Tag Archive for: ambitious

IAEA Initiative Sets Ambitious Goals to Support the Safe and Secure Deployment of SMRs


The goal of the industry track is to develop more standardized industrial approaches for SMR manufacturing, construction and operations that can reduce licensing timelines, costs and, ultimately, the time to deploy SMRs. The SMR business model is often based on serial production, which means that after the deployment of the first-of-a-kind reactor, cost and time savings materialize under a standardized approach. The industry track focused on four objectives: harmonization of high-level user requirements, information sharing on national standards and codes, experiments and validation of simulation computer codes to model SMRs and accelerating the implementation of a nuclear infrastructure for SMRs.

“User requirements are based on the utilities’ needs and must be consistent with IAEA safety standards,” said Aline des Cloizeaux, Director of the Division of Nuclear Power at the IAEA and chair of the industry track. “There is a general agreement on the need for technology neutral utility requirements, as this will help standardize user specifications and help technology developers to align with the market.” She also stated the need to consider non-electrical applications and non-traditional end users when defining industry standards.

Codes and standards are requirements and rules for the design, construction and operation of structures, systems and components, and they are issued by national and global organizations, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The challenge with harmonizing codes and standards is that each country may have different requirements. For codes and standards that apply to SMRs, equivalencies among existing requirements will be identified, and the NHSI will collect and share information through a platform that will expand to advanced manufacturing standards and customization for SMRs. Furthermore, the NHSI proposed resource sharing among experimental facilities, technology holders and technical support organizations (TSOs) to validate simulation computer codes to model SMRs, which are used to support the design and safety analysis that regulators review to grant licenses. TSOs provide expertise and services to support nuclear…

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Tech trees to fund ambitious science and tech


Have you ever played the game series Civilization, created by designer Sid Meier? Through the years, much has changed, but one of the unchanging hallmarks of the series has been the technology tree. Why has it been such a stable component of this game? Because it allows you, on one look, to get a bird’s-eye view of the technological capabilities necessary to make progress on your audacious civilizational goals. 

Compare this with our real civilization. If we wanted to, we could probably map the many technological capability paths that got us to where we are today. After all, our current tech stack is what the Civilization tech tree is modeled after. What if we could build a tech tree that was future-facing, starting now? Reality is, arguably, more complex than a computer game. So, rather than mapping civilization at large, perhaps we could start with individual technology areas and map those out, one by one. Within technology domains, one could break down the main goals for the field into future capabilities required to get there and recursively work ourselves backward to the present capability stack.

Even if it’s possible, what’s the point? The point is that, apart from being an intellectually interesting endeavor, it may well dramatically speed up progress. Imagine you’re a funder, or talented postdoc, an entrepreneur in residence, or an advocacy leader looking to advance your technology area of choice. Currently, it’s pretty difficult to figure out how to plug in. Even after graduating in that field, digesting much of its literature, drawing on interviews, and online courses, it’s not very intuitive to see how to connect the dots within an area in a way that would advance the field. There is plenty of information out there, but without a scaffold to map the context and dependencies of different opportunities, one can only guess that the one you’re zooming in on is actually a crucial bottleneck in the field rather than an irrelevant detail that stands to be solved by an approaching technological innovation upstream from that area.

Related: Decentralization is helping to shape the course of scientific research and business

A dynamic overview of a field would make it…

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The Solarium Commission’s most ambitious proposal lacks a game plan


With help from Eric Geller

The Cyberspace Solarium Commission has been trying to update a Cold War-era law to prepare for the mother-of-all cyber emergencies. But industry says there aren’t many details about what this would look like.

As the Biden administration ramps up its crackdown on cybercriminal use of cryptocurrencies, the industry has a familiar refrain: We’re not the only problem.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s recent threat against a journalist for discovering a data security vulnerability is part of a decades-long trend of prosecuting security researchers for such discoveries.

HAPPY MONDAY, and welcome back to Weekly Cybersecurity! I’m your host, Sam Sabin, and it seems I’m the one person on the planet who watched the premiere of Succession and didn’t tweet about it? Don’t worry, my inbox is still open for all hot, and even lukewarm, takes.

Have tips, secrets or cat photos to share with MC? Send what you’ve got to [email protected]. Stay up to date by following @POLITICOPro and @MorningCybersec. (Full team contact info below.) Let’s get to it:

WHAT’S THE HOLD UP — Despite Congress’ heightened focus on cybersecurity in the annual defense budget and infrastructure packages, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s most ambitious policy ideas are still struggling to gain political momentum in Congress.

The most distinctive example: a proposal to include cybersecurity firms under the 1950 Defense Protection Act, which would allow the government to tap private cyber firms for help in emergencies such as a debilitating attack on a critical infrastructure firm or, most likely, a pandemic-sized cyberattack on the supply chain. As Eric reports for Pros this morning, cybersecurity firms and their customers have been…

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Piper nv: An ambitious home monitoring and automation system

Home automation has become a Big Thing and with it the surveillance and monitoring systems market has exploded. My focus today, the Icontrol Networks Piper nv, is ostensibly in the monitoring market but it’s an ambitious product that attempts to do a lot more.

The Piper nv is a wireless (802.11 b/g/n), ultra-wide angle (180 degrees!) 3.4 megapixel video camera that can deliver 1080p (1,920-by-1,080 pixel) streaming video in h.264 format. It has “night” vision (at much reduced video quality) with built-in infrared illumination. The device has passive infrared motion detection, a microphone, a speaker, temperature and humidity sensors, a 105 dB siren, and a built-in Series 500 Z-Wave Controller. 

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