The Strange Reason Scientists Still Need Pre-1945 Steel
The world’s most sensitive radiation detectors sometimes rely on low background steel produced before the first atomic bomb test in July 1945, according to a new report from SpaceDaily.
Steel manufactured before the nuclear age lacks the tiny traces of radioactive fallout that atmospheric weapons testing later introduced into the environment, making it valuable for experiments searching for extraordinarily rare particles and faint radiation signals.
The report says that this gave rise to the popular story that scientists depend on steel salvaged from pre war shipwrecks resting on the ocean floor. While there is some truth to that, the claim has been greatly exaggerated. Some laboratories have indeed used steel from old warships for shielding, but it is not true that nearly every sensitive detector depends on sunken ships or that science faces a crisis as this supply disappears.
The reason low background steel matters is that, in cutting edge physics experiments, even the detector’s own walls can generate enough background radiation to interfere with measurements. Facilities searching for dark matter, rare nuclear decays, or other elusive phenomena go to extraordinary lengths to eliminate every possible source of interference, often operating deep underground and surrounding detectors with multiple layers of carefully selected shielding materials.
Today, researchers no longer rely exclusively on pre 1945 steel. Advances in metallurgy allow laboratories to manufacture and rigorously screen modern stainless steel, titanium, copper, and other materials with extremely low levels of radioactivity. In many cases, these newly produced metals perform just as well as their pre war counterparts, making the finite supply of old ship steel far less important than popular accounts suggest.
The enduring lesson is not that modern science depends on scavenging sunken fleets, but that the atomic age permanently changed the way physicists design their experiments.
When scientists are trying to detect just a handful of events over the course of an entire year, even the manufacturing history of the steel surrounding an experiment can make the difference between finding a signal and measuring nothing but noise.
According to the latest Gallup poll, only 38% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. One of the Gallup experts told Fox News that one of the key reasons for the continued slide in public trust is “the perception that there’s a political agenda being taught.” That perception is well documented after most departments purged their ranks of any republican, conservative, or libertarian faculty members. At the same time, many faculty oppose the long-standing principle of institutional neutrality for universities, the subject of a recent debate that I had with the President of the American Association of University Professors.
Gallup’s expert added that there is also a view that we are “not teaching people the right kinds of things they need to succeed in the job once they finish.”
As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.
According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.
Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.
Currently, only 37% of Americans report having “some” confidence in the institution. In any other industry or area, that record of alienation and mistrust would prompt massive changes in management. In higher education, however, colleges and universities remain captive to administrators and faculty members who replicate their views and values to the exclusion of many others.
The result is evident in multiple surveys which reveal widespread self-censorship among students, particularly conservative students. When I confronted a Harvard Law professor in a debate at Harvard Law School with those surveys, he responded by calling these students “conservative snowflakes.”
It did not matter that only a third of Harvard students felt comfortable expressing their views in classes or on campus. Since Harvard has also shown the same bias in admissions, only roughly nine percent of the students identify as conservative. Thus, the vast majority of the students who are saying that they self-censor are liberals. This is the environment that the current generation of administrators and faculty have created.
As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates.
We now largely have two systems of higher education for those seeking education with a diversity of opinions and viewpoints. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities holding the line on free speech, the orthodoxy found at private universities remains a barrier to many conservative and independent thinkers.
If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to take the view that citizens are a captive audience expected to continue funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.
If faculty members want to continue maintaining echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should have to seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.
Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining intellectually diverse faculties in determining the level of continued support from citizens.
When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.
When confronted by their own obvious ideological litmus tests, they shrug. Some acknowledge that their departments are overwhelmingly liberal, but insist that they just cannot find “competent” or “intellectually promising” conservatives. A few will admit that they do not believe that conservative views have a place in their departments.
It is impossible to deny the purging of faculties to create an academic echo chamber. If a large corporation effectively eliminated women or minorities while claiming no conscious discrimination, they would be trounced in court.
For years, I have raised concerns about the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculty members replicate their own views and values. There is no evidence that any faculty members (including those acknowledging the loss of virtually all faculty from the right of center) are honestly willing to reform their schools.
That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many facing rising tuition costs and relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views.
A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools – almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.
We are watching the demise of American higher education by its own hand. It will be up to legislators and donors to save these institutions from themselves.
A federal judge on July 30 declined to block new work requirements for Medicaid recipients that states must implement by Jan. 1, 2027.
Judge Richard Stearns of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts turned down a request for a preliminary injunction made by Massachusetts and 25 other states to block the work requirements as the states’ legal challenge proceeds.
Stearns said in a six-page decision that the harms about which the states complained—added costs to comply with the new requirements—are largely reimbursable, since the federal government has said it will pay for 90 percent of the costs.
States have also complained that officials face a “tight timeline” to implement the requirements, which include mandating that beneficiaries aged 19 to 64 work, volunteer, or participate in job training for 80 or more hours per month. The timing, though, was set by Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, not by the defendant, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in its guidance on implementing the requirements, the judge said.
“There is a certain point at which damages fail to justify the issuance of such an extraordinary measure,” Stearns wrote later. “Plaintiffs have not shown that their damages rise above that minimal threshold here. Moreover, the additional costs that may be incurred by the States are unlikely to bloom disproportionately given the familiarity of the responsible state agencies with the tasks to be performed.”
Lawyers for the states and the government did not immediately return requests for comment.
In addition to the Jan. 1, 2027, deadline to implement changes, states in their motion for an injunction noted that under the guidance, they also must inform Medicaid recipients of the looming update in notices by Sept. 1.
The states also opposed the guidance on how to determine whether a person is medically frail, which would exempt them from the work requirements. The guidance suggests that in no case can states base their determinations of whether an individual is “medically frail” solely on their records that an individual has a “particular diagnosis or condition” and improperly limits the short-term hardship exception for individuals experiencing an emergency declared by the president to those who can establish that the emergency renders them unable to comply, state lawyers told the court.
Government lawyers said the One Big Beautiful Bill Act delegated the definition of medically frail to the federal government, and the states are seeking to impose “arbitrary limits” on that authority. They also said the state plaintiffs had not met the standards for a preliminary injunction.
Stearns said on July 30 that the court’s denial of the injunction request “is not a reflection or anticipation of its ultimate views on the merits of the underlying litigation,” which will proceed.
“As illustrated in the pleadings and briefings to date (and in the arguments of counsel during the hearing), this case presents difficult issues regarding the scope of Congress’s delegation of interpretative authority to the Secretary and the faithfulness to Congressional intent with which the Secretary performed his task,” the judge stated.
“This, in turn, requires an examination of the data relied upon by the Secretary and the judgments (some medical) that underlay his amplification of Congress’s legislative outline.
“These are determinations that, in the view of the court, should be made on a developed record of the kind that informs a court’s decision at the summary judgment stage of a case.”
Memory-Chip Crunch Hits Smartphone Demand Across China
Prices for electronic devices reliant on advanced memory chips, from smartphones to gaming consoles, have risen as the AI data-center buildout tightens supply and drives component costs higher. The resulting memory-chip crunch is now weighing on consumer demand, with Goldman’s latest note showing that the pressure is increasingly visible in China’s handheld-device market.
Goldman analyst Allen Chang, who focuses on everything from smartphones to semiconductors, AI, EVs, and robotaxis, cited new data on Friday showing that China’s smartphone shipments fell 17% from a year earlier and 36% from May, to 17 million units in June.
Second-quarter shipments totaled 69 million units, little changed from the previous quarter and a year earlier but above Goldman’s 59 million estimate. Chang expects full-year 2026 shipments to decline 10%.
June 5G shipments fell 12% year over year to 16 million units, representing 85% of the market.
“We expect 2026 shipments to decline at 10% YoY, given rising memory cost weighing on demand,” Chang wrote in the report.
Chang noted that the average number of cameras per handset declined to 2.9 this year, down from a 2022 peak of 3.8, while the share of cameras with resolutions of at least 20 megapixels increased to 66% of the total, up from 57% in 2025.
Model pricing for various foldable smartphone brands
The Wall Street Journal and CBS are reporting that major US strikes – perhaps harder than anything of the last two weeks – are set to imminently commence. The attacks could be initiated at any point this weekend, after Trump gave the ‘order’ – it’s being reported:
President Trump has ordered a fresh attack on Iranaimed at getting Tehran to surrender that could begin as soon as this weekend and would last a few days, U.S. officials said.
Earlier on Friday, he told reporters that he planned to resume heavy military strikes to force the regime to come to the negotiating table. He predicted that if the U.S. hit Iran hard enough, the hard-line regime would eventually “peter out.”
Trump made clear earlier at Camp David that the Iranians can’t be trusted, are ‘dishonorable’ – and so he’s not pursuing talks.
The late afternoon Friday CBS report is more alarming, given that “The United States and Israel are planning what would be one of the harshest bombing campaigns to date against energy infrastructure targets in Iran, multiple sources told CBS News, with strikes possible throughout the weekend.”
It adds, “There was some discussion about trying to conclude by the time financial markets open Monday because of concern about how the bombings will affect the U.S. and global economy, but an end point wasn’t locked in.”
Earlier this week there were reports of Trump exploding at his own advisors amid ongoing debates about how the crisis should be handled, and finding an exit strategy.
“Well, they always want to talk, but they break their words so often,” Trump said Friday at Camp David, putting his frustration on display later adding: “All they do is make me angry.”
A key line from WSJ point to where things are likely headed: “Some U.S. officials believe Iran will continue to drag out negotiations, banking that Trump will abandon his war efforts in the long term in the face of mounting domestic political opposition.”
Keep Hitting Them: Trump
Trump is holding a Cabinet meeting on Friday at Camp David. He claimed that the fight against Iran is “going well” and stated that American forces are “hitting them very hard” – adding that “eventually” Iran will have no choice but to “come home” – meaning full surrender.
“It’s going well. Everything we can do is keep winning,” Trump also told Fox News. “But we are hitting them hard, shaking them up, and we’re just continuing to win.” He suggested there will still be strikes ongoing in coming weeks, and that he’s losing faith in the idea of talks with “dishonest” Iran “because they lie”.
Additionally, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is claiming that Iran is unable to pay its troops – though without offering specific evidence to back this, and that the US continues searching for Iranian assets to seize “all around the world”. This is after Thursday Washington rolled out yet more sanctions.
Trump: “We’ll be hitting them. We’ll be hitting them very hard. At some point they’re gonna say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.'” pic.twitter.com/DT1Fcf57EN
In the meantime, the American public continues souring on the Iran war, which has predictably turned into yet another quagmire in the Middle East. Per a new Associated Press poll:
Most Americans say the war in Iran has not been worth fighting, and President Donald Trump’s approval rating on Iran has fallen slightly since last month, according to a new AP-NORC poll.
The results are a stark repudiation of the Republican president’s approach to the conflict, which has dragged on far longer than he originally predicted.
About two-thirds of U.S. adults say the war with Iran, which began Feb. 28, has not been worthwhile, according to the new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That includes the vast majority of Democrats and independents, as well as about 37% of Republicans.
Iran Boasts it Hit Kuwait Base
“We note with concern that the security situation remains precarious,” said Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Tahir Andrabi on his country’s mediation efforts to find peace between the US and Iran. Talks “are ongoing to normalize the situation, particularly the situation in the Strait of Hormuz,” he told reporters as a week full of renewed fighting as come to a close. But there essentially are no current talks, and US officials have indicated they are not even seeking them.
Early Thursday had seen the last major exchanges of tit-for-tat attacks, followed by a window of relative quiet into Friday – but the Iranian military has said it newly targeted strategic US military facilities at Kuwait’s Ahmad Al-Jaber airbase in a drone attack. This was cast as ‘retaliation’ for US attacks of the day prior which focused on Qeshm island. Several Iranian troops had been killed in the prior assault, and separately a family was slain when their home was reportedly hit.
Semiofficial Tasnim news agency said the armed forces had targeted hangars, satellite communication systems and equipment warehouses using drones – based on the military statement.
No New US Strikes Overnight
“Iranian state media reported the strike on Ahmed Al Jaber Air Base early Friday, but Kuwaiti officials and the Pentagon have yet to comment,” Newsnation summarizes, adding of the current standstill in fighting, “Notably, Iranian media did not report any American strikes hitting targets inside Iran overnight, a change from Wednesday, when the U.S. carried out what officials called a heavy wave of strikes against Iranian positions.”
The day prior saw the Iranians heavily target an American outpost in Jordan. Iran believes the US is amassing equipment there in preparation for further rounds of attacks. As for the Friday targeting of Kuwait: “Iran cited a U.S. strike that killed a mother, father and their 2-year-old child in a home on Qeshm Island as part of its justification for the reported Kuwait attack.”
‘Horizontal Escalation’
On the question of where the crisis goes from here, a Tehran-based researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies, Ali Akbar Dareini, gave Al Jazeera some interesting insight into Tehran’s likely thinking:
He said Iran is likely trying to preempt any future attacks by the US in its current targeting in the region. Iran does not want to “allow the US to decide when to start the war, when to pause temporarily and when to restart the war”, he added. “Iran is now targeting the staging grounds of future operations.”
Dareini explained that while Washington has been pursuing “vertical escalation” by ramping up military attacks against Iran, Tehran has sought “horizontal escalation” by expanding the conflict’s “geographical scope”.
“Iran wants a complete, permanent end to war, or it’s going to be a wide-scale regional war,” he said.
As for the latest on potential US-Israeli plans to escalate against the Islamic Republic…
The U.S. and Israel are reportedly considering a land blockade of Iran to increase economic pressure after months of military action failed to force Tehran back to negotiations.
The proposal would involve persuading neighboring countries—such as Iraq, Pakistan, Türkiye,… pic.twitter.com/uBHO7qx9po
In the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) has claimed its forces struck a pair of tankers attempting to pass though the narrow waterway under the “air escort” of the US military.
The IRGC asserted that the “non-compliant oil tankers… were struck and brought to a halt, while four other oil tankers quickly changed course and returned to their previous positions.” Meanwhile, two headlines that don’t line up:
US President Trump says the Iran war is going well; US is hitting Iran hard and “we just keep winning” (Fox)
The Persian Gulf Waterway Management Authority announces that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is not possible due to the continued aggressive actions of the US
Oil Climbs with No Offramp on Horizon
Still, despite of a lack of intense tit-for-tat so far on Friday, oil is rebounding significantly as there are no signs of offramp and the two sides aren’t talking – but instead preparing for more rounds in the fight…
But this Friday’s somewhat ‘quiet’ state of things could likely dramatically shift at any moment, as has been the pattern this summer. The aforementioned Tehran-based analyst Dareini describes a serious change and overhaul in Iranian leaders’ strategic thinking, which has gone from defensive to proactive, with an understanding of the need to inflict pain on the US side in a preemptive way.
“Iranians are tired from suffering from limited US attacks,” Dareini said, charging that the US uses its declared pauses as a “deception tactic” merely in preparation for future attacks and operations.
“There has been a profound change in Iran’s strategic thinking,” he added. “The era of restraint is over. Iran has decided that, if needed, it has to take preemptive military action against the US.”
Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the leader of Yemen’s Ansar Allah, commonly known as the Houthis, said Thursday that there were indications Saudi Arabia was planning a major escalation in Yemen, as the war between the two sides has been reignited following the July 13 Saudi strikes on the Sanaa International Airport.
“We will work to establish the equation of siege with siege, especially since indicators reveal that the Saudis are heading toward comprehensive escalation, and we will seek God’s help against him and confront his comprehensive escalation with comprehensive escalation,” al-Houthi said, according to Yemen’s SABA news agency.
The Guardianalso reported on Thursday, citing Yemeni sources, that Saudi Arabia was preparing for a major escalation against Ansar Allah by sea and possibly by launching a ground offensive in central Yemen.
Saudi Arabia is looking to launch a new Red Sea coalition to keep the Bab el-Mandeb Strait open, and the Saudi Defense Ministry announced that 14 countries backed the effort. The full coalition hasn’t been released, but according to Saudi officials, it includes—
Kuwait
Qatar
Bahrain
Pakistan
Turkey
Egypt
Jordan
Ansar Allah imposed a blockade on Saudi ports following the Saudi strikes on the Sanaa airport, which were meant to prevent the landing of a plane that took off from Iran and was carrying members of a Yemeni delegation that attended the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Yemeni forces have also targeted oil infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi military has launched additional strikes on Yemen of late.
Escalations against Ansar Allah are unlikely to achieve success since the group faced a brutal US-backed Saudi-UAE war from 2015 to 2022 and multiple US and Israeli bombing campaigns since then that failed to achieve their goals. President Trump has suggested that the US could restart bombing Yemen.
— ابراهيم ناجي Ibrahim Naji (@Ibrahym22Nagi) July 31, 2026
Al-Houthi said in his comments on Thursday that the Yemeni people “are among the most suffering and targeted peoples by the Saudi regime within the framework of the American scheme, and in service of the Israeli enemy.”
Trump’s Jones Act Waiver Helped Avert Fuel Shortages Across These Key US Regions
The Department of Homeland Security has issued the broadest Jones Act waiver since at least the 1950s, just weeks after the US-Iran conflict erupted. The measure has allowed foreign-flagged vessels to transport fuel, crude oil, fertilizer, and other essential goods between US ports, bypassing domestic shipping restrictions to mitigate supply chain disruptions across various U.S. regions.
The Jones Act, a century-old law requiring goods transported between U.S. ports to be carried aboard U.S.-Built, US-owned, and US-crewed vessels, was immediately waived in the early days of the U.S.-Iran conflict by the Trump administration.
As of Friday, the waiver has entered its 135th day, suggesting that the administration is continuing to protect domestic supply chains and curb energy prices by temporarily easing maritime protectionist restrictions.
A recent Reuters report stated that the Trump administration was considering another extension of the waiver.
The tracker indicates that the waiver sharply expanded domestic fuel movements, allowing foreign-flagged vessels to supply regions where limited U.S. shipping capacity, high transportation costs, and vessel shortages had constrained trade.
After 135 days, waiver shipments to the West Coast totaled 13.9 million barrels, equivalent to 108% of the region’s projected full-year baseline. Puerto Rico received 5.02 million barrels, equal to 134% of its normal annual pace, while New England’s 1.25 million barrels represented an increase of 215%. Gulf Coast shipments were 426% above the projected baseline, albeit from a much smaller historical base.
The data suggest the waiver is unlocking trade routes that were previously uneconomical or unavailable under Jones Act restrictions.
The largest effects are being seen in isolated or import-dependent markets, particularly the West Coast, Puerto Rico and New England, while the impact on the well-supplied Lower Atlantic remains marginal. Cargoes have included gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, renewable diesel, propane and ammonia.
Without the waiver, import-dependent markets such as those in California would likely have faced severe fuel shortages, with gasoline prices potentially surging well above $10 per gallon. The quick action by the Trump administration and the Energy Department appears to have mitigated supply disruptions in those regions where fuel shipments expanded the most.
Recall that suspending the Jones Act was one of six policy options identified by JPMorgan’s head of commodity research, Natasha Kaneva, for how the Trump administration could contain energy costs at the pump. The latest shipment data suggest that this option has played a material role in stabilizing vulnerable regional markets.
Five States Make The Cut For $50 Billion Nuclear Campuses
The Department of Energy has selected Utah, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Idaho as the first five potential hosts for Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses (NLICs), advancing an effort that forced states to decide whether they support the entire nuclear industry or merely the convenient parts.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed Memorandums of Understanding with the five states after the DOE reviewed 28 applications from 26 states. The agreements allow the federal government and the states to continue exploring potential campuses.
The potential prize is substantial, with NLICs potentially attracting up to $50 billion in capital investment, generating almost $10 billion in state and local tax revenue and creating 25,000 jobs each.
These would not simply be reactor parks. The campuses are intended to accommodate multiple parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment, fuel fabrication, reprocessing or recycling of used nuclear fuel, and the final disposition of material that cannot be reused.
Depending on the state and location, a campus could also include advanced reactors, power generation, manufacturing facilities, and co-located data centers.
The DOE is offering states the opportunity to build entire nuclear industrial ecosystems, rather than collecting federal reactor grants while expecting somebody else to deal with the fuel afterward.
That distinction may explain why some supposedly pro-nuclear states are conspicuously absent from the first shortlist.
Texas has spent years presenting itself as the future capital of advanced nuclear power. In 2025, the state established the Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Office and appropriated$350 million for reactor development, construction reimbursement, and supply-chain projects. State officials called it the largest state investment of its kind in the country.
Yet when Orano USA and Waste Control Specialists proposed a consolidated interim storage facility for used nuclear fuel in Andrews County, the state’s enthusiasm for nuclear technology suddenly became rather selective.
Gov. Greg Abbott urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reject it, calling the location unsuitable and warning that the facility could threaten the Permian Basin. Texas legislators subsequently passed a law opposing high-level waste storage, and the state fought the NRC license all the way to the Supreme Court.
Apparently, nuclear reactors are an economic-development opportunity, while the fuel that actually ran through them is somebody else’s problem.
New Mexico produced an even clearer example.
The state has supported nuclear technology when it generates investment and high-paying jobs. It committed $3 million in economic-development funding and another $1.8 million in workforce assistance for Kairos Power’s expansion in Albuquerque, where the company is developing molten-salt coolant and fuel-manufacturing technology for advanced reactors.
But New Mexico’s reception was considerably less cheerful when Holtec International proposed its HI-STORE consolidated interim storage facility in Lea County.
The NRC licensed the multibillion-dollar project in 2023, but New Mexico’s governor and legislature fought it through legislation, permit threats, and litigation. Even after a favorable Supreme Court decision revived the federal licensing pathway, Holtec abandoned the project, describing the path forward in New Mexico as “untenable” and saying it would look toward states that were more amenable.
That history likely did not make New Mexico an especially convincing candidate for a federal program explicitly centered on the entire nuclear lifecycle.
As we have previously detailed, used nuclear fuel has been stored safely in pools and dry casks for decades. The United States has accumulated roughly 95,000 metric tons of it, much of which remains stranded at operating and decommissioned reactor sites because anti-nuclear activists have spent decades treating every proposed storage location like the opening scene of a disaster movie.
The NLIC program offers a different bargain. States willing to accept the responsibilities of the complete fuel cycle stand to enjoy tens of billions of dollars in investments and thousands of high-paying jobs for their constituents.
Texas and New Mexico may enjoy calling themselves pro-nuclear when reactors, research grants, and factory announcements are on the table. But supporting nuclear energy also requires dealing responsibly with what comes out of the reactor.
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is pushing back against Disney-owned ABC’s claims that his agency is engaged in “attempted censorship,” insisting the review of the network’s broadcast licenses stems from evidence of discriminatory hiring practices, not politics.
ABC leveled the censorship accusation in a 119-page regulatory filing posted Thursday, arguing the FCC’s scrutiny of its eight television licenses sends a chilling message to media companies nationwide. “The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration’s view of what news coverage should look like or pay the price,” the network’s lawyers wrote.
Carr has flatly denied that characterization. “I don’t view the FCC as the speech police,” he told Politico this week for an episode of the podcast “The Conversation.” The chairman has said the license review grew out of an ongoing investigation into ABC’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies, not a reaction to the network’s news coverage.
In the interview, Carr detailed the substance of that concern.
“The Disney case is about evidence coming to light, we haven’t made a final decision yet, that they had been discriminating inside the company based on race and gender, in terms of hiring, promoting, compensation, workplace opportunities,” he said.
“If that all ends up being true, based on all the evidence that Disney gets to put in, that’s a very concerning development, and it does raise fundamental questions about fitness to have a license.”
An FCC spokesperson echoed that stance, saying broadcasters must serve the public interest rather than “the narrow or partisan interests of a political party” and are barred from discriminatory practices, hoaxes and news distortion. “The FCC is going to hold broadcasters accountable to the full extent of the law, regardless of any disinformation campaign that some of them may choose to run,” the spokesperson said.
ABC’s filing leaned heavily on outside voices, citing more than 153,000 public comments and warnings from figures including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, about regulatory overreach. Some conservatives and free-market advocates have separately raised concerns about handing an appointed federal agency sweeping authority over news content, regardless of which party controls the White House.
Not all conservatives are sympathetic to ABC’s position.
The Center for American Rights, which petitioned the FCC to deny the licenses, called Thursday for the case to proceed to an administrative hearing.
“Disney’s lawyers can wish upon a star, but they cannot make this record disappear,” said Daniel Suhr, the group’s president.
The dispute traces back to April, when Carr called up all eight Disney-owned stations for an early license review, and intensified this month after President Donald Trump publicly urged the FCC to strip both ABC and NBC of their licenses over their handling of a presidential address. ABC has hired prominent litigators, including former Solicitor General Paul Clement, to fight the review.
Can the world’s newest technology give a boost to one of transportation’s oldest? A plan by leading Asia companies wants to find out.
Nvidia and Kawasaki Heavy Industries announced a joint effort to build a “next‑generation digital shipyard” at Kawasaki’s Sakaide Works in Japan.
The core of the deal is co‑development of AI‑powered robots for shipbuilding tasks such as welding, painting, inspection, and material handling.
Kawasaki (OTC: KWHIY) will contribute decades of shipbuilding data, production know‑how, and its own robotics capabilities.
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) will contribute its AI and simulation stack, including products for applications in digital twins, robotics, vision/AI, and edge AI, which applies AI models and algorithms directly to devices such as sensors, cameras, robots, vehicles, or industrial controllers.
One report notes Nvidia making a $5 million investment connected to this 1990s‑era Kawasaki shipbuilding business as part of the arrangement, though the main value is technology integration rather than large equity stakes in shipyards.
The outcome could be a precursor to wider adoption in shipbuilding: A plan by the United States to revitalize its shipyards has been dogged by persistent questions of workforce availability.
Nvidia is already invested in an array of autonomous truck technology.
The AI applications include digital twins of hulls, production lines, and workflows will simulate and optimize before cutting steel, and AI‑guided robots that can adapt to complex, low‑volume, highly customized shipbuilding tasks. Skills transfer and training via simulation is expected to help address labor shortages and the loss of experienced workers.
Analysts say a scalable AI model could improve lead times and cost curves for newbuilds, particularly in Japan and other yards that license production. Quality and rework rates could be improved, which influence delivery reliability and charterer risk.
