IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON

Stocks pushed higher after the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran has been urgently signaling that it seeks an end to hostilities and resumption of talks over its nuclear programs.
Reuters has been told that Iran has asked Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Oman to press US President Donald Trump to use his influence on Israel for an immediate ceasefire in return for Tehran’s flexibility in talks about its nuclear program.

The U.S. pioneered the combination of solar panels and batteries that makes it possible to get power from the sun when it isn’t shining. Now it risks being left behind thanks to a trade war and Republicans’ plan to withdraw clean-energy subsidies.
The tax bill passed by the House would phase out tax breaks for various green technologies, including energy storage facilities that use batteries to store power that gets released when the grid needs it. Grid batteries are also heavily exposed to tariffs because, unlike EV batteries, practically none are made in the U.S. They are made in China.
This double whammy casts a shadow over a technology that is doing the heavy lifting as U.S. power demand rises for the first time in a generation. Batteries will account for 29% of the power capacity installed this year, behind only solar, the Energy Information Administration says.
The Senate may prolong the tax credits, and Wednesday’s court ruling that voided—for now—many of Trump’s tariffs underscores the uncertainty over trade policy. For green-energy companies that typically line up customers before committing to projects, that uncertainty makes it harder to put a price on power: “We have never seen such a high demand for energy, but there’s no way we can move forward,” said David Ruiz de Andrés, chief executive of solar-plus-storage company Grenergy.
The Madrid-based company has ambitions to grow in the U.S., lured by tech companies vying to build power-hungry data centers, but currently it isn’t investing in projects besides a few already under way. Grenergy’s new $4 billion investment plan prioritizes Europe, its home market, and Latin America, where it recently signed a deal with Chile’s state-controlled copper-mining giant, Codelco, to provide round-the-clock power from vast solar and battery arrays.
Solar power, 24/7 is becoming feasible (in very sunny places like Chile, anyway) thanks to battery technology improvements from Chinese manufacturers such as BYD and CATL. Their race to squeeze more capacity into less space reduced grid batteries’ cost by 40% between 2023 and 2024, according to BloombergNEF.

Not doomed, but more expensive-
Low costs, and the sheer availability of solar panels and batteries, means U.S. growth would likely be slowed rather than halted by trade barriers and withdrawn subsidies, said BloombergNEF policy expert Ethan Zindler: “Some projects will get canceled, some will go forward and get priced higher,” he said.
There aren’t enough gas turbines, let alone nuclear plants, to meet U.S. power demand. As Zindler sees it, the question is how much potential demand is destroyed by higher prices—tech companies can build more data centers in other countries—and how much Americans pay for electricity.

Microsoft made a significant statement by entering a twenty-year agreement with Constellation Energy, which plans to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the site of the 1979 partial nuclear meltdown. Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6 billion to refurbish and restart the reactor by 2028 with an estimated 835 MW of capacity. Microsoft entered the agreement to provide the energy demands for its AI data centers.

There is one problem with this: we cannot continue to scale energy usage like this without making the Earth inhospitable to organic life.

we will in just a few short decades be able to deliver payloads of a self-assembling farm of robots to mine the Moon, create chip fabs, build, and ultimately tile the Moon with GPUs. The Moon has a surface area of 14.6 million square miles, roughly the size of Asia. If we very conservatively tiled even half the Moon with GPUs and solar panels, the Moon could sustain a billion times the compute of the Colossus cluster and, with a few turns of Moore’s law driving chip technology forward, even a trillion times the compute.