The Energy In Nuclear Waste Could Power the US For 100 Years, But the Technology Was Never Commercialized

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.

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Bees Are ‘Fish’ Under Calif. Endangered Species Act – State Court

Bumblebees are eligible for protection as endangered or threatened “fish” under California law, a state appeals court held in a win for environmental groups and the state’s Fish and Game Commission. From a report: The Sacramento-based California Court of Appeal reversed a lower court’s ruling Tuesday for seven agricultural groups who argued that the California Endangered Species Act (CESA) expressly protects only “birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and plants” — not insects.

While “fish” is “commonly understood to refer to aquatic species, the term of art employed by the Legislature … is not so limited,” Associate Justice Ronald Robie wrote for the appeals court. CESA itself does not define “fish,” but the law is part of the California Fish and Game Code. The code’s definition includes any “mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate (or) amphibian,” Robie wrote. All those categories “encompass terrestrial and aquatic species,” and the state legislature has already approved the listing of at least one land-based mollusk, the opinion said.

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Dogs Can Detect COVID-19 With Great Accuracy

According to a new study, dogs were able to better detect COVID-19 than PCR antigenic tests in both symptomatic and asymptomatic people. Slashdot Falconhell shares the report via The Guardian: In the study, trained dogs were able to detect Covid in 97% of symptomatic cases and nearly 100% of asymptomatic cases. The study featured 335 participants from Covid screening centers in Paris. Of the participants, 109 were positive with Covid, including 31 who were asymptomatic. The detection dogs, provided by French fire stations and the United Arab Emirates, received three to six weeks of training, depending on if a dog was previously trained for odor detection. The dogs sniffed samples of human sweat placed in an olfaction cone. If a dog detected Covid, it sat down in front of the cone.

Ultimately, the trained dogs were more sensitive to positive cases. Nasal PCR tests were better able to better detect negative cases. In two false positive cases, dogs falsely identified other coronavirus respiratory illness strains that were not Covid. While there have been previous studies on the capability of dogs to detect Covid, this is believed to be the first to compare the accuracy of dogs to antigenic tests. The study has been published in the journal Plos One.

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Older iPads May Soon Be Able To Run Linux

Older iPads with the Apple A7- and A8-based chips may soon be able to run Linux. “Developer Konrad Dybcio and a Linux enthusiast going by “quaack723″ have collaborated to get Linux kernel version 5.18 booting on an old iPad Air 2, a major feat for a device that was designed to never run any operating system other than Apple’s,” reports Ars Technica. From the report: The project appears to use an Alpine Linux-based distribution called “postmarketOS,” a relatively small but actively developed distribution made primarily for Android devices. Dybcio used a “checkm8” hashtag in his initial tweet about the project, strongly implying that they used the “Checkm8” bootrom exploit published back in 2019 to access the hardware. For now, the developers only have Linux running on some older iPad hardware using A7 and A8-based chips — this includes the iPad Air, iPad Air 2, and a few generations of iPad mini. But subsequent tweets imply that it will be possible to get Linux up and running on any device with an A7 or A8 in it, including the iPhone 5S and the original HomePod.

Development work on this latest Linux-on-iDevices effort is still in its early days. The photos that the developers shared both show a basic boot process that fails because it can’t mount a filesystem, and Dybcio notes that basic things like USB and Bluetooth support aren’t working. Getting networking, audio, and graphics acceleration all working properly will also be a tall order. But being able to boot Linux at all could draw the attention of other developers who want to help the project.

Compared to modern hardware with an Apple M1 chip, A7 and A8-powered devices wouldn’t be great as general-purpose Linux machines. While impressive at the time, their CPUs and GPUs are considerably slower than modern Apple devices, and they all shipped with either 1GB or 2GB of RAM. But their performance still stacks up well next to the slow processors in devices like the Raspberry Pi 4, and most (though not all) A7 and A8 hardware has stopped getting new iOS and iPadOS updates from Apple at this point; Linux support could give some of these devices a second life as retro game consoles, simple home servers, or other things that low-power Arm hardware is good for. Further reading: Linux For M1 Macs? First Alpha Release Announced for Asahi Linux

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Toyota’s Prototype ‘Cartridge’ Is a Way To Make Hydrogen Portable

Toyota and its subsidiary Woven Planet have unveiled a new portable cartridge prototype for hydrogen. “The idea is that they can be filled up at a dedicated facility, transported where needed, then returned when you receive your next shipment,” reports Engadget. From the report: The cartridges would be relatively small at 16 inches long, 7 inches in diameter and about 11 pounds in weight. Toyota calls them “portable, affordable, and convenient energy that makes it possible to bring hydrogen to where people live, work, and play without the use of pipes.. [and] swappable for easy replacement and quick charging.”

They could be useful for “mobility [i.e. hydrogen cars], household applications, and many future possibilities we have yet to imagine,” Toyota said. It didn’t mention any specific uses, but it said that “one hydrogen cartridge is assumed to generate enough electricity to operate a typical household microwave for approximately 3-4 hours.”

In its press release, Toyota acknowledges that most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and so not exactly green. But it thinks that it’ll be generated with low carbon emissions in the future, and that the cartridges could help with some of the infrastructure issues. Toyota plans to test that theory by conducting proof of concept trials in various places, including its “human-centered smart city of the future,” Woven City in Susono City, Zhizuoka Prefecture in Japan. The company is also “working to build a comprehensive hydrogen-based supply chain aimed at expediting and simplifying production, transport, and daily usage,” it said.

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Consumers Embrace Milk Carton QR Codes, May Cut Food Waste

The “use-by” and “best-by” dates printed on milk cartons and gallon jugs may soon become a thing of the past, giving way to more accurate and informative QR codes. Phys.Org reports: A new Cornell University study finds that consumers will use the QR codes to better depict how long the milk is drinkable and create substantially less agricultural and food waste. In the U.S., dairy products are among the top three food groups with the largest share of wasted food, said Samantha Lau, a doctoral student in food science who works in the lab of Martin Wiedmann, the professor of food safety in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

In the early spring semester, Lau, also working with Cornell’s Milk Quality Improvement Program, connected with the Cornell Dairy Bar, which sells fluid milk in addition to ice cream on campus. She wanted to assess consumer acceptance for QR code technology that may one day replace the static best-by or sell-by dates commonly found on food products. Customers had a choice: purchasing milk with printed best-by dates, or buying containers with QR codes, which when scanned by a smart phone, would display the best-by date.

In the same Cornell Dairy Bar study, Lau placed a dynamic pricing element where consumers were encouraged to purchase milk with a shorter remaining shelf life — by offering a price discount as the best-by date approached. “During two-month study, over 60% of customers purchased the milk with the QR code, showing a considerable interest in using this new technology,” Lau said. “This revealed that the use of QR codes on food products can be an innovative way to address the larger issue of food waste.” Wiedmann says the technology also exists where smart milk cartons could communicate with smart refrigerators to inform a household of the need for fresh milk.

The study has been published in the Journal of Dairy Science.

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HP Turns Back On $1 Billion In Annual Sales By Quitting Russia, Belarus

“Considering the COVID environment and long-term outlook for Russia, we have decided to stop our Russia activity and have begun the process of fully winding down our operations,” said CEO Enrique Lores on a Q2 earnings call with analysts. Lores says “business there accounted for approximately $1 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2021.” The Register reports: HP was among the first wave of tech companies to suspend shipments to the countries soon after Russia invaded its neighbor on February 24, but now the company’s president and CEO Enrique Lores is making the move more permanent. […] HP’s Lores revealed the exit of Russia and Belarus as HP reported financial results for Q2 of its fiscal 2022 ended 30 April: revenue grew 4 percent to $16.5 billion including a 9 percent hike in the Personal Systems Group to $11.532 billion, and a 7 percent drop in Printing to $4.963 billion.

In the PC unit, notebooks were up 3 percent to $7.734 billion, and desktops were up 28 percent to $2.855 billion as corporate customers refreshed their estates. […] HP recorded a net profit of $1 billion for the period, lower than the $1.228 billion reported in the same quarter of last year.

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Banking Giant Capital One Enters B2B Software Industry With Launch of New Business

Capital One, a major player in America’s banking industry with $434 billion in assets and more than 100 million customers, is launching Capitol One Software, “a business that develops and sells software products to companies scaling up their use of data and cloud computing,” reports Forbes. From the report: The new venture, which has been created by Capital One’s CEO and founder, Rich Fairbank, is based at the company’s headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and has its own dedicated personnel as well as access to software developers in Capital One’s 12,000-strong technology team. Its first product, Capital One Slingshot, helps companies speed up their adoption of Snowflake, a popular cloud data platform, and manage costs associated with it. […] Ravi Raghu, the head of Capital One Software, says executives at Capital One see its creation as a natural evolution of the overall company’s digital journey. “We’ve been talking of Capital One as a technology company for a while now. The best proof of that is [to become] a technology company that’s actually selling software. That innovation just runs in our DNA.”

Still, making Capital One Software a success will be no slam dunk. The markets the new business is targeting are big but they are also full of formidable competitors whose sole focus is on software and there are significant costs associated with things such as building teams that consult with customers to help them get the most out of the products they buy. Capital One may also need to reassure investors, who have seen its share price fall by almost 12% this year to $127.86 at close of trading on May 31, that its move into the software business will not distract executives from its core finance ones, especially as the economy shows signs it may be tilting towards recession.

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Silicon Valley Investors Give Startups Survival Advice for Downturn

After years of funneling cash into startups’ grand ambitions, Silicon Valley’s investors are engaging in the grim ritual of delivering survival advice to their portfolio companies. From a report: In recent online slide presentations, blog posts and social-media threads, venture-capital doyens including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Craft Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator are telling the founders that they need to take emergency action for what could be the sharpest turn in more than a decade. Their advice includes cutting costs, preserving cash and jettisoning hopes that hedge funds or other investors will swoop in with big checks.

“The boom times of the last decade are unambiguously over,” Lightspeed, which has backed companies including social network Snap and crypto exchange FTX, wrote in a dispatch for startup executives that was posted on Medium, a publishing platform, this month. The investors’ admonitions are a departure from the growth-above-all mantra for startups in recent years, and come as the venture market is showing signs of sputtering. Funding for global startups — at around $58 billion in commitments midway through the second quarter — is on pace to drop by about one-fifth in the period compared with the previous quarter, according to analytics firm CB Insights. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is down about 25% from its all-time high in November, and SoftBank Group, which has poured more than $100 billion into investments, this month reported a $26.2 billion loss in the first quarter as valuations plummeted in its portfolio of tech companies.

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