MAROKO133 Hot ai: Russia’s 820 MW sodium-cooled reactor ‘burns’ next-gen actinide nuclear

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Russia’s 820 MW sodium-cooled reactor ‘burns’ next-gen a

Three trial uranium-plutonium MOX fuel assemblies containing americium-241 and neptunium-237 have completed three fuel campaigns in the Beloyarsk BN-800 fast neutron reactor. 

These assemblies, which were loaded into the reactor core in the summer of 2024, are now cooling in a used fuel pool. After the cooling period, they will undergo post-irradiation studies to evaluate the transmutation process. 

This trial is a stage of a research program for minor actinide afterburning that began in 2021 and is scheduled to run until 2035.

Minor actinides, including neptunium, americium, and curium, are transuranic elements produced in nuclear fuel during reactor operation. Although they represent a small percentage of the mass of used fuel, they contribute to its radioactive toxicity and residual heat. 

These isotopes have half-lives lasting hundreds of thousands of years, which determines the conditions for isolating radioactive waste from the environment.

“Minor actinides are characterized by high radioactivity and toxicity, as well as the presence of isotopes with long half-lives, which makes them hazardous components of radioactive waste,” said Rosatom.

Transmuting actinides into isotopes

Rosatom stated that fast neutron reactors can burn minor actinides by transmuting them into isotopes that are either stable or have shorter half-lives.

The goal of this technology is to reduce the volume of radioactive waste that requires deep geological disposal. Rosatom indicated that eliminating minor actinides could allow nuclear waste to reach radiation equivalence with the original uranium feedstock hundreds of times faster than natural decay. 

Alexander Ugryumov, Senior Vice President for Research and Development at TVEL, stated that burning minor actinides in a commercial reactor is a long-term strategy rather than a single experiment. 

“Burning minor actinides in a commercial reactor is not a one-off experiment, but a long-term strategy,” noted Ugryumov. “Before scaling this solution to an industrial level, we are demonstrating the very technological feasibility, that this idea actually works.”

Enhancing fourth-gen nuclear reactor capabilities

The current focus is to demonstrate technological feasibility before scaling to an industrial level. Future stages of the program involve increasing the concentration of minor actinides in trial MOX fuel and adding them to nitride uranium-plutonium fuel.

TVEL also plans to test heterogeneous burning, where minor actinides are placed in separate fuel rods or assemblies within specific zones of the reactor rather than being mixed into the fuel matrix.

Yuri Nosov, Director of the Beloyarsk plant, said that post-irradiation studies will define the role of this technology in the fuel cycle. Fourth-generation power units are intended to improve safety by using used fuel instead of storing it. 

“Over approximately 60 years of operation, such installations will be capable of utilizing about four tons of minor actinides, which is more than several thermal reactors can produce,” concluded Nosov.

The BN-800 is a sodium-cooled fast reactor with an output of 820 MWe. It entered commercial operation in 2016 and transitioned to a full load of MOX fuel in September 2022. MOX fuel is produced by mixing plutonium recovered from used fuel with depleted uranium.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stu

Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers.

The numbers were actually AI tokens. Decoded, they led to a coding challenge: build an algorithm to act as a digital bouncer at Berghain, the Berlin nightclub famous for rejecting nearly everyone at the door. Within days, thousands attempted the puzzle. 430 cracked it. Some got hired. The winner flew to Berlin, all expenses paid.

That unconventional approach has now attracted $69 million in Series B funding, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from Evantic and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Conviction, and Pear VC. The round values Listen Labs at $500 million and brings its total capital to $100 million. In nine months since launch, the company has grown annualized revenue by 15x to eight figures and conducted over one million AI-powered interviews.

"When you obsess over customers, everything else follows," Wahlforss said in an interview with VentureBeat. "Teams that use Listen bring the customer into every decision, from marketing to product, and when the customer is delighted, everyone is."

Why traditional market research is broken, and what Listen Labs is building to fix it

Listen's AI researcher finds participants, conducts in-depth interviews, and delivers actionable insights in hours, not weeks. The platform replaces the traditional choice between quantitative surveys — which provide statistical precision but miss nuance—and qualitative interviews, which deliver depth but cannot scale.

Wahlforss explained the limitation of existing approaches: "Essentially surveys give you false precision because people end up answering the same question… You can't get the outliers. People are actually not honest on surveys." The alternative, one-on-one human interviews, "gives you a lot of depth. You can ask follow up questions. You can kind of double check if they actually know what they're talking about. And the problem is you can't scale that."

The platform works in four steps: users create a study with AI assistance, Listen recruits participants from its global network of 30 million people, an AI moderator conducts in-depth interviews with follow-up questions, and results are packaged into executive-ready reports including key themes, highlight reels, and slide decks.

What distinguishes Listen's approach is its use of open-ended video conversations rather than multiple-choice forms. "In a survey, you can kind of guess what you should answer, and you have four options," Wahlforss said. "Oh, they probably want me to buy high income. Let me click on that button versus an open ended response. It just generates much more honesty."

The dirty secret of the $140 billion market research industry: rampant fraud

Listen finds and qualifies the right participants in its global network of 30 million people. But building that panel required confronting what Wahlforss called "one of the most shocking things that we've learned when we entered this industry"—rampant fraud.

"Essentially, there's a financial transaction involved, which means there will be bad players," he explained. "We actually had some of the largest companies, some of them have billions in revenue, send us people who claim to be kind of enterprise buyers to our platform and our system immediately detected, like, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud."

The company built what it calls a "quality guard" that cross-references LinkedIn profiles with video responses to verify identity, checks consistency across how participants answer questions, and flags suspicious patterns. The result, according to Wahlforss: "People talk three times more. They're much more honest when they talk about sensitive topics like politics and mental health."

Emeritus, an online education company that uses Listen, reported that approximately 20% of survey responses previously fell into the fraudulent or low-quality category. With Listen, they reduced this to almost zero. "We did not have to replace any responses because of fraud or gibberish information," said Gabrielli Tiburi, Assistant Manager of Customer Insights at Emeritus.

How Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Chubbies are using AI interviews to build better products

The speed advantage has proven central to Listen's pitch. Traditional customer research at Microsoft could take four to six weeks to generate insights. "By the time we get to them, either the decision has been made or we lose out on the opportunity to actually influence it," said Romani Patel, Senior Research Manager at Microsoft.

With Listen, Microsoft can now get insights in days, and in many cases, within hours.

The platform has already powered several high-profile initiatives. Microsoft used Listen Labs to collect global customer stories for its 50th anniversary celebration. "We wanted users to share how Copilot is empowering them to bring their best self forward," Patel said, "and we were able to collect those user video stories within a day." Traditionally, that kind of work would have taken six to eight weeks.

Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based drinkware company, used Listen to test a new product concept. The process took about an hour to write questions, an hour to launch the study, and 2.5 hours to receive feedback from 120 people across the country. "We went from 'Should we even have this product?' to 'How should we launch it?'" said Chris Hoyle, the company's Chief Marketing Officer.

Chubbies, the shorts brand, achieved a 24x increase in youth research participation—growing from 5 to 120 participants — by using Listen to overcome the scheduling challenges of traditional focus groups with children. "There's school, sports, dinner, and homework," explained Lauren Neville, Director of Insights and Innovation. "I had to find a way to hear from them that fit into their schedules."

The company also discovered product issues through AI interviews that might have gone undetected otherwise. Wahlforss described how the AI "through conversations, realized there were like issues with the the kids short line, and decided to, like, interview hundreds of kids. And I understand that there were issues in the liner of the shorts and that they were, like, scratchy, quote, unquote, according to the people interviewed." The redesigned product became "a blockbuster hit."

The Jevons paradox explains why cheaper research creates more demand, not less

Listen Labs is entering a massive but fragmented market. Wahlforss cited research from Andreessen Horowitz estimating the market research ind…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com