridge measure while other efforts increase domestic solar power production -- even as the administration remains supportive of U.S. trade laws and the Commerce Department investigation. [...]

The use of executive action comes as the Biden administration's clean energy tax cuts, and other major proposals meant to encourage domestic green energy production, have stalled in Congress. The Defense Production Act lets the federal government direct manufacturing production for national defense and has become a tool used more commonly by presidents in recent years. The Trump administration used it to produce medical equipment and supplies during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden invoked its authority in April to boost production of lithium and other minerals used to power electric vehicles.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After a long, long month of laptop releases, Computex 2022 is finally over. In some ways, it's the Computex that wasn't. The early part of this year was an exciting time to be a laptop reporter. Every company and its mother announced that big ideas were on the way. Wacky products abounded, from monitors to phones. LG Display (which supplied the 13.3-inch panel for Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Fold) showed off a 17-inch foldable OLED screen. We saw RGB, OLEDs, and haptics galore. Chipmakers promised architectural innovations and performance gains. We were told that these were all coming soon.

At the end of May was Computex, the biggest laptop-specific show of the year. This would've been the perfect time for some of these innovative releases to be, you know, released -- or get a release date. But we didn't get them at Computex 2022. The show was, in fact, aggressively unexciting. We got a heck of a lot of chip bumps. We got some higher refresh rate displays. We got an HP Spectre x360 with rounder corners. Don't get me wrong: incremental upgrades, both to internal specs and external elements, are important. They will make a difference in people's lives. Companies do not need to reinvent the wheel with every single laptop they release. But it is still worth noting that a number of devices that truly seem poised to expand or redefine their categories are not yet here.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Kim Yong-rae is the CEO of Speefox, South Korea's biggest manufacturer of capacitors, and he thinks robots are key to the company's survival. On his factory floor, free-standing machines squeal as they spit out gleaming sheets of aluminum that roll into coils. The air is filled with the rhythmic thud of stamping and the buzzing of machinery moving continuously, on the ground and overhead. Capacitors are essential to almost every electronic device, and these will end up in thousands of smartphones, cameras, and home appliances. "Throughout our history, we've always had to find ways to stay ahead," Kim told Rest of World. "Automation is the next step in that process." Speefox's factory is 75% automated, representing South Korea's continued push away from human labor. Part of that drive is labor costs: South Korea's minimum wage has climbed, rising 5% just this year.

But the most recent impetus is legal liability for worker death or injury. In January, a law came into effect called the Serious Disasters Punishment Act, which says, effectively, that if workers die or sustain serious injuries on the job, and courts determine that the company neglected safety standards, the CEO or high-ranking managers could be fined or go to prison. Experts and local media say that the law has shaken the heavy industry and construction sectors. Along with pushing the companies to invest to make workplaces safer, they point out, it's triggered a ramp-up of automation in order to require fewer workers -- or, ideally, none at all.

This week CNN published an article chronicling how 35 countries "have come together to try and master nuclear fusion, a process that occurs naturally in the sun — and all stars — but is painfully difficult to replicate on Earth.

"Fusion promises a virtually limitless form of energy that, unlike fossil fuels, emits zero greenhouse gases and, unlike the nuclear fission power used today, produces no long-life radioactive waste. Mastering it could literally save humanity from climate change, a crisis of our own making." If it is mastered, fusion energy will undoubtedly power much of the world. Just 1 gram of fuel as input can create the equivalent of eight tons of oil in fusion power. That's an astonishing yield of 8 million to 1. Atomic experts rarely like to estimate when fusion energy may be widely available, often joking that, no matter when you ask, it's always 30 years away. But for the first time in history, that may actually be true....

The main challenge is sustaining it. The tokamak in the UK — called the Joint European Torus, or JET — held fusion energy for five seconds, but that's simply the longest that machine will go for. Its magnets were made of copper and were built in the 1970s. Any more than five seconds under such heat would cause them to melt. ITER uses newer magnets that can last much longer, and the project aims to produce a 10-fold return on energy, generating 500 megawatts from an input of 50 megawatts.... The dimensions are mind-blowing. The tokamak will ultimately weigh 23,000 tons. That's the combined weight of three Eiffel towers. It will comprise a million components, further differing into no fewer than 10 million smaller parts.

This powerful behemoth will be surrounded by some of the largest magnets ever created. Their staggering size — some of them have diameters of up to 24 meters — means they are are too large to transport and must be assembled on site in a giant hall.... Even the digital design of this enormous machine sits across 3D computer files that take up more than two terabytes of drive space. That's the same amount of space you could save more than 160 million one-page Word documents on. Behind hundreds of workers putting the ITER project together are around 4,500 companies with 15,000 employees from all over the globe... Now commercial businesses are preparing to generate and sell fusion energy, so optimistic they are that this energy of the future could come online by mid-century.

But as ever with nuclear fusion, as one challenge is overcome another seems to crop up. The limited stocks and price of tritium is one, so ITER is trying to produce its own. On that front, the outlook isn't bad. The blanket within the tokamak will be coated with lithium, and as escaped plasma neutrons reach it, they will react with the lithium to create more tritium fuel... First plasma is now expected in 2025, and the first deuterium-tritium experiments are hoped to take place in 2035, though even those are now under review — delayed, in part, by the pandemic and persistent supply chain issues.
"This article has some nice photography," writes Slashdot reader technology_dude. "It really makes it hit home on the incredible amount of design and planning work that is required."

The article notes that when Stephen Hawking was asked which scientific discovery he'd like to see in his lifetime, Hawking answered, "I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source."

Thane Gustafson is a longtime specialist on Russian energy — and even before Russia invaded Ukraine, he'd pulled together some startling predictions for his new book. The New York Review of Books looks at Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change: About two thirds of Russia is covered in permafrost, a mixture of sand and ice that, until recently, remained frozen year-round. As permafrost melts, walls built on it fracture, buildings sink, railways warp, roads buckle, and pipelines break. Anthrax from long-frozen reindeer corpses has thawed and infected modern herds. Sinkholes have opened in the melting ground, swallowing up whole buildings. Ice roads over frozen water, once the only way to travel in some remote regions, are available for ever-shorter periods. The Arctic coast is eroding rapidly, imperiling structures built close to the water.... As burning, dying, clear-cut forests become carbon producers rather than carbon sinks, they make the problem of climate change even worse. The same is true of melting permafrost, which releases methane, another potent greenhouse gas.

In Klimat, Gustafson maintains that Russia's agricultural exports and revenues will continue to increase until the end of this decade, with global warming of one degree Celsius improving Russian agricultural productivity. But in the 2030s and 2040s the rate of increase will diminish, because of harm to Russian crops caused by drought, heat waves, and torrential rain. Some of these difficulties may be counteracted by rising prices, as climate change compromises the world's food supply, but Russia will also hit the limit of its supply of arable land. Two thirds of European Russia, the country's most fertile agricultural area, is already too dry. Thawed permafrost, meanwhile, is sandy and infertile, and will not make good farmland. Russia will require more resources to produce the same amount of food. More aggressive tactics to increase production (e.g., heavy use xof fertilizer) will ultimately cause acidification and erosion....

[T]he long-term future of the Russian oil industry, like that of the Russian economy, looked dismal even before the new sanctions. West Siberia, long the country's primary source of oil, is running low. The extraction of Arctic oil is already well underway, but it is expensive and relies in part on foreign technology that was sanctioned even before the invasion of Ukraine.... As time goes on, Gustafson argues, the Russian oil industry will be more and more dependent on government tax breaks. A dwindling supply will lose value in a global market that is shifting to renewable energy. In Gustafson's account, most of the factors that will determine the future of Russia's oil exports lie outside its control: exhaustion of its most accessible oilfields, increasing difficulty and expense in reaching remaining sources, damage to oil infrastructure caused by climate change, and reduction in demand from the EU and later from Asia. But Russia's choices have had some effect. Its invasion of Ukraine has vastly accelerated the timeline for this squeeze by prompting new sanctions and informal boycotts...

As Russia's income declines, so will its ability to placate its population with cheap household gas and generous welfare policies. This will likely lead to social destabilization, exacerbated by the disruption and suffering caused by climate change and a weakening economy. The Russian war on Ukraine, meanwhile, has resulted in the emigration not only of opposition politicians and journalists but also of professionals, especially younger ones, who have skills marketable elsewhere in the world — for instance, IT specialists, who find it easy to work from safer, freer cities like Bishkek or Tbilisi. The scientists, activists, and businesspeople who might help Russia cope with climate change are also among those likely to emigrate.

Klimat's time horizon of 2050 is short, but Putin's is even shorter: he is now almost seventy years old. After him will come the deluge, the wildfires, the droughts, the collapse.
"Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change..." according to the book's description on the Harvard University Press website.

"Lucid and thought-provoking, Klimat shows how climate change is poised to alter the global order, potentially toppling even great powers from their perches."

From Google's Open Source blog: The Google Hardware Toolchains team is launching a new developer portal, developers.google.com/silicon, to help the developer community get started with its Open MPW shuttle program.

This will allow anyone to submit open source integrated circuit designs to get manufactured at no-cost.

Since November 2020, when Skywater Technologies announced their partnership with Google to open source their Process Design Kit for the SKY130 process node, the Hardware Toolchains team here at Google has been on a journey to make building open silicon accessible to all developers. Having access to an open source and manufacturable PDK changes the status-quo in the custom silicon design industry and academia:

— Designers are now free to start their projects liberated from NDAs and usage restrictions

— Researchers are able to make their research reproducible by their fellow peers

— Open source EDA tools can integrate deeply with the manufacturing process

Together we've built a community of more than 3,000 members, where hardware designers and software developers alike, can all contribute in their own way to advance the state of the art of open silicon design....

We need to go beyond cramming more transistors into smaller areas and toward more efficient dedicated hardware accelerators. Given the recent global chip supply chain struggles, and the lead time for popular ICs sometimes going over a year, we need to do this by leveraging more of the existing global foundry capacity that provides access to older and proven process node technologies....

By combining open access to PDKs, and recent advancements in the development of open source ASIC toolchains like OpenROAD, OpenLane, and higher level synthesis toolchain like XLS, we are getting us one step closer to bringing software-like development methodology and fast iteration cycles to the silicon design world. Free and open source licensing, community collaboration, and fast iteration transformed the way we all develop software. We believe we are at the edge of a similar revolution for custom accelerator development, where hardware designers compete by building on each other's works rather than reinventing the wheel....

To help you on-board on future shuttles, we created a new developer portal that provides pointers to get started with the various tools of the open silicon ecosystem: so make sure to check out the portal and start your open silicon journey!

"A new study from Stanford and the University of British Columbia has bad news for the next generation of nuclear reactors," writes Slashdot reader SoftwareArtist

An announcement from Stanford University warns that "Small modular reactors, long touted as the future of nuclear energy, will actually generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants," citing joint research with the University of British Columbia published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study," said study lead author Lindsay Krall, a former MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). "These findings stand in sharp contrast to the cost and waste reduction benefits that advocates have claimed for advanced nuclear technologies...."

Energy is produced in a nuclear reactor when a neutron splits a uranium atom in the reactor core, generating additional neutrons that go on to split other uranium atoms, creating a chain reaction. But some neutrons escape from the core — a problem called neutron leakage — and strike surrounding structural materials, such as steel and concrete. These materials become radioactive when "activated" by neutrons lost from the core. The new study found that, because of their smaller size, small modular reactors will experience more neutron leakage than conventional reactors. This increased leakage affects the amount and composition of their waste streams.

"The more neutrons that are leaked, the greater the amount of radioactivity created by the activation process of neutrons," Ewing said. "We found that small modular reactors will generate at least nine times more neutron-activated steel than conventional power plants. These radioactive materials have to be carefully managed prior to disposal, which will be expensive."
That's a problem because already, just in America, spent nuclear fuel is accumulating at a rate of about 2,000 metric tonnes per year, the announcement notes, and is "currently stored in pools or in dry casks at reactor sites."

But that's not the only issue: The study also found that the spent nuclear fuel from small modular reactors will be discharged in greater volumes per unit energy extracted and can be far more complex than the spent fuel discharged from existing power plants. "Some small modular reactor designs call for chemically exotic fuels and coolants that can produce difficult-to-manage wastes for disposal," said co-author Allison Macfarlane, professor and director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. "Those exotic fuels and coolants may require costly chemical treatment prior to disposal."

"The takeaway message for the industry and investors is that the back end of the fuel cycle may include hidden costs that must be addressed," Macfarlane said. "It's in the best interest of the reactor designer and the regulator to understand the waste implications of these reactors."

The study concludes that, overall, small modular designs are inferior to conventional reactors with respect to radioactive waste generation, management requirements, and disposal options. One problem is long-term radiation from spent nuclear fuel. The research team estimated that after 10,000 years, the radiotoxicity of plutonium in spent fuels discharged from the three study modules would be at least 50 percent higher than the plutonium in conventional spent fuel per unit energy extracted.

Because of this high level of radiotoxicity, geologic repositories for small modular reactor wastes should be carefully chosen through a thorough siting process, the authors said.

"We shouldn't be the ones doing this kind of study," said Ewing. "The vendors, those who are proposing and receiving federal support to develop advanced reactors, should be concerned about the waste and conducting research that can be reviewed in the open literature."

A team of scientists at Canada's Concordia University are using sound waves to print intricate three-dimensional objects. The technology is known as direct sound printing (DSP). New Atlas reports: In the current version of the technique, a transducer is used to send focused pulses of ultrasound through the sides of a chamber, into liquid polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) resin contained within. Doing so produces ultrasonic fields, which cause rapidly oscillating microscopic bubbles to temporarily form at specific points in the resin. As those bubbles oscillate, the temperature inside them rises to about 15,000 degrees Kelvin (14,727C or 26,540F) and the pressure within them climbs to over 1,000 bar (14,504 psi). Although this sudden increase in temperature and pressure only lasts for picoseconds (trillionths of a second), it causes the resin to solidify at the exact location of the bubble. Therefore, by incrementally moving the transducer along a predetermined path, it's possible to build up an intricate three-dimensional object -- one tiny pixel at a time. Along with its ability to produce very small, detailed items, DSP also allows structures to be non-invasively printed inside other structures that have opaque surfaces. [...] Besides the PDMS resin, the scientists have also successfully used DSP to print objects made of ceramic material. They now plan on experimenting with polymer-metal composites, followed by pure metal. The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A 20-year-old woman who was born with a small and misshapen right ear has received a 3-D printed ear implant made from her own cells, the manufacturer announced on Thursday. Independent experts said that the transplant, part of the first clinical trial of a successful medical application of this technology, was a stunning advance in the field of tissue engineering. The new ear was printed in a shape that precisely matched the woman's left ear, according to 3DBio Therapeutics, a regenerative medicine company based in Queens. The new ear, transplanted in March, will continue to regenerate cartilage tissue, giving it the look and feel of a natural ear, the company said.

The results of the woman's reconstructive surgery were announced by 3DBio in a news release. Citing proprietary concerns, the company has not publicly disclosed the technical details of the process, making it more difficult for outside experts to evaluate. The company said that federal regulators had reviewed the trial design and set strict manufacturing standards, and that the data would be published in a medical journal when the study was complete. The clinical trial, which includes 11 patients, is still ongoing, and it's possible that the transplants could fail or bring unanticipated health complications. But since the cells originated from the patient's own tissue, the new ear is not likely to be rejected by the body, doctors and company officials said.

There is enough energy in the nuclear waste in the United States to power the entire country for 100 years with clean energy, says Jess C. Gehin at the Idaho National Laboratory. CNBC reports: There are 93 commercial nuclear reactors at 55 operating sites in the United States, according to Scott Burnell, spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Twenty-six are in some stage of decommissioning process. All of the nuclear reactors that operate in the U.S. are light-water reactor designs [...]. In a light-water reactor, uranium-235 fuel powers a fission reaction, where the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller nuclei and releases energy. The energy heats water, creating steam which is used to power a generator and produce electricity. The nuclear fission reaction leaves waste, which is radioactive and has to be maintained carefully. There are about 80,000 metric tons of used fuel from light-water nuclear reactors in the United States and the existing nuclear fleet produces approximately an additional 2,000 tons of used fuel each year, Gehin told CNBC. But after a light-water reactor has run its reactor powered by uranium-235, there is still tremendous amount of energy potential still available in what is left.

"Fundamentally, in light-water reactors, out of the uranium we dig out of the ground, we use a half a percent of the energy that's in the uranium that's dug out of the ground," Gehin told CNBC in a phone interview. "You can get a large fraction of that energy if you were to recycle the fuel through fast reactors." Fast reactors don't slow down the neutrons that are released in the fission reaction, and faster neutrons beget more efficient fission reactions, Gehin told CNBC. "Fast neutron reactors can more effectively convert uranium-238, which is predominantly what's in spent fuel, to plutonium, so you can fission it," Gehin said.

Even as private companies are working to innovate and commercialize fast reactor designs, there are significant infrastructure hurdles. Before nuclear waste can be used to power fast reactors, it has to go through reprocessing. Right now, only Russia has the capacity to do this at scale. France, too, has the capacity to recycle used nuclear waste, Gehin said, but the country generally takes its recycled fuel and puts it back into existing light water reactors. For now, the Idaho National Lab can reprocess enough fuel for research and development, Gehin told CNBC, but not much more.

Private companies commercializing fast reactor technology are pushing for domestic fuel supply chains to be developed. TerraPower says it's investing in supply chains and working with elected leaders to build political support, while Oklo has received three government awards and is working with the government to commercialize fast reactor fuel supply chains domestically. The other option to power fast reactors is to create HALEU fuel, which stands for high-assay low-enriched uranium, from scratch, rather than by recycling nuclear waste. (Where conventional reactors use uranium enriched up to 5%, HALEU is uranium enriched up to 20%.) It's arguably easier to produce HALEU directly than by recycling spent waste, says Gehin, but ultimately, the cheaper option will win out. "It will be largely be driven by what makes sense economically." Regardless, Russia is the only country that has the capacity to make HALEU at commercial scale.

According to the Wall Street Journal, workplace robot orders increased 40% in the first quarter of 2022, and were up 21% overall in 2021. The robot industry is now valued at $1.6 billion. Business Insider reports: Robots are providing at least a temporary solution for businesses confronted by difficulty hiring in the tightest job market since World War II, marred by the pandemic, record-high quitting rates, and vast economic turmoil. [...] Advanced technology, however, is allowing machines to assist a growing number of industry sectors, while at the same time becoming more accessible.

But as robot usage climbs, some have expressed concern about the machines displacing human workers as the labor crisis eventually eases. "Automation, if it goes very fast, can destroy a lot of jobs," Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Journal. "The labor shortage is not going to last. This is temporary."