There’s no getting around it: The news that someone has posted open-source blueprints for a functional nuclear power plant online sounds like the evil scheme of a James Bond villain. In fact, it could turn out to be a game-changer for affordable, clean, sustainable nuclear energy.
Created by Energy Impact Center, a research institute with the mission to decarbonize the global economy by 2040, the so-called OPEN100 project aims to be a one-stop-shop for everything needed for new power plant construction. That includes resources ranging from a web interface for visualizing plant and component design to detailed construction plans. It is the culmination of two years of research, including more than 1,500 interviews with experts and more than 100 site visits across 15 countries. The open-source format is intended to allow startups, engineering firms, global utilities, and capital markets to work together around a common goal.
“The nuclear industry, over the last five decades, has engaged in a spiral of ever-escalating costs, where their preferred solution has been to earn more revenue by building bigger, only further exacerbating their woes,” Bret Kugelmass, managing director of the Energy Impact Center, told Digital Trends. “For the first time ever there is a clear way out: OPEN100 paves the way towards standardization, simplification, and cost-effective nuclear energy – the ultimate solution for climate change.”
As Kugelmass, a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, explained, complex and proprietary plant designs have led the nuclear industry to become niche, expensive, and slow to adapt. The goal of this project is to unite vendors, developers and other interested parties in establishing a common platform for design, construction, and financing of future plants.
“We only just launched and in the last two weeks we’ve been flooded with inbound interest from individual engineers, industrial partners, and even international developers,” Kugelmass said. “Even more promising, however, is the attention we’ve been receiving from National Laboratories around the world, who are eager to build upon the precedent of the early U.S. nuclear industry when scientific institutions aided private industry in a rapid scale-up of nuclear energy.”
Standardized nuclear power plants may not sound like a big deal. But, when it comes to helping fight back against climate change, it could be a massive step in the right direction.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.