An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: On the afternoon of April 14, 2020, dozens of firefighters arrived at an Amazon warehouse in Fresno, California, as thick plumes of smoke poured from the roof of the 880,000-square-foot warehouse. Some 220 solar panels and other equipment at the facility, known as FAT1, were damaged by the three-alarm fire, which was caused by "an undetermined electrical event within the solar system mounted on top of the roof," Leland Wilding, Fresno's fire investigator, wrote in an incident report. A little over a year later, about 60 firefighters were called to an even larger Amazon facility in Perryville, Maryland, to put out a two-alarm blaze, local news outlets reported. In the intervening months, at least four other Amazon fulfillment centers caught fire or experienced electrical explosions due to failures with their solar energy-generating systems, according to internal company documents viewed by CNBC.

The documents, which have never been made public, indicate that between April 2020 and June 2021, Amazon experienced "critical fire or arc flash events" in at least six of its 47 North American sites with solar installations, effecting 12.7% of such facilities. Arc flashes are a kind of electrical explosion. "The rate of dangerous incidents is unacceptable, and above industry averages," an Amazon employee wrote in one of the internal reports. [...] By June of last year, all of Amazon's U.S. operations with solar had to be taken offline temporarily, internal documents show. The company had to ensure its systems were designed, installed and maintained properly before "re-energizing" any of them.

Amazon spokesperson Erika Howard told CNBC in a statement that the incidents involved systems run by partners, and that the company responded by voluntarily turning off its solar-powered roofs. "Out of an abundance of caution, following a small number of isolated incidents with onsite solar systems owned and operated by third parties, Amazon proactively powered off our onsite solar installations in North America, and took immediate steps to re-inspect each installation by a leading solar technical expert firm," the statement said. [...] "As inspections are completed, our onsite solar systems are being powered back on," Howard said. "Amazon also built a team of dedicated solar experts overseeing the construction, operations, and maintenance of our systems in-house to ensure the safety of our systems." "An Amazon employee estimated, in the documents circulated internally, that each incident cost the company an average of $2.7 million," adds the report. "The Amazon employee also said the company would lose $940,000 per month, or $20,000 for each of the 47 decommissioned North American sites, as long as the solar remained offline. There could be additional costs for Amazon depending on contracts with clean energy partners for renewable energy credits, the documents show."

Chip designer Nvidia on Wednesday said that U.S. officials told it to stop exporting two top computing chips for artificial intelligence work to China, a move that could cripple Chinese firms' ability to carry out advanced work like image recognition and hamper a business Nvidia expects to generate $400 million in sales this quarter. Reuters reports: Nvidia shares fell 4% after hours. The company said the ban, which affects its A100 and H100 chips designed to speed up machine learning tasks, could interfere with completion of developing the H100, the flagship chip Nvidia announced this year. Nvidia said U.S. officials told it the new rule "will address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a "military end use" or "military end user" in China."

The announcement signals a major escalation of the U.S. crackdown on China's technological capabilities as tensions bubble over the fate of Taiwan, where chips for Nvidia and almost every other major chip firm are manufactured. [...] Nvidia said it had booked $400 million in sales of the affected chips this quarter to China that could be lost if Chinese firms decide not to buy alternative Nvidia products. It said it plans to apply for exemptions to the rule but has "no assurances" that U.S. officials will grant them. Stacy Rasgon, a financial analyst with Bernstein, said the disclosure signaled that about 10% of Nvidia's data center sales, which investors have closely monitored in recent years, were coming from China and that the hit to sales was likely "manageable" for Nvidia.

New submitter xwin shares a report from WTVO: With California's power grid under strain due to extreme heat and high demand, the utility grid operator is asking residents to avoid charging their electric vehicles. This comes days after the state announced a plan to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035. The California Independent System Operator is asking residents for "voluntary energy conservation" over the Labor Day weekend.

According to the National Weather Service, the western United States is facing a "prolonged and record heat wave." "The top three conservation actions are to set thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, avoid using large appliances and charging electric vehicles, and turn off unnecessary lights,â the American Public Power Association said, asking residents to limit energy usage during 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. "Today, most people charge their electric cars when they come home in the evening -- when electricity demand is typically at its peak," according to Cornell University's College of Engineering. "If left unmanaged, the power demanded from many electric vehicles charging simultaneously in the evening will amplify existing peak loads, potentially outstripping the grid's current capacity to meet demand."

Japan's digital minister, who's vowed to rid the bureaucracy of outdated tools from the hanko stamp to the fax machine, has now declared "war" on a technology many haven't seen for decades -- the floppy disk. From a report: The hand-sized, square-shaped data storage item, along with similar devices including the CD or even lesser-known mini disk, are still required for some 1,900 government procedures and must go, digital minister Taro Kono wrote in a Twitter post Wednesday. "We will be reviewing these practices swiftly," Kono said in a press conference Tuesday, who added that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has offered his full support. "Where does one even buy a floppy disk these days?" Japan isn't the only nation that has struggled to phase out the outdated technology -- the US Defense Department only announced in 2019 that it has ended the use of floppy disks, which were first developed in the 1960s, in a control system for its nuclear arsenal. Sony Group stopped making the disks in 2011 and many young people would struggle to describe how to use one or even identify one in the modern workplace.

Provinces in China are being forced to reduce power consumption as forest fires, droughts, and heatwaves ravage the country. The Guardian reports: here were still some streetlights on the Bund, one of the main roads in central Shanghai. But the decorative lights which light up the city skyline -- blue, pink, and red -- were turned off for two days to cope with the peaking power demand. The power restriction imposed by the city authorities, was the first in Shanghai, the financial hub of China. But across the rest of the country similar restrictions have been put in place, as cities, notably in the south-western region, grapple with ongoing power shortages caused by devastating droughts this summer.

In Sichuan, a top-level energy emergency alert was issued to address the province's power shortages, a first in the province's history: the alert means that residents will be given priority for power supplies. Sichaun is known for its abundant hydro energy, which provides 80% of its power, and is a vital link in China's extensive West-to-East Electricity Transfer Project. But the area has been hit by record-breaking high temperatures, unseen in 60 years. With water in the region's rivers dropping to historical lows, hydropower plants are only producing half the energy they were generating this time last year.

Sichuan had already imposed rolling blackouts across factories, and international companies have had to halt production, while the coal-fired plants are all at full stretch. But even so, cities around Sichuan are struggling to meet surging power demands from residential communities, with people's daily lives being heavily affected. In Dazhou, residents in one community complain that power supplies have been cut for 6-7 hours each day for nearly a week, leaving many flocking to a nearby bridge in the evening to beat the sweltering summer heat, according to Jiupai News. Private business owners are also hit hard as power supplies are rationed among communities and shopping malls. Business activities and supply chains are being hit in various ways. "The price of commodities such as silicon metal has risen due to the power restrictions, and there are growing concerns about a shortage of automobile parts in Shanghai for companies including the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation and Tesla," reports The Guardian.

Tesla has unveiled a new virtual power plant using Powerwalls home battery pack, and this time, it's on an island, Miyako-jima, in Japan. Electrek reports: A virtual power plant (VPP) consists of distributed energy storage systems, like Tesla Powerwalls, used in concert to provide grid services and avoid the use of polluting and expensive peaker power plants. Tesla launched one in California earlier this year, and it had its first emergency event earlier this month with great results. Now the company is trying to deploy a virtual power plant in Texas, and of course, it also had one in operation for years in Australia that is still expanding.

But now we have learned that Tesla also quietly built a new virtual power plant in Japan, and it has now decided to unveil it. The project is called "Miyakojima VPP" because it is located on the island of Miyako-jima, the most populous island in the Okinawa Prefecture. Tesla announced that it started to install Powerwalls in partnership with the local electric utility in 2021, and it now has over 300 Powerwalls on the island as part of the VPP. [...] Tesla explains that VPP is helping the island take better advantage of its renewable energy, but it is also proving more grid resilience, especially in the case of a natural disaster. The Miyakojima VPP is still growing, and Tesla expects that it will include 400 Powerwalls by the end of this year and 600 Powerwalls by the end of 2023. In 2024, Tesla expects to start installing Powerwalls for similar projects throughout the Okinawa Prefecture. "[W]hen power supply and demand are tight on Miyako Island, electricity generated by photovoltaic power generation is stored in Powerwall before the tight time period and discharged from Powerwall to the home during the tight time period," said Tesla in a statement translated to Japanese. "It contributes not only to the households where the is installed, but also to the stabilization of Miyako Island's grid power supply, and stabilizes the power supply on the island. In addition, in the event of a power outage due to a typhoon, etc., power will be supplied from the Powerwall to the installed home, making it possible to prevent power outages in the home."

AMD unveiled its 5nm Ryzen 7000 lineup today, outlining the details of four new models that span from the 16-core $699 Ryzen 9 7950X flagship, which AMD claims is the fastest CPU in the world, to the six-core $299 Ryzen 5 7600X, the lowest bar of entry to the first family of Zen 4 processors. Tom's Hardware reports: Ryzen 7000 marks the first 5nm x86 chips for desktop PCs, but AMD's newest chips don't come with higher core counts than the previous-gen models. However, frequencies stretch up to 5.7 GHz - an impressive 800 MHz improvement over the prior generation -- paired with an up to 13% improvement in IPC from the new Zen 4 microarchitecture. That results in a 29% improvement in single-threaded performance over the prior-gen chips. That higher performance also extends out to threaded workloads, with AMD claiming up to 45% more performance in some threaded workloads. AMD says these new chips power huge generational gains over the prior-gen Ryzen 5000 models, with 29% faster gaming and 44% more performance in productivity apps. Going head-to-head with Intel's chips, AMD claims the high-end 7950X is 11% faster overall in gaming than Intel's fastest chip, the 12900K, and that even the low-end Ryzen 5 7600X beats the 12900K by 5% in gaming. It's noteworthy that those claims come with a few caveats [...].

The Ryzen 7000 processors come to market on September 27, and they'll be joined by new DDR5 memory products that support new EXPO overclocking profiles. AMD's partners will also offer a robust lineup of motherboards - the chips will snap into new Socket AM5 motherboards that AMD says it will support until 2025+. These motherboards support DDR5 memory and the PCIe 5.0 interface, bringing the Ryzen family up to the latest connectivity standards. The X670 Extreme and standard X670 chipsets arrive first in September, while the more value-oriented B650 options will come to market in October. That includes the newly announced B650E chipset that brings full PCIe 5.0 connectivity to budget motherboards, while the B650 chipset slots in as a lower-tier option. The Ryzen 7000 lineup also brings integrated RDNA 2 graphics to all of the processors in the stack, a first for the Ryzen family.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: North American lithium-ion battery production is set to soar over the next decade. The Biden administration and Congress have both put policies in place to incentivize domestic manufacturing over imports, and startups, battery companies, and automakers are responding. Honda and LG Energy Solutions are the most recent to make moves; on Monday morning, the companies announced that they are forming a $4.4 billion joint venture to build a US battery factory. "Our joint venture with Honda, which has significant brand reputation, is yet another milestone in our mid- to long-term strategy of promoting electrification in the fast-growing North American market," said Youngsoo Kwon, CEO of LG Energy Solution. "Since our ultimate goal is to earn our valued customers' trust and respect, we aspire to position ourselves as a leading battery innovator, working with Honda in achieving its core initiatives for electrification, as well as providing sustainable energy solutions to discerning end consumers."

2025 is when Honda and LG are targeting mass production at this newest joint venture. It's too soon for them to have finalized a site for this factory, but the companies say they plan to begin construction early next year. The battery factory will make pouch cells, with an annual capacity of 40 GWh. "Honda is working toward our target to realize carbon neutrality for all products and corporate activities the company is involved in by 2050," said Toshihiro Mibe, president and CEO of Honda Motor Company. "Aligned with our longstanding commitment to build products close to the customer, Honda is committed to the local procurement of EV batteries which is a critical component of EVs. This initiative in the US with LGES, the leading global battery manufacturer, will be part of such a Honda approach."

"In a speech today that is likely making some EV proponents' heads spin and implode, Musk made the argument that we need more oil and gas as we transition to alternative energy solutions," writes Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck. "He said this at the ONS Energy Conference being held in Norway this week." Bloomberg reports: The world needs more oil and gas now to deal with an energy shortage while pushing to transition to renewable supplies, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said. "At this time, we actually need more oil and gas, not less," Musk said Monday during an energy conference in Norway, adding that he's not someone to "demonize" the fossil fuels. At the same time, "we must have a clear path to a sustainable energy future."

Musk said the transition to a sustainable economy should be "as fast as possible," adding that ocean wind has "massive untapped potential" and that he's also a proponent of nuclear energy. "If you have a well-designed nuclear plant, you should not shut it down -- especially right now," Musk said. The EV maker's aim "has always been to accelerate sustainability," Musk said. "That's still our primary goal by far." "Realistically, I think we need to use oil and gas in the short term, because otherwise civilization will crumble," Musk added. "One of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced is the transition to sustainable energy and to a sustainable economy. That will take some decades to complete."

Further reading: Germany To Keep Last Three Nuclear-Power Plants Running In Policy U-Turn

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Germany has ordered overnight shutdowns for non-essential digital signage, to save its reserves of natural gas for more important purposes. Like many European nations, Germany relies on natural gas imported from Russia. And thanks to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, that gas is currently in short supply. The European Union has therefore implemented an energy saving plan. One of Germany's tactics is requiring digital signage in shop windows and other non-essential locations to be turned off between 10:00PM and 6:00AM. Germany will also stop external lighting of some public buildings and implement many other power-saving measures. The plan [PDF] requiring the switch-off was published on August 12, with a deadline of September 1.

But as German outlet Invidis reports, the regulation was unhelpfully vague. For starters an updated ordinance [PDF] appears to have made the simple mistake of substituting 06:00 and 16:00 -- meaning digital signage could only run from 4PM to 10PM. Invidis also pointed out that digital signage at bus stops and train stations can do double duty displaying ads and timetable information. Exceptions for such dual-purpose signs have been arranged. Those errors and ambiguities have reportedly left those who run digital signs unsure of what they needed to do and worried they might miss the deadline.

Further complicating matters is a requirement to turn off the screens altogether rather than leaving the displays blank. Digital signage is seldom switched off, and retail staff will have to learn how to do that. Many digital signs also include a computer -- some are Android machines, others use compute sticks, the Intel NUC and even the Raspberry Pi. Admins will therefore need to cope with extra reboots. And then there's the matter of content updates, which are often scheduled overnight. All of which adds up to a stressful moment for admins of digital signage, and not much time to get things right.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Partha Ranganathan came to realize about seven years ago that Moore's law was dead. No longer could the Google engineering VP expect chip performance to double roughly every 18 months without major cost increases, and that was a problem considering he helped Google construct its infrastructure spending budget each year. Faced with the prospect of getting a chip twice as fast every four years, Ranganathan knew they needed to mix things up. Ranganathan and other Google engineers looked at the overall picture and realized transcoding (for YouTube) was consuming a large fraction of compute cycles in its data centers. The off-the-shelf chips Google was using to run YouTube weren't all that good at specialized tasks like transcoding. YouTube's infrastructure uses transcoding to compress video down to the smallest possible size for your device, while presenting it at the best possible quality.

What they needed was an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC -- a chip designed to do a very specific task as effectively and efficiently as possible. Bitcoin miners, for example, use ASIC hardware and are designed for that sole purpose. "The thing that we really want to be able to do is take all of the videos that get uploaded to YouTube and transcode them into every format possible and get the best possible experience," said Scott Silver, VP of engineering at YouTube. It didn't take long to sell upper management on the idea of ASICs. After a 10-minute meeting with YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki, the company's first video chip project was approved. Google started deploying its Argos Video Coding Units (VCUs) in 2018, but didn't publicly announce the project until 2021. At the time, Google said the Argos VCUs delivered a performance boost of anywhere between 20 to 33 times compared to traditional server hardware running well-tuned transcoding software. Google has since flipped the switch on thousands of second-gen Argos chips in servers around the world, and at least two follow-ups are already in the pipeline.

The Washington Post shares a little-acknowledged downside to electric cars: recharging takes "upward of 15 to 30 minutes."

But scientists are already working on improvements: In a report released this week, government researchers said they have found a way to charge electric car batteries up to 90 percent in just 10 minutes. The method is likely five years away from making its way into the market, scientists said, but would mark a fundamental shift. "The goal is to get very, very close to [times] you would see at the gas pump," said Eric Dufek, a lead author of the study and scientist at the Idaho National Laboratory, a research center run by the Department of Energy....

At issue is the delicate balance of trying to charge an electric vehicle battery quicker, but not doing it so fast that a rapid charge does long-term damage to the battery or plays a role in causing them to explode. Charging electric batteries fast can cause damage, reducing the battery's life span and performance, scientists said. "You've had batteries when you first got it, they were great, but after a couple years or a few hundred charge cycles, they don't perform as well," said Eric D. Wachsman, director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, an energy research organization at the University of Maryland. To try to solve this, Dufek and his team used machine learning to figure out how batteries age when charging fast. Their algorithm was trained to analyze 20,000 to 30,000 data points which indicated how well the battery was charging and whether it was aging or degrading....

Wachsman said the new research is helpful for the field. "Not too fast, not too slow," he said of Dufek's charging approach. "It's just right in that Goldilocks [zone]." But the bigger benefit, he said, would be if this method spurs car companies to make electric vehicles with smaller batteries, since they'd now have batteries that could be charged quicker and allow consumers to feel less worried about stopping periodically to get a quick recharge.

"Smaller batteries are cheaper cars," he said.

What's the deal with that supposed 30TB external SSD being sold for just $31.40 on China-based online shopping site AliExpress? It's also listed on Walmart's website for just $39 — but first, listen to cybersecurity researcher calling himself "Ray [REDACTED]". Scammer gets two 512MB Flash drives. Or 1 gigabyte, or whatever. They then add hacked firmware that makes it misreport its size... when you go to WRITE a big file, hacked firmware simply writes all new data on top of old data, while keeping directory (with false info) intact.
Ars Technica goes over the details: On the inside, this "SSD" looks like two small-capacity microSD cards hot glued to a USB 2.0-capable board. This board's firmware has been modified so that each of these cards reports its capacity as "15.0TB" to the operating system, for a total of 30TB, even though the actual capacity of the cards is much lower.... It preserves the directory structure of whatever you're copying, but when it's "copying" your data, it just keeps writing and rewriting over the tiny microSD cards.

Everything will look fine until you go to access a file, only to find that the data isn't there.

Replies to Ray Redacted's thread are full of alternate versions of this scam, including multiple iterations of the hot-glued microSD version and at least one that hid a USB thumb drive inside a larger enclosure. Fake USB storage devices are neither new nor rare, though this one makes spectacularly egregious claims about its price-per-gigabyte. When it comes to buying storage online, common-sense advice is best: stick to name brands, buy from trustworthy sellers.... and know that if a deal seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

PINE64's August update included photos of their first prototype for its upcoming Star64 single-board computer, "the first true RISC-V single-board computer from us...but as I wrote last month it certainly isn't the last RISC-V piece of hardware you'll be seeing from us." Just as a short recap: Star64 comes with a StarFive JH7110 64bit CPU sporting quad SiFive FU740 cores clocked at 1.5GHz. The SOC is equipped with BXE-2-32 from Imagination Technologies, which is said to be a solid mid-range GPU. Star64 will be available in two configurations — with 4Gb and 8GB of RAM, similarly to the Quartz64. Both hardware versions include USB 3.0 and a PCIe slot as well as two native Gigabit Ethernet NICs.... Along the long leading edges you'll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you'll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you'll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas — one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi....

The Star64 also has an MiPi display output complete with a touch panel (TP) input, a 12V power port, a CSI camera port and an eMMC slot. A micro SD card slot can be found at the bottom of the PCB. Similarly to the RockPro64 and Quartz64, the 12V port on the Star64 can be used for powering other hardware directly from the board — a popular example is powering one or multiple SSDs connected to a PCIe SATA adapter. I'll add that, at least in theory, the Star64 would make a great network-attached storage device because of its SoCs low thermals and idle power. I am looking forward to seeing NAS-focused Linux or BSD* OSes available for the board.

Speaking of software, efforts to support the SoC in Linux have already begun. I've been told that both Debian and Fedora are already being ported to the StarFive JH7110, which is great news. We are certain that many other OSes will follow swiftly — especially once we start delivering the Star64 to interested developers. On the subject of availability: the Star64 will be available in a few weeks time, and will initially be available to developers. Given the interest in the Star64's and the SoC powering I hope to see functional distributions available for the board soon after launch.
The announcement also included an update on their PinecilV2 smart mini portable soldering iron (built with a 32-bit RISC-V SoC). "The Pinecil V2 landed earlier this month and sold out almost instantly. The next production run of the ought to be available soon however..."

The war in Ukraine has "reshaped" energy markets, reports the Washington Post, with gas and oil shortages driving up the price of fossil fuels.

The end result? "From Japan to Germany to Britain to the United States, leaders of countries that had stopped investing in nuclear power are now considering building new power plants or delaying the closure of existing ones." The shift is especially notable in Japan and Germany, where both turned decisively against nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.... This week, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that his government is considering constructing next-generation nuclear power plants with the goal of making them commercially operational in the 2030s. The government may also extend the operational life of its current nuclear power plants. German policymakers, meanwhile, are considering prolonging the life of three final nuclear power plants that had been scheduled to go offline at the end of the year. The reprieve would be temporary — just a year or two to get through the current energy crisis — but it would still mark a significant policy reversal that has been a major focus of Germany political life for the last decade...

Any decision in Germany would have to be approved by [German Economy Minister Robert] Habeck and his Green party — which was founded decades ago to focus on abolishing nuclear power. It remains a core policy position of the party — but so is opposition to Russia's war in Ukraine and a desire to be as strong as possible against the Kremlin. "We are in really special times," said Dennis Tänzler, a director of Adelphi, a Berlin-based climate think tank. "The bottom line is that German climate and energy policy has been shaped since Fukushima by a cross-party consensus that overall the technological risks, the security risks, are just too great."

Even some prominent nuclear critics appear open to keeping existing plants online for longer, though they oppose building any new ones. "There's no connection between building nuclear power plants and dealing with the price spike caused by the loss of Russian gas," since they take at least a decade to construct, said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, a London-based climate think tank. But, he said, extending the life of existing reactors could make sense. "If you can do it safely, and it's worthwhile economically to do it, I don't see any good reason not to extend the life of nuclear reactors," he said.

"Over the past year, nuclear fusion has inched closer to reality," the Washington Post reported Friday.

"Scientists are mere years from getting more energy out of fusion reactions than the energy required to create them, they said. Venture capitalists are pumping billions into companies, racing to get a fusion power plant up and running by the early 2030s. The Biden administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Department of Energy, is creating tax credits and grant programs to help companies figure out how to deploy this kind of energy." (One fusion company's CEO argues that "Once the technology is shown to work, it's less risky, and the next buyer of that technology could get a commercial loan.")

But even with all this new excitement, challenges still remain, nuclear scientists warn: The U.S. energy grid would need a significant redesign for fusion power plants to become common. The price of providing fusion power is still too high to be feasible. "We're at a very exciting place," said Dennis G. Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "But we also have to be realistic in the sense that it's still very hard...."

Phil Larochelle, a partner at the venture capital firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said private money is flowing into fusion at such high levels because scientific advancements, such as better magnets, have made cheap nuclear fusion a likelier possibility. Going forward, Larochelle noted that getting nuclear fusion to market probably will require formal cost-sharing programs with the government, which he said could be similar to how NASA is partnering with SpaceX for space travel innovation. "In both the U.S. and the U.K., there's now kind of new government programs and support for trying to get to a [fusion] pilot," he said. "It's a good kind of risk-sharing between public and private [sectors]."

Despite the growing government collaboration, Whyte said, a few challenges remain. The effects of climate change are increasingly irreversible, and the clock is ticking, he said, making fusion energy a crucial need. Companies will have to figure out how to deploy the technology widely. Doing it cheaply is most important, he said. "What I worry about is that we'll get to a system where we can't actually make it economically attractive fast enough," he added. Moreover, to create an electricity grid through which fusion technology provides large amounts of power, many things need to happen. Universities need to churn out scientists more capable of working on fusion technology. Fusion power companies need to build devices that create more energy than they consume. Scientific and manufacturing materials must be constructed in difficult ways if power plants want to scale.

"Can we get there?" Whyte asked. "I think we can if we get our act together in the right way. But there's no guarantee of that."

Thursday Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant was cut off from the country's electricity grid, causing "widespread power outages across southern Ukraine," according to the New York Times. Friday afternoon it was reconnected to Ukraine's national power grid, the Times adds — "but its time offline renewed concerns about the safe operation of the plant..."

The Guardian notes it's the first such disconnection in nearly 40 years. Three other power lines connecting the reactors to the grid "had already been taken out during the war," though when the fourth and final line went out, "the plant still received supplies of electricity from one remaining backup line connected to the nearby conventional power plant." (Though two other lines to that power plant were already also down.) "Disconnecting the plant from the grid is dangerous because it raises the risk of catastrophic failure of the electricity-run cooling systems for its reactors and spent fuel rods.... If all external connections go down, it must rely on diesel-fuelled generators for power. If they break down, engineers only have 90 minutes to stave off dangerous overheating." (Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed out that during the break in power, back-up diesel generators did indeed immediately kick in to ensure continuous power supply, according to Reuters.)

But is Russia executing a larger strategy here? Earlier, Russian engineers informed plant workers that the nuclear plant would be switched to Russia's power network in the event of an emergency, according to the head of Ukraine's atomic energy company. Speaking to the Guardian, he adds that the plant's workers were told that "The precondition for this plan was heavy damage of all lines which connect Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the Ukrainian system" — and he worries that Russia is now attempting to create those preconditions.

He's not the only one thinking that. Voice of America interviewed a nuclear engineer at the plant who claims that Russian troops have several times "bombed places that cannot affect the safe operation of the power plant. I think that the Russians are trying to discredit the armed forces of Ukraine for the purpose of propaganda.... At the same time, the Russians deliberately damaged the high-voltage power lines that connect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant with the Ukrainian power system.... [T]he Russians want to arrange a small accident and stop Zaporizhzhia for a short time, then supply us with electricity from Crimea and automatically switch the nuclear power plant to the Russian energy system."

He also claims to have seen Russian military equipment stored in the plant. For example, "Different types of Russian artillery and missile installations are located both inside the territory of the nuclear power plant and around it, on the perimeter, near the Kakhovka Reservoir."

The last power line connecting the reactors to the grid was disconnected by fires "caused by shelling," the Guardian reported.

The New York Times reports on the aftermath: Ukrainian engineers were able to restore damaged external power lines after repeated shelling on Thursday, ensuring the facility was able to meet its own power needs and continue to operate safely, according to Ukrainian and international officials, but efforts to reconnect it to the grid took longer. With fires raging around the plant, new shelling in and around the facility on a near daily basis and an exhausted and stressed team of Ukrainian engineers tasked with keeping the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant running safely, however, calls for international intervention grew louder.

Negotiations with Ukraine and Russia to allow safety experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit and inspect the plant appeared to be making progress, as U.N. officials indicated they expected an agreement soon. "We are in active consultations for an imminent I.A.E.A. mission," a spokesman for the agency said.

The stakes are high.

"Nowhere in the history of this world has a nuclear power plant become a part of a combat zone, so this really has to stop immediately," Bonnie Denise Jenkins, the State Department's under secretary for arms control and international security, told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. Russian actions, she said, "have created a serious risk of a nuclear incident — a dangerous radiation release — that could threaten not only the people and environment of Ukraine, but also affect neighboring countries and the entire international community."
Here's the opinion of that nuclear engineer at the Ukrainian nuclear plant (interviewed by Voice of America). "The expectation is that after the [International Atomic Energy] agency's conclusion, international pressure on Moscow will intensify, and Russia will be required to withdraw heavy weapons and troops from the nuclear power plant.

"I think this is unrealistic. The Russians will not leave here by their own will. Without a war, it is impossible."

Japan will restart more idled nuclear plants and look at developing next-generation reactors, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Wednesday, setting the stage for a major policy shift on nuclear energy a decade after the Fukushima disaster. Reuters reports: Japan has kept most of its nuclear plants idled in the decade since a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 triggered a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Quake-prone Japan also said it would build no new reactors, so a change in that policy would be a stark turnaround. Kishida told reporters he had instructed officials to come up with concrete measures by the year end, including on "gaining the understanding of the public" on sustainable energy and nuclear power.

Government officials met on Wednesday to hammer out a plan for so-called "green transformation" aimed at retooling the world's third-largest economy to meet environmental goals. Nuclear energy, which was deeply opposed by the public after the Fukushima crisis, is now seen by some in government as a component for such green transformation. Public opinion has also shifted, as fuel prices have risen and an early and hot summer spurred calls for energy-saving.

According to a new paper published in the journal Nature, researchers at MIT describe new aluminum-sulfur batteries that are made entirely from abundant and inexpensive materials and can be charged in less than a minute. "The new battery architecture, which uses aluminum and sulfur as its two electrode materials, with a molten salt electrolyte in between, is described today in the journal Nature, in a paper by MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, along with 15 others at MIT and in China, Canada, Kentucky, and Tennessee," reports MIT News. The caveat with this new kind of battery is that it requires a variety of molten salts that need to be "close to the boiling point of water." From the report: In their experiments, the team showed that the battery cells could endure hundreds of cycles at exceptionally high charging rates, with a projected cost per cell of about one-sixth that of comparable lithium-ion cells. They showed that the charging rate was highly dependent on the working temperature, with 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit) showing 25 times faster rates than 25 C (77 F). Surprisingly, the molten salt the team chose as an electrolyte simply because of its low melting point turned out to have a fortuitous advantage. One of the biggest problems in battery reliability is the formation of dendrites, which are narrow spikes of metal that build up on one electrode and eventually grow across to contact the other electrode, causing a short-circuit and hampering efficiency. But this particular salt, it happens, is very good at preventing that malfunction. The chloro-aluminate salt they chose "essentially retired these runaway dendrites, while also allowing for very rapid charging," Sadoway says. "We did experiments at very high charging rates, charging in less than a minute, and we never lost cells due to dendrite shorting."

What's more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. "As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat," Sadoway says. In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, "you'd store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you'd draw electricity after dark, and you'd do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature." This new battery formulation, he says, would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.

For larger installations, up to utility scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours, other technologies might be more effective, including the liquid metal batteries Sadoway and his students developed several years ago and which formed the basis for a spinoff company called Ambri, which hopes to deliver its first products within the next year. For that invention, Sadoway was recently awarded this year's European Inventor Award. The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations, Sadoway says. He points out that when electric vehicles become common enough on the roads that several cars want to charge up at once, as happens today with gasoline fuel pumps, "if you try to do that with batteries and you want rapid charging, the amperages are just so high that we don't have that amount of amperage in the line that feeds the facility." So having a battery system such as this to store power and then release it quickly when needed could eliminate the need for installing expensive new power lines to serve these chargers. "The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale," Sadoway says, and then subject it to a series of stress tests, including running through hundreds of charging cycles.

If you're looking for a detailed breakdown of how this new battery works, we recommend you check out Ars Technica's article here.

Canalys' North American smartphone market share numbers are out, and the big mover for Q2 2022 is once again Google, which is seeing huge growth numbers thanks to the Pixel 6. Last quarter, Canalys had Google up 380 percent year over year, and this quarter, the company is up 230 percent! ArsTechnica adds: That sounds incredibly successful, but this is Google's tiny hardware division we're talking about, so it's all relative success. The company is now at 2 percent North American market share, having shipped 800,000 devices for Q2 2022. Along with last quarter, Google is now regularly hitting whole-digit market share numbers. That's good enough for fifth place, behind Apple (52 percent), Samsung (26 percent), Lenovo/Motorola (9 percent), and TCL (5 percent). Canalys also has a list of the best-selling models. The top five are all iPhones, of course, with the base model iPhone 13 taking the top spot, followed by the super-cheap iPhone SE. The iPhone 13 Mini, which is rumored to be selling so poorly that there won't be an iPhone 14 Mini, took the ninth spot. The first Android phone on the list, the flagship Galaxy S22 Ultra, clocks in at No. 6.