Small modular reactors (SMRs) are advanced nuclear reactors that have a power capacity of up to 300 MW(e) per unit, which is about one-third of the generating capacity of traditional nuclear power reactors. SMRs, which can produce a large amount of low-carbon electricity, are:
Small – physically a fraction of the size of a conventional nuclear power reactor.
Modular – making it possible for systems and components to be factory-assembled and transported as a unit to a location for installation.
Reactors – harnessing nuclear fission to generate heat to produce energy.
Advantages of SMRs
Many of the benefits of SMRs are inherently linked to the nature of their design – small and modular. Given their smaller footprint, SMRs can be sited on locations not suitable for larger nuclear power plants. Prefabricated units of SMRs can be manufactured and then shipped and installed on site, making them more affordable to build than large power reactors, which are often custom designed for a particular location, sometimes leading to construction delays. SMRs offer savings in cost and construction time, and they can be deployed incrementally to match increasing energy demand.
Footage from my exploration video of the underground chambers of the Dendera Temple (Egypt), including RESTRICTED ACCESS to an upper level chamber of great importance that is usually locked off to the public.
I posted this video this morning (several posts below) along with an essay on the dangers of an advanced AI surveillance state. I commented on that essay before watching the video because a totalitarian surveillance state is a very real and dangerous possibility and many of us are talking about it. Now that I have watched Vance’s talk, I am posting it alone. In my view it’s a good talk and I agree with the policy directives Vance outlines. As a Buddhist, I am fundamentally an optimist and do not worry too much about things I have no control over. In many comments I have said our best defense against totalitarianism is free speech and platforms that host thriving free speech. Free speech can be thought of as a kind of biological technology that always sifts through the data and eventually finds the best stuff. This process must needs always be ongoing because everything is always changing. ABN
When Vice-President JD Vance delivers prepared remarks about Artificial Intelligence, pay attention.
JD Vance is the 2028 presidential candidate of choice for the Technocrats; the current goal is to envelop the MAGA populist movement for the intents and purposes of the collective network of Technocrats.
This motive and intent baseline will not change as Vance positions to replace President Donald Trump.
During a speech to the American Dynamism Summit, JD Vance outlines his optimism for the future of the U.S. economy, as boosted by the technological advances in artificial intelligence.
Within his remarks, Vance correctly notes some voices are saying there is going to be a major fracture between the “Techno-optimists” and the “populists.” However, Vance defines that chasm, and then refutes that fear/concern around jobs, advanced AI, automation, innovation and the economy. He misses what will be the root cause of the fracture completely.
Vice-President Vance notes there is nothing to fear from innovation, artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced industrial application of emerging technology. Indeed, all facets of economic growth through the use of all the aforementioned enterprises are correctly framed by the vice president.
There is nothing to fear on the economic front from the technological advancements currently underway.
Let me repeat, before I get misinterpreted….
Everything JD Vance says about the economic future of the United States, against the backdrop of innovation and AI is accurate. JD Vance is 100% correct. However, that’s not the predictable root cause of the upcoming fracture between the Techno-Optimists (his term) and the MAGA populists.
The fracture is going to come as an outcome of how AI networks with government and then destroys privacy, liberty and ultimately freedom for Americans.
It is not the economic side of the AI system Vance supports on behalf of his benefactors that is problematic; it’s the creation of a compliant surveillance state that flows as a natural outcome of advanced and automated AI systems within a highly weaponized government. That’s the problem. That where the fracture will occur.
Techno-optimists are not paying any attention to how their beloved AI networking can be weaponized in a surveillance state. When you combine fully automated AI data processing with ‘Real ID’, facial recognition software, digital identities created for each American and the motives of govt, you can easily predict what comes next.
The U.S. surveillance system can then be fine-tuned (depending on who is in charge of it) to use the real-time digital and physical identity to control access to systems. Write a Facebook post critical of government, get blocked from your bank account. Do something defined by government as against their interests, lose your access to travel etc.
The problem for Americans is how advanced AI will be deployed under the guise of efficiency to create a comprehensive DHS surveillance state.
The predictable system will automate, connecting every aspect of our lives to our compliance in living that life in the manner approved by those who control the system.
Privacy, freedom and liberty, core fundamental principles of our American system, are replaced with surveillance and defined citizen compliance. These are the pesky issues JD Vance and his Techno-Optimists (Thiel, Sacks, Musk, Ellison, et al) do not want to consider when they think about those pesky ‘proles’ they call “populists.”
Vice-President JD Vance has been constructed as the palatable messenger to calm the fears of MAGA. To calm those AI fears, Vance focuses attention to the well-discussed AI issues around jobs, labor and employment as outlined in his speech.
Listen carefully. However, the issue is not economics, it’s about privacy and liberty.
Reposted in full with permission from Sundance. I definitely see the problem but do not see any way out of it, save we the people having enough free speech to communicate our shared dissatisfaction and thus influence the powers that be. We the plebs have already allowed our civilization to be inundated with incompatible mass immigration, and we have even paid for it. Who is to blame? Not AI.
The Buddhist tradition has long been a ‘render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s’ one. I am black-pilled on our technological future when viewed in terms of the past and assessed with values formed in the past.
My white-pilled, optimistic side envisions digital babies with super-high IQs; AI so good and so well networked, everyone is wealthy and no one needs to be greedy. If everyone is super smart, healthy, and has all they need, the ancient human values of violence, dominance and might makes right, may wither away. All of us are capable of murder but very few ever do it. Several generations of digital babies will produce the finest human beings possible. In their hands AI surveillance will also have the capacity to prevent fraud, group parasitism, evil cabals. Bad as it looks today, I see lots of room for optimism and no matter what, Buddhist practice works in all worlds. ABN
South Korean and US troops simulate an assault on Kim Jong-un’s underground passageways
Robotic dogs could be deployed in underground tunnels to help defeat North Korean troops in battle.
New images show the South Korean army using dog-like robots during military drills with the United States, as the allies train for a potential combat in North Korea’s extensive network of fortified tunnels.
This week roughly 370 troops from the two countries are taking part in a four-day exercise in Paju, close to the border with North Korea, to simulate an assault within Kim Jong-un’s subterranean passageways – an activity considered more critical since the war in Gaza.
Hamas used its network of military tunnels in Gaza to hold hostages, smuggle weapons and enable its leaders to escape.
There are concerns that similar scenarios could unfold in North Korea, which has built a massive network of underground shelters, command centres and weapon stores. The persistent digging has been ongoing since the Korean War decades ago
While the legacy media often reports that the world is rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, a new report from J.P. Morgan shows that narrative is simply not correct. Since 2010, $9 trillion has been spent globally on wind, solar, electric vehicles energy storage, electrification and power grids, but despite this expensive effort — mostly at taxpayer expense — the share of final energy consumption by carbon-free energy sources is advancing by approximately a scant 0.3% to 0.6% per year.
Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan, explains in “Heliocentrism,” the 15th annual energy paper by the investment firm, that the reason fossil fuels remain the dominant source of energy is that modern prosperity is tied to certain kinds of industrial products, including chemicals, steel, cement, food and paper. Approximately 80% of the energy inputs for these products are fossil fuels. JPMorgan Chase is the world’s fifth largest bank by total assets, with $3.9 trillion as of 2023.
“As things stand now, modern prosperity is highly reliant on fossil fuels,” Cembalest said in a podcast on the report. Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., retired professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, estimates on his “The Honest Broker” Substack that at the current pace, the world will not be carbon free until sometime after the year 2200.
“There’s a lot of people that are so focused on the growth in solar power that they believe that solar power, typically bolted on with some energy storage, can represent the dominant share of where we get our energy from,” Cembalest said.
Solar accounts for approximately 6% of global electricity generation. However, electricity is only about 33% of the total energy people consume, according to the paper, and by some estimates it’s only about 20%. Translating all that solar power to a share of final energy consumption, which includes all forms of energy, solar is only 2% of total final energy and will grow to 4% to 5% by the end of the decade.
“While that’s impressive growth from a low base, we obviously need to be more focused on the other 95% of where we’re going to get our final energy consumption from and rather than just the solar on its own,” Cembalest said.
An estimated 1.6 billion people rely on VPNs to carry out the most sensitive tasks online, from watching illegal videos to engaging in sexual or political activities. But few people know that a considerable chunk of that market—including three of the six most popular VPNs—is quietly operated by an Israeli-owned company with close connections to that country’s national security state, including the elite Unit 8200 and Duvdevan Units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Previous MintPress Newsinvestigations into Israel’s growing control over the tech industry have outlined how those units have been involved in many of Israel’s most outrageous hacking, surveillance and assassination programs, acting as spies and death squads. Unit 8200, for example, has been the source of much of the world’s most infamous spying software, including Cellebrite and Pegasus, the program used to snoop on tens of thousands of the world’s top politicians and journalists, including by Saudi Arabia, who used it to help track down and kill Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Given this context, justifiable fears arise that control over a vast VPN empire could add to Israel’s influence over the online information and security world, creating backdoors for Israeli intelligence to carry out a vast kompromat operation on users around the globe.
This investigation is part of a serieshighlighting and detailing the power of Israel’s growing tech industry to access and control people’s data.
A Company Like No Other
Kape Technologies is a major player in the online privacy world, one of the three giants that collectively control the market. It owns many of the world’s top VPNs, including ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate, Intego Antivirus, and a host of tech websites that promote its products. Kape brands can be seen sponsoring a wide array of public figures, such as Tucker Carlson, Angry Video Game Nerd, Drew Gooden, Lex Fridman, Cody Ko, Uncle Roger, and Ben Shapiro.
Elon Musk has revealed the large cyberattack that took down his social media app X on Monday seemingly originated in Ukraine.
His revelation followed repeated glitches with the site, which has been down for much of the day.
‘Well, we’re not sure exactly what happened,’ Musk told Fox Business Network on Monday afternoon. But there was a massive cyber attack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.’
Musk had confirmed earlier in the day that X was being targeted by a ‘massive cyberattack.’
The world’s richest man noted during the interview that the social media site is now back up and running.
The Trump admin has repurposed the controversial Biden era CBP One cell phone app into a self deportation app called CBP Home that launches today. DHS tells me any migrants who had the prior CBP One app will have it auto update to this new app, & DHS can use data from prior CBP One registrations to track migrants for removal.
The new app allows illegal aliens and migrants in the US to register with CBP to self deport. They fill out biographical information, including their countries of citizenship, which country they plan to return to, their alien registration numbers, contact information, and it allows them to upload photos of themselves to confirm their identity. All of it is then submitted to CBP, and they leave the country.
You may be asking yourself – why would an illegal alien want to self deport?
In a statement to FOX News – DHS Secretary Kristi Noem answers that question.
“The CBP Home app gives aliens to option to leave now and self-deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream. If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return,” Noem said. “The Biden administration exploited the CBP One app to allow more than one million aliens to enter the United States. With the launching of the CBP Home app, we are restoring integrity to our immigration system.”
Microsoft today introduced Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture that it expects will realize quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.
It leverages the world’s first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers.
In the same way that the invention of semiconductors made today’s smartphones, computers and electronics possible, topoconductors and the new type of chip they enable offer a path to developing quantum systems that can scale to a million qubits and are capable of tackling the most complex industrial and societal problems, Microsoft said.
“We took a step back and said ‘OK, let’s invent the transistor for the quantum age. What properties does it need to have?’” said Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow. “And that’s really how we got here – it’s the particular combination, the quality and the important details in our new materials stack that have enabled a new kind of qubit and ultimately our entire architecture.”
I injected the horse tranquilizer Ketamine and tracked my brain data for 15 days. It completely scrambled my brain.
In a world-first we answered the question ‘what happens to the brain before, during, and after ketamine treatment?’ We also discovered how long it took for my brain to return to ‘normal’.
Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency discovered $4.7 trillion in United States Treasury payments on an untraceable budget line.
The agency announced Monday that the Treasury Access Symbol, which are used to describe the account the money is linked to, was missing on a number of payments the Treasury Department has made.
‘In the federal government, the TAS field was optional for about $4.7 trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,’ DOGE posted on X.
‘As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.’
The account went on to thank the US Treasury for its help in identifying the optional field.
The Treasury Department, which fields trillions of dollars worth of government payments every year was one of the first departments DOGE staffers gained access to.
American Buddhist Net 