Free Republic

A software group that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help automate processes said it was joining with a nuclear power deployment company on an AI-driven system to accelerate construction of nuclear reactors. Palantir Technologies on June 26 said it will work with The Nuclear Company, a nuclear power startup, to jointly create a nuclear operating system (NOS) to simplify reactor builds. The companies on Thursday said the software system would allow for faster construction of new reactors, and provide lower costs. The deal comes as the U.S. government has said it will support nuclear power and other baseload power generation...

Data analytics giants Palantir Technologies Inc. announced a partnership with The Nuclear Company on Thursday to develop NOS, an AI-driven software system designed specifically for nuclear construction projects. The investment comes at a time where the nuclear sector has seen rapid growth in interest from investors and corporations. The software platform’s main aim is to simplify he construction process by enabling faster and cost-efficient deployment of nuclear plants. Palantir will receive approximately $100 million over a five-year period to build the software platform, according to the sources. Alignment with government policiesThe agreement is well aligned with the four executive orders...

President Donald Trump celebrated after the Supreme Court moved to block lower courts from issuing universal injunctions, something that had impacted his executive orders. The president held a news conference just over an hour after the ruling was issued and said the Supreme Court had stopped a "colossal abuse of power." "I was elected on a historic mandate, but in recent months, we've seen a handful of radical left judges effectively try to overrule the rightful powers of the president to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for in record numbers," Trump said on Friday....

Yesterday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the proposed repeal of the Biden-era’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, which ruled that coal-fired and many new natural gas power plants must capture and store over 90% of their carbon emissions by the 2030s—or shut down by 2040. It’s a costly mandate, resting on shaky legal and technical foundations. Americans would be fortunate to have it repealed. President Biden issued his Clean Power Plan 2.0 after the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that President Obama’s Clean Power Plan 1.0 exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) statutory authority. The Court’s...

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Arena,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said that while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, he “has other considerations, just like President Trump, who may want to distract from other developments.” And “it’s not unknown, either here in the United States or in the Middle East, for political figures to try and change the subject or to take bold or decisive action that may or may not be in their nation’s best interests, merely to change the subject from politically inconvenient developments.” Host Kasie Hunt asked, “Sir, there, of course,...

New York State has officially ordained the destruction of its electricity system and its economy with a mad dash to energy utopia, as prescribed by a 2019 statute called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act). The Climate Act mandates a completely unachievable 70% of electricity generation from “renewables” by 2030, with even more draconian mandates following in quick succession thereafter. New York City has piled on with its own fantasy energy statute called Local Law 97, mandating, among other things, forced conversion to electric heat by 2030 of most residential buildings over 25,000 square feet. A so-called...

President Donald Trump is lashing out on social media. Jerome Powell is on the receiving end of today's ire. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair who is slowly cutting back interest rates to minimize the risk of continued inflation, is caught in the President's crosshairs after a paltry jobs report. US private payrolls increased far less than expected in May, the ADP National Employment Report showed on Wednesday. Private payrolls increased by only 37,000 jobs last month, a far cry from analyst projections and the worst private job hiring slump since March 2023. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast private employment...

Across Spain and Portugal, more than 50 million people recently experienced the largest blackout in modern European history. Thousands of commuters stood stranded on the concourses of Spain's transit system. In the span of five seconds, 60 percent of the country's electricity supply vanished. This wasn't caused by a storm or a cyberattack—just bad policy and the most underappreciated force in modern engineering giving way: inertia. When a power plant trips offline or demand suddenly spikes, the power grid has no cushion; it must respond instantly or it unravels. That's where inertia comes in. In coal, gas, and nuclear plants,...

London has been thrown into chaos after a massive power outage crippled the city’s subway system. Commuters were left stranded as multiple Underground lines shut down, forcing thousands to seek alternative routes. The disruption, attributed to a failure in the National Grid, caused widespread delays and station closures, with Waterloo, Tottenham Court Road, and Holborn among the worst affected. The outage struck during the afternoon rush hour, bringing the city’s transport network to a standstill. Transport for London confirmed that the Bakerloo and Waterloo & City lines were completely suspended, while the Elizabeth, Jubilee, and Northern lines suffered severe delays....

President Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is warning that the United States is at risk of major widespread blackouts similar to the power cuts that recently shut down most of Spain and Portugal.. Burgum said the blackouts in Europe were caused by over-subsidizing intermittent renewable energy sources. However, he warns that America is now “dangerously close” to suffering from similar “rolling blackouts and grid failure.” Speaking to David Freeberg on “The All-In Podcast,” Burgum admitted that the artificial intelligence (AI) “arms race” with China keeps him “awake at night” due to the amount of electricity that the technology requires....

Spain’s electricity supply went down last month due to cascading failures traced to faults in two solar plants in Spain’s southwest region, causing a blackout on the Iberian Peninsula. Americans should not be complacent because the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a nonprofit international regulatory authority, has warned that it might happen in the United States. On April 28, the day of the Spanish meltdown, solar provided 59% of electricity, wind about 12%, and nuclear and gas approximately 22%. When the two solar plants went down, insufficient backup, or inertia, was available to keep the system going. The sun shines...

Last Monday, the Iberian grid suffered a disturbance in the south-west at 12:33. In 3.5 seconds this worsened and the interconnection to France disconnected. All renewable generation then went off-line, followed by disconnection of all rotating generation plant. The Iberian blackout was complete within a few seconds. At the time the grid was producing 28.4 GW of power, of which 79 per cent was solar and wind. This was a problematic situation as solar and wind plants have another, not widely known, downside – one quite apart from their intermittency and expense.This is the fact that they do not supply...

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) – Early vote counting in Australia’s general election Saturday suggested the government was likely to be returned for a second term. The Australian Electoral Commission’s early projections gave the ruling center-left Labor Party 70 seats and the conservative opposition coalition 24 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, the lower chamber where parties need a majority to form governments. Unaligned minor parties and independent candidates appeared likely to win 13 seats. Senior government minister Jim Chalmers said the early results pointed to volatility and different contests across the nation. Opposition Sen. James McGrath expected the result would...

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s green-energy lunacy keeps socking New Yorkers, with the latest blow coming from the Empire Wind One offshore turbine project. Team Trump has blocked it for now, and that’s great news (despite Eric Adams’ pleading that it should go forward): If it went into operation, New Yorkers would be forced to pay a brain-busting 2.5 times the market rate for energy, an independent analysis found. The project won a sweetheart contract to provide energy at $155 per megawatt hour, as opposed to the wholesale-market rate of around $50, an effective subsidy on the order of $9 billion over...

President Donald Trump defended his use of the power that comes with the presidential office, denying that he is “expanding” it while maintaining that he is “using it properly” in an interview on his first 100 days as the 47th president with TIME. Trump, who will have served 100 days of his second term on April 30, gave the extensive, bombshell interview to the outlet from the White House on Wednesday. The interview started off with a pointed question from TIME senior political correspondent Eric Cortellessa and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, who asked, “Why do you think you need more power?”...

Policymakers on both sides of the political aisle increasingly advocate for affordable, reliable, and clean energy. This is for good reason – modern society requires energy that is affordable and available on demand. Environmental concerns are also very important. Together, affordability, reliability, and cleanliness form the three pillars of ideal energy policy. Two new analyses evaluate competing electrical power sources and produce an affordable, reliable, and clean scorecard. The two analyses – one published by Northwood University and the Mackinac Center, and the other published by my public policy organization, The Heartland Institute – independently reach near-identical findings. Both analyses...

A new report from GlobalData, a data and analytics group, projects global nuclear power capacity will hit 494 GW by 2035. The group’s “Nuclear Power Market, Update 2025–Market Size, Segmentation, Major Trends, and Key Country Analysis to 2035” said capacity gains will be tied to advancements in deployments of small modular reactors (SMRs), along with the continuing worldwide shift to cleaner forms of energy. The report released April 21 said recent gains in nuclear power have been driven by moves toward more low-carbon baseload power. Measures promoting energy security, in addition to interest in decarbonization of industrial sectors, also is...

Rep. Jamie Raskin threatened foreign leaders who “facilitated authoritarianism in our country” by currying favor with President Trump on issues like deportation — saying that Democrats will not “look kindly” on his supporters when they “come back to power.” Referencing El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele specifically, Raskin (D-Md.), 62, suggested that Dems should keep score of foreign leaders who brownnose Trump, 78, during his second term. “Implicit in it should be the idea that if and when we come back to power — and we will — we are not going to look kindly upon people who … facilitated authoritarianism...

The island of Puerto Rico is suffering another island-wide power outage, just months after a dayslong blackout on New Year's Eve kept residents in the dark. Luma Energy said the complete interruption to its service began at about 12:40 p.m. Wednesday. This means all 1.4 million customers on the island are without power. "While the cause of the interruption is being investigated, preliminary findings indicate an unexpected shutdown at all generating plants," the company said. At least 328,000 clients were without water, with officials warning that power likely won’t be fully restored for another 48 to 72 hours. Genera Power,...

As the artificial intelligence (AI) boom drives exponential demand for data centers, the United States’ position as an AI leader is at risk without immediate action to address growth constraints. The “transition toward cloud-based services and generative AI applications [is forecast to drive] a 37% compound annual increase in AI spending out to 2032,” according to Bloomberg. The significant growth comes at a time when supply chain constraints are limiting revenue growth among the largest U.S. data center developers—known as hyperscalers. In the past year, hyperscalers have been flagging the data center supply chain as a headwind in their growth...