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Submission + - NuScale Power awarded $226 million to deploy small nuclear reactor design (nytimes.com)

Submitted by ghack
ghack writes: NuScale power, a small nuclear power company in Corvallis Oregon, has won a Department of Energy grant of up to $226 million dollars to enable deployment of their small modular reactor. The units would be factory built in the United States, and their small size enables a number of potential niche applications. NuScale argues that their design includes a number of unique passive safety features.

This was the second of two DOE small modular reactor grants; the first was awarded to Babcock and Wilcox, a stalwart in the nuclear industry.

Comment Re:Brilliant (Score 1) 264

by chefshoemaker (#32737012) Attached to: BP Robot Seriously Hampers Oil Spill Containment
Conservative propaganda? Facts are facts. Unfortunately the Lame-stream media will never touch something that may tarnish this administration. You have to dig deeper no matter how unpleasant it may be.
Sherlock.
All entities are clueless.
oh.
more.
Jones Act a non-factor.
If the want of a strong decisive administration, instead of a group of clueless community organizers, makes me a conservative, then so be it. It makes it easier to make fun of the bed-wetters. Eventually it will be exposed how this was all an elaborate plan to sabotage the oil industry to gain backing for the Cap and Trade bill to further the government take over of industry. Kind of a head scratcher as to why less than a month before the explosion and leak, the administration opens up previously restricted offshore areas to oil and gas exploration and drilling. Flies in the face of the environmental platform. Now we know why. More Government control.
Patents

Submission + - USPTO Plans Could Kill Small Business Innovation (bnet.com) 1

Submitted by bizwriter
bizwriter writes: If protecting inventions is at the heart of high tech competitiveness, plans underfoot at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans will critically wound small companies. The agency's notorious 750,000 patent applications backlog has long been the subject of heavy criticism. One of the key tools the USPTO wants to use is to raise fees so high as to directly reduce 40 percent of the backlog. That would mean setting filing and maintenance rates so high as to make it economically difficult, if not impossible, for many small companies to adequately protect their innovations, leaving large corporations even more in control of technology than today.
Government

Submission + - Use open source? Then you're a pirate! (computerworlduk.com) 4

Submitted by superapecommando
superapecommando writes: There's a fantastic little story in the Guardian today that says a US lobby group is trying to get the US government to consider open source as the equivalent to piracy.
The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), an umbrella group for American publishing, software, film, television and music associations, has asked with the US Trade Representative (USTR) to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they encourage the use of open source software.
A Special 301, according to Guardian's Bobbie Johnson is: "a report that examines the 'adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights' around the planet — effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure — often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods — to try and force governments to change their behaviours."
Read more: http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2811&blogid=10
Earth

Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807

Posted by kdawson from the so-many-notes-mister-mozart dept.
DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."
IT

Submission + - Uniforms for the Help Desk 5

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am an IT worker in a mid sized company with approximately 500 employees. There are 30 people on the IT staff, 6 of which are on the help desk. Our help desk does have significant visibility in the company, and most people know us by face (some by name). Recently the idea has been floated up the management chain to have these help desk workers wear IT department branded shirts. The idea is to promote visibility and unity. Wearing of these shirts would be mandatory Monday through Thursday. The shirts would not be identical (there would be several styles offered). We would be the only department with specific garments outside of the normal business casual dress code.

Is management out of line with the industry in promoting this sort of policy change? Is the singling out of 6 employees as "the IT guys" a step in the right direction, or does it detract from the professionalism that we are trying to display as a department?

Submission + - HT Superconductors to build Grid Interconnect (yahoo.com)

Submitted by physburn
physburn writes: Some big and cold is appearing in Clovis, New Mexico. Somewhere in a triangle between, Roswell (UFO), Alberqueue (Left Turn), and Armillo (Do you know the way), a 22.5 square mile, a triangle of High Temperature Superconductor pipeline is to be build. Each leg of the triangle can carry 5GW of electricity. The purpose to load balance and sell electricity between America's three power grids. Previously the Eastern Grid, Western Grid and Texan Grid have been seperate, preventing cheap electricity being sold from one end of America to the other. The Tres Amiga Superstation as it is to be called, will final contact the three grids. The superstation is also design to link renewable solar and wind power in the Grids, and is to use HTS wire from American Superconductor. Some 23 years after its invention today is day HTS came of age.
came of age.

Comment Re:The Woman (Score 1) 319

by chefshoemaker (#29468549) Attached to: Spyware Prank Exposes Hospital Medical Records
Why would every person need 2 computers? Where I work, with highly sensitve personal data, we have computers in a seperate room that are for personal email/internet use. These machines are not conneted to the internal network for just this reason. All work machines are restricted from accessing webmail and internet access is highly regulated based on job requirements.

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