NuScale’s small nuclear reactor is first to get US safety approval

Small size can help with economics and safety.

NuScale's reactor-in-a-can.

Enlarge / NuScale's reactor-in-a-can. (credit: NuScale)

One hope buoying nuclear energy advocates has been the promise of “small modular reactor” designs. By dividing a nuclear facility into an array of smaller reactors, they can largely be manufactured in a factory and then dropped into place, saving us from having to build a complex, possibly one-of-a-kind behemoth on site. That could be a big deal for nuclear’s persistent financial problems, while also enabling some design features that further improve safety.

On Friday, the first small modular reactor received a design certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meaning that it meets safety requirements and could be chosen by future projects seeking licensing and approval.

The design comes from NuScale, a company birthed from research at Oregon State University that has received some substantial Department of Energy funding. It’s a 76-foot tall, 15-foot wide steel cylinder (23 meters by 5 meters) capable of producing 50 megawatts of electricity. (The company also has a 60-megawatt iteration teed up.) They envision a plant employing up to 12 of these reactors in a large pool like those used in current nuclear plants.

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Daily Deals (9-01-2020)

Intel Gamer Days is underway, which means you can score discounts on gaming PCs and accessories at a number of participating retailers including B&H, Best Buy, Microsoft, Newegg, Target, and Walmart. There are also chances to win PCs or accessorie…

Intel Gamer Days is underway, which means you can score discounts on gaming PCs and accessories at a number of participating retailers including B&H, Best Buy, Microsoft, Newegg, Target, and Walmart. There are also chances to win PCs or accessories. You can find more details at the Intel Gamer Days website, or follow the links […]

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AT&T backs Trump plan, demands “neutrality” on Facebook, Amazon, and Google

AT&T: Trump-admin petition to FCC is “the neutrality debate that really matters.”

A man with an umbrella walking past a building with an AT&T logo.

Enlarge / A man walks with an umbrella outside of AT&T corporate headquarters on March 13, 2020, in Dallas, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | Ronald Martinez)

AT&T is supporting President Trump's crackdown on Big Tech, arguing in a blog post yesterday that online platforms should have to uphold "neutrality" on the Internet. The debate over websites ignited by Trump's petition is more important than the years-long debate over net neutrality rules applied to Internet service providers, AT&T claimed. The company said it will file comments with the Federal Communications Commission this week as the FCC continues its review of the Trump administration's petition.

The phrase "net neutrality" almost always refers to Internet service providers like AT&T, not websites. The general idea is that ISPs should have to act as neutral conduits, connecting Internet users to any (legal) website or online service they want to access and without forcing websites to pay tolls to reach users.

When the Obama-era FCC imposed net neutrality rules in 2015—prohibiting ISPs from blocking or throttling traffic and from giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment—AT&T sued the commission in an attempt to overturn the rules. That lawsuit failed, but AT&T and other ISPs got their wish when the Trump-era FCC deregulated broadband and eliminated net neutrality rules.

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Report: Apple will launch four 5G iPhones with a new design this year

iPhones will be joined by new Watches, a HomePod, a new iPad Air, and more.

A new report from Bloomberg's Debby Wu and Mark Gurman says that Apple tasked its suppliers with building "at least 75 million" 5G iPhones. That's in the ballpark of what was produced last year, so Apple is expecting strong sales despite the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

More interesting for our purposes here, though, are tidbits about what those iPhones—and other Apple products planned for release this year—look like.

Citing people familiar with the situation, the Bloomberg story claims that Apple has a busy holiday season ahead of it. The sources say that Apple plans to launch four 5G iPhone models, a new iPad Air, two new Apple Watch models, over-ear headphones, and a new HomePod speaker. They also allude to a modestly updated Apple TV 4K and the long-rumored AirTags product, but the story did not claim that those are coming this year.

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The US military took a big step toward a future space network this week

The Department of Defense is going for smaller low-cost satellites.

The Space Development Agency plans to build out a network of optical communications satellites by 2024.

Enlarge / The Space Development Agency plans to build out a network of optical communications satellites by 2024. (credit: Space Development Agency)

On Monday, the Space Development Agency announced new contracts to Lockheed Martin and York Space Systems for the development of "space vehicles" that would operate in the "transport layer" around Earth. This language obfuscates what is actually a pretty big deal in how the US military plans to communicate and control its weapons systems in the coming decades.

With the new contracts, these two Colorado-based companies will each build 10 relatively small satellites—likely on the order of 100- to 200kg each—that will be launched no later than September 2022. These will essentially be test satellites for what will eventually grow into a constellation of several hundred satellites at roughly 1,000km above the Earth's surface.

Transport layer

So what is the transport layer? To answer this question, let's start at the beginning: in early 2019, the Pentagon formally created the "Space Development Agency" to identify future threats in space and to oversee development of satellites and other assets to ensure technological and military superiority.

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Behold, Nvidia’s 3080 GPU: 2x 2080 power, starting at $699 on Sept. 17

RTX 3070 will exceed RTX 2080 Ti at $499 in October. Three-slot RTX 3090 is $1,499.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the RTX 3080 as Nvidia's "new flagship" GPU on Tuesday morning, confirming over a month of leaked rumors and card designs. This was met with a flurry of other hardware, app, and software partnership announcements, but arguably the biggest numbers out of today's event came in the form of performance and price.

Huang alleged that the RTX 3080 will "double" the performance of the $1,200+ RTX 2080 GPU while starting at $699, with hardware going on sale September 17. Next to that, Huang announced the RTX 3070, whose power will reportedly exceed the RTX 2080 Ti while starting at only $499.

After these, the three-slot RTX 3090 was announced without any aspirations of value, with a September 24 launch starting at a whopping $1499. This was followed by a sizzle reel of fans playing recent RTX-enabled 3D games at 8K resolution and "60 frames per second."

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