"Scientists in China have made a breakthrough with fusion energy that could finally overcome one of the most stubborn barriers to realising the next-generation energy source," reports the Independent: A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said its experimental nuclear reactor, dubbed the 'artificial Sun', achieved a plasma density that was previously thought impossible... Through a new process called plasma-wall self organisation, the CAS researchers were able to keep the plasma stable at unprecedented density levels. By pushing plasma density well past long-standing empirical limits, the researchers said fusion ignition can be achieved with far higher energy outputs. "The findings suggest a practical and scalable pathway for extending density limits in tokamaks and next-generation burning plasma fusion devices," said Professor Ping Zhu from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, who so-led the research.

Professor Zhu's team now plan to apply this new method on the EAST reactor to confirm that it will work under high-performance plasma conditions. The latest breakthrough was detailed in the journal Science Advances in a study titled 'Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST'.

China has hacked the emails used by congressional staff on powerful committees in the US House of Representatives, as part of a massive cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon. An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese intelligence accessed email systems used by some staffers [non-paywalled source] on the House China committee in addition to aides on the foreign affairs committee, intelligence committee and armed services committee, according to people familiar with the attack. The intrusions were detected in December.

The attacks are the latest element of an ongoing cyber campaign against US communication networks by the Ministry of State Security, China's intelligence service. One person familiar with the attack said it was unclear if the MSS had accessed lawmakers' emails. The MSS has been operating Salt Typhoon for several years. It allows China to access the unencrypted phone calls, texts and voicemails of almost every American, and in some cases enables access to email accounts. Salt Typhoon has also intercepted the calls of senior US officials over the past couple of years, said people familiar with the campaign.

A new working paper from researchers at the University of Hong Kong has found that Chinese graduate students who plagiarized more heavily in their master's theses were significantly more likely to pursue careers in the civil service and to climb the ranks faster once inside.

John Liu and co-authors analyzed 6 million dissertations from CNKI, a Chinese academic repository, and cross-referenced them against public records of civil-service exam-takers to identify 120,000 civil servants and their academic work. Those who entered the public sector had plagiarism scores 15.6% above average. Customs and tax officials fared worst -- their scores ran 25% and 26% higher than private-sector peers respectively. Within the civil service, those who plagiarized more were promoted 9% faster during the first five years of their careers. The researchers validated their plagiarism metric through an experiment involving 443 job applicants who were asked to roll dice for rewards without monitoring. Those who had plagiarized more also reported improbably high rolls.

Samsung's co-CEO TM Roh has warned that product price increases are "inevitable" as an unprecedented global memory chip shortage squeezes margins across the company's consumer electronics lineup -- from smartphones to televisions and home appliances.

The South Korean giant, one of the top two largest smartphone manufacturers, plans to double the number of mobile devices running its Galaxy AI features to 800 million units this year, up from 400 million at the end of 2025. Galaxy AI is powered by Google's Gemini model and Samsung's own Bixby assistant for different tasks. "As this situation is unprecedented, no company is immune to its impact," Roh told Reuters in his first interview since becoming co-CEO in November.

Samsung is working with partners on longer-term strategies to minimize the impact, he said. Market researchers IDC and Counterpoint predict the global smartphone market will shrink this year as the chip shortage threatens to drive up phone prices. The shortage is a boon to Samsung's semiconductor business but pressures margins on its smartphone division, the company's second-largest revenue source.

The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility: There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup that runs the metal-making plant in Exeter, New Hampshire. A handful of other companies in the United States are processing rare earths in small quantities, including MP Materials, which owns a mine in Mountain Pass, California, and recently began producing rare-earth metal in Fort Worth, Texas. Similar efforts are underway in Europe and Asia. "It's small volumes of low-value materials that are very expensive to process," said Elsa Olivetti, a materials science and engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Meaning it's hard to make money."

Phoenix Tailings' New Hampshire operation is about 2 months old, housed in a converted medical device plant. The company buys metric-ton bags of powder — a mixture of neodymium and praseodymium bound with oxygen — from mining and refining companies in the United States, South America and Australia. It funnels that flour-like material into a drying oven and eventually into furnaces that heat it to the temperature of volcanic lava. This circuit takes up less than 15,000 square feet and is designed to generate no emissions other than those associated with the electricity Phoenix Tailings uses. The closed-loop design distinguishes this process from the more energy-intensive techniques used in China, where workers scoop up molten metal with ladles. That approach releases perfluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases that do not break down easily.
In late 2024 the company was three weeks from bankruptcy — but it's recently been valued at $189 million.

President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon's cloud computing systems. From a report: The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department's computer systems for nearly a decade -- a practice that left some of the country's most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary.

U.S.-based supervisors, known as "digital escorts," were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. In the wake of the reporting, leading members of Congress called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called "a national betrayal." Cybersecurity and intelligence experts have told ProPublica that the arrangement posed major risks to national security, given that laws in China grant the country's officials broad authority to collect data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cyber Press: A newly uncovered Chinese threat group, DarkSpectre, has been linked to one of the most widespread browser-extension malware operations to date, compromising more than 8.8 million users of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera over the past seven years. According to research by Koi.ai, the group operates three interconnected campaigns: ShadyPanda, GhostPoster, and a newly identified one named The Zoom Stealer, forming a single, strategically organized operation.

DarkSpectre's structure differs from that of ordinary cybercrime operations. The group runs separate but interconnected malware clusters, each with distinct goals. The ShadyPanda campaign, responsible for 5.6 million infections, focuses on long-term user surveillance and e-commerce affiliate fraud. Its extensions have appeared legitimate for years, offering new tab pages and translation utilities, before secretly downloading malicious configurations from command-and-control servers such as jt2x.com and infinitynewtab.com. Once activated, they inject remote scripts, hijack search results, and track browsing activity.

The second campaign, GhostPoster, spreads via Firefox and Opera extensions that conceal malicious payloads in PNG images via steganography. After lying dormant for several days, the extensions extract and execute JavaScript hidden within images, enabling stealthy remote code execution. This campaign has affected over one million users and relies on domains like gmzdaily.com and mitarchive.info for payload delivery.

The most recent discovery, The Zoom Stealer, exposes around 2.2 million users to corporate espionage. These extensions masquerade as productivity tools or video downloaders while secretly harvesting corporate meeting links, credentials, and speaker profiles from more than 28 video conferencing platforms, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. The extensions use real-time WebSocket connections to exfiltrate data to Firebase databases, such as zoocorder.firebaseio.com, and to Google Cloud functions, such as webinarstvus.cloudfunctions.net.

China's Commerce Ministry on Wednesday demanded that the Netherlands "immediately correct its mistakes" over chipmaker Nexperia, escalating a standoff that has disrupted global semiconductor supply chains and triggered warnings from automakers about component shortages. The Dutch government in September invoked a Cold War-era law to effectively seize control of the Chinese-owned chipmaker, reportedly after the United States raised security concerns. China responded by blocking Nexperia products from leaving the country.

Nexperia manufactures billions of foundation chips -- transistors, diodes and power management components -- that are produced in Europe, assembled and tested in China, and then re-exported to customers worldwide. These low-tech, inexpensive chips are essential in almost every device that uses electricity, from car braking systems and airbag controllers to electric windows and entertainment systems.

The Commerce Ministry spokesperson said the Netherlands "remains indifferent and stubbornly insists on its own way, showing absolutely no responsible attitude towards the security of the global semiconductor supply chain." Dutch Economy Minister Vincent Karremans has repeatedly defended the intervention. Auto industry groups have warned that disruptions have not been fundamentally resolved. Japan's Nissan and German supplier Bosch have flagged looming shortages, and the German Association of the Automotive Industry warned of elevated supply risks "particularly for the first quarter" of 2026.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: South Africans ... have found a remedy for power cuts that have plagued people in the developing world for years. Thanks to swiftly falling prices of Chinese made solar panels and batteries, they now draw their power from the sun. These aren't the tiny, old-school solar lanterns that once powered a lightbulb or TV in rural communities. Today, solar and battery systems are deployed across a variety of businesses -- auto factories and wineries, gold mines and shopping malls. And they are changing everyday life, trade and industry in Africa's biggest economy. This has happened at startling speed. Solar has risen from almost nothing in 2019 to roughly 10 percent of South Africa's electricity-generating capacity.

No longer do South Africans depend entirely on giant coal-burning plants that have defined how people worldwide got their electricity for more than a century. That's forcing the nation's already beleaguered electric utility to rethink its business as revenues evaporate. Joel Nana, a project manager with Sustainable Energy Africa, a Cape Town-based organization, called it "a bottom-up movement" to sidestep a generations-old problem. "The broken system is unreliable electricity, expensive electricity or no electricity at all," he said. "We've been living in this situation forever." What's happening in South Africa is repeating across the continent. Key to this shift: China's ambition to lead the world in clean energy. The report says that more than 7 gigawatts of solar capacity have been installed in South Africa over the past five years -- about 1/10 of the country's total installed capacity (55 GW). And most of this new solar capacity is privately owned and installed by households and businesses rather than utilities.

Across the continent, Chinese solar imports rose 50% in the first 10 months of 2025. Cheap Chinese solar is rapidly reshaping Africa's energy landscape from the bottom up but it's also shifting geopolitical influence, hollowing out local manufacturing opportunities, and deepening divides between those who can afford energy independence and those who can't. "The solar surge does little to address the most pressing social and economic problems of developing countries like South Africa, the need to generate new jobs for millions of young citizens," reports the NYT. "Installation labor is local, but the panels and batteries are almost all made in China."

Further reading: Why Solarpunk Is Already Happening In Africa

One-Netbook has unveiled the OneXSugar Wallet, the first gaming handheld with a folding OLED display. The Verge reports: The OneXSugar Wallet was announced on China's Weibo yesterday, but with few details about its features and capabilities. That folding OLED screen has a resolution of 2480 x 1860 pixels, and the handheld will be powered by an unspecified "Qualcomm gaming platform flagship processor," but its performance and emulation capabilities are unknown.

Based on photos and a video released by One-Netbook, the OneXSugar Wallet will feature a standard set of controls including asymmetrical thumbsticks, four action buttons, and a D-pad situated on either side of the lower half of its display. There are also shoulder buttons and triggers on the back of the handheld, and a pair of front-facing speakers flanking the top half of the screen. The biggest question is how much will the handheld cost...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from DW: India has surpassed Japan to become the world's fourth-largest economy, according to calculations in the Indian government's end-of-year economic review. On current trends, India is expected to overtake Germany to become the world's third-largest economy within the next three years, the review said.

The review said India's gross domestic product has already reached about $4.18 trillion, and is projected to reach $7.3 trillion by 2030. On current trends, it said, India would trail only the United States and China in economic heft. India's real GDP grew 8.2% in the second quarter of the 2025-26 financial year, up from 7.8% in the previous quarter and marking a six-quarter high.

Export performance has also strengthened, the review noted. Merchandise exports rose to $38.13 billion in November, up from $36.43 billion in January, supported by engineering goods, electronics, pharmaceuticals, and petroleum products. Official confirmation however depends on data due in 2026 when final annual GDP figures are released. The International Monetary Fund suggests India will surpass Japan next year. The Reserve Bank of India has revised its growth forecast for the 2025-26 financial year upward to 7.3%.

China is quietly mandating that chipmakers use at least 50% domestically made equipment when expanding capacity, "as Beijing pushes to build a self-sufficient semiconductor supply chain," according to Reuters. From the report: The rule is not publicly documented, but chipmakers seeking state approval to build or expand their plants have been told by authorities in recent months that they must prove through procurement tenders that at least half their equipment will be Chinese-made, the people told Reuters. The mandate is one of the most significant measures Beijing has introduced to wean itself off reliance on foreign technology, a push that gathered pace after the U.S. tightened technology export restrictions in 2023, banning sales of advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China.

While those U.S. export restrictions blocked the sale of some of the most advanced tools, the 50% rule is leading Chinese manufacturers to choose domestic suppliers even in areas where foreign equipment from the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Europe remain available. Applications failing the threshold are typically rejected, though authorities grant flexibility depending on supply constraints, the people said. The requirements are relaxed for advanced chip production lines, where domestically developed equipment is not yet fully available. "Authorities prefer if it is much higher than 50%," one source told Reuters. "Eventually they are aiming for the plants to use 100% domestic equipment."

Meta has agreed to acquire viral AI agent startup Manus, "a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral," reports TechCrunch. "The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research." From the report: By April, just weeks after launch, the early-stage firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the board. Per Chinese media outlets, some other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) via an earlier $10 million round.

Though Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted the pricing seemed "somewhat aggressive... for a membership service still in a testing phase,") the company recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That's when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says Meta is paying $2 billion -- the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next funding round.

For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta's future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that's actually making money (investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta's $60 billion infrastructure spending spree). Meta says it'll keep Manus running independently while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Boston's once-booming biotech sector has hit a sharp downturn, leaving newly minted Ph.D.s struggling to find work as venture funding dries up, lab space sits empty, and companies downsize or relocate amid rising costs and policy uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal reports: Boston's biotech sector, long a vital economic engine for one of America's wealthiest metro areas, is sputtering. A double whammy of cutbacks in venture capital and government funding have taken a toll, leading to layoffs and struggles for job seekers. For workers who thought they would easily launch into a well-paying science career, the downturn has been especially harsh.

Massachusetts experienced a slight decline in its roughly 65,000 biotech research-and-development jobs in 2024 after years of mostly strong increases, including during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to federal data. The numbers indicate that job losses continued through at least June, while hiring remains sluggish. By the end of September, nearly 28% of greater Boston's laboratory space sat empty, according to the latest estimates from real-estate firm CBRE. "Every stage of the life cycle has been impacted by policy or regulatory uncertainty this year," said Kendalle Burlin O'Connell, chief executive of MassBio, an industry trade group. The impact has hit startups especially hard, she said.

A continued downturn poses risks for a region where workers will put up with sky-high real-estate costs if they can land high-paying jobs. Massachusetts faces competition from other states and China, which are eager to peel away talent and investment. "There are states and countries chasing us every single day," Gov. Maura Healey said in an interview. In late October, the Democrat testified before the Massachusetts legislature in support of a $400 million "competitiveness agenda" that she is seeking to spur new investment and supplement research funding lost this year. Lawmakers are reviewing the bill, a House spokesman said.

Amid a global DDR5 shortage and soaring prices, Russian hardware enthusiasts are experimenting with do-it-yourself DDR5 RAM by sourcing empty PCBs and soldering memory chips by hand. Tom's Hardware reports: The idea comes from Russian YouTuber PRO Hi-Tech's Telegram channel, where a local enthusiast known as "Vik-on" already performs VRAM upgrades for GPUs, so this is a relatively safe operation for him. According to Vik-on, empty RAM PCBs can be sourced from China for as little as $6.40 per DIMM. The memory chips themselves, though, that's a different challenge.

The so-called spot market for memory doesn't really exist at the moment, since no manufacturer has the production capacity to make more RAM, and even if they did, they'd sell to better-paying AI clients instead. Still, you can find SK Hynix and Samsung chips across Chinese marketplaces if you search for the correct part number, as shown in the attached screenshots.

Moreover, the Telegram thread says it would cost roughly 12,000 Russian Rubles ($152) to build a 16 GB stick with "average" specs, which is about the same as a retail 16 GB kit. There's also a ZenTimings snapshot showing CL28 timings, claiming that even relatively high-end DDR5 RAM can be built using this method, but it won't be cost-effective. Therefore, it doesn't make too much sense just yet to get the BGA rework station out and assemble your own DDR5. Things are expected to get worse, though, so maybe these Russians are on to something.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: China drafted landmark rules to stop AI chatbots from emotionally manipulating users, including what could become the strictest policy worldwide intended to prevent AI-supported suicides, self-harm, and violence. China's Cyberspace Administration proposed the rules on Saturday. If finalized, they would apply to any AI products or services publicly available in China that use text, images, audio, video, or "other means" to simulate engaging human conversation. Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, told CNBC that the "planned rules would mark the world's first attempt to regulate AI with human or anthropomorphic characteristics" at a time when companion bot usage is rising globally.

[...] Proposed rules would require, for example, that a human intervene as soon as suicide is mentioned. The rules also dictate that all minor and elderly users must provide the contact information for a guardian when they register -- the guardian would be notified if suicide or self-harm is discussed. Generally, chatbots would be prohibited from generating content that encourages suicide, self-harm, or violence, as well as attempts to emotionally manipulate a user, such as by making false promises. Chatbots would also be banned from promoting obscenity, gambling, or instigation of a crime, as well as from slandering or insulting users. Also banned are what are termed "emotional traps," -- chatbots would additionally be prevented from misleading users into making "unreasonable decisions," a translation of the rules indicates.

Perhaps most troubling to AI developers, China's rules would also put an end to building chatbots that "induce addiction and dependence as design goals." [...] AI developers will also likely balk at annual safety tests and audits that China wants to require for any service or products exceeding 1 million registered users or more than 100,000 monthly active users. Those audits would log user complaints, which may multiply if the rules pass, as China also plans to require AI developers to make it easier to report complaints and feedback. Should any AI company fail to follow the rules, app stores could be ordered to terminate access to their chatbots in China. That could mess with AI firms' hopes for global dominance, as China's market is key to promoting companion bots, Business Research Insights reported earlier this month.

Yes, greenhouse gas emissions kept rising in 2025, writes Bloomberg (alternate URL here). And the pledges of various governments to lower greenhouse gases "are nowhere near where they need to be to avoid catastrophic climate change..."

But in 2025, "there were silver linings too." The world is decarbonizing faster than was expected 10 years ago and investment into the clean energy transition, including everything from wind and solar to batteries and grids, is expected to have reached a new record of $2.2 trillion globally in 2025, according to research by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, a London nonprofit. "Is this enough to keep us safe? No it clearly isn't," said Gareth Redmond-King, international lead at the ECIU. "Is it remarkable progress compared to where we were headed? Clearly it is...." Global investment in clean tech far outpaced what went into polluting industries. For every $1 funding fossil fuel projects, $2 went into clean power, according to the ECIU. For China, the EU, the U.S. and India, the four largest polluters, it was $2.60.

Funds flowing into renewable power set another record in the first half of this year and were up 10% compared to the same period in 2024, to $386 billion, according to the latest available research by BloombergNEF. Solar and wind grew fast enough to meet all new electricity demand globally in the first three quarters of 2025, according to UK-based energy think tank Ember. That means renewable capacity is set to hit a new record globally this year, with Ember forecasting an 11% increase from 2024. Over the last three years, renewable capacity grew by nearly 30% on average. That puts the world within reach of the goal set at COP 28 in Dubai in 2023 to triple clean power by 2030. China is leading the charge, with the world's largest polluter expected to have delivered 66% of new solar capacity, and 69% of new wind globally this year, according to Ember. Renewables also advanced in parts of Asia, Europe and South America.

The explosive power demand from artificial intelligence is also turning the tide on green technology investment, which had soured in recent years. For the first three quarters of this year, global clean tech investment, which was dominated by funding in next-generation nuclear reactors, renewables and other solutions that help power data centers, has already surpassed all of 2024. That marks the sector's first annual increase since the 2022 peak. And despite President Trump's rollback of climate policies, the S&P's main gauge tracking clean energy is up about 50% this year, outperforming most other stock indexes and even gold. That same enthusiasm has also helped channel more capital into developing and upgrading the power grid, a backbone of the global energy transition.
The article also notes that prices per kilowatt-hour of battery capacity "fell by 8% to a record $108 this year and they're expected to decline a further 3% next year, according to BloombergNEF."

And this year the International Court of Justice "determined that countries risk being in violation of international law if they don't work toward keeping global warming to the 1.5C threshold agreed on at the Paris climate conference in 2015."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk's Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called "zone-effect" weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density pellets, potentially disabling multiple satellites at once but also risking catastrophic collateral damage to other orbiting systems.

Analysts who haven't seen the findings say they doubt such a weapon could work without causing uncontrollable chaos in space for companies and countries, including Russia and its ally China, that rely on thousands of orbiting satellites for communications, defense and other vital needs. Such repercussions, including risks to its own space systems, could steer Moscow away from deploying or using such a weapon, analysts said. "I don't buy it. Like, I really don't," said Victoria Samson, a space-security specialist at the Secure World Foundation who leads the Colorado-based nongovernmental organization's annual study of anti-satellite systems. "I would be very surprised, frankly, if they were to do something like that." [Later they suggested the research might just be experimental.]

But the commander of the Canadian military's Space Division, Brig. Gen. Christopher Horner, said such Russian work cannot be ruled out in light of previous U.S. allegations that Russia also has been pursuing an indiscriminate nuclear, space-based weapon. "I can't say I've been briefed on that type of system. But it's not implausible," he said... The French military's Space Command said in a statement to the AP that it could not comment on the findings but said, "We can inform you that Russia has, in recent years, been multiplying irresponsible, dangerous, and even hostile actions in space."
The article also points out that this month Russia "said it has fielded a new ground-based missile system, the S-500, which is capable of hitting low-orbit targets..."

The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers "enriched" license pages with "relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support".

So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:

mit	(1.5M)
apache-2-0	(344k)
bsd-3-clause	(214k)
bsd-2-clause	(128k)
gpl-2-0	(76k)
gpl-3-0	(55k)
isc-license-txt	(35k)
lgpl-3-0	(34k)
OFL-1.1	(31k)
lgpl-2-1	(24k)
.	.

From the Open Source Initiative's announcement: Please note that these are aggregated pageviews from actual humans along the year of 2025... Actual humans (presumably) because the number of requests by bots or crawlers is several orders of magnitude higher (e.g. requests just for the MIT license are on the range of 10M per month).

We do provide an API service that gives access to the canonical list of OSI Approved Licenses — this is a very new service, which hopefully will be adopted by automated requests from CI/CD pipelines. One final observation is that the number of human pageviews is likely higher because we are using Plausible as our data source and a high percentage of our target audience uses Ad blockers, which by design are not accounted by Plausible. Users from China are also likely undercounted by Plausible for the same reason.

The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima's nuclear plant "was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986," CNN remembers.

But this week Japanese authorities "have approved a decision to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant," reports CNN, "which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster."

Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata prefectural assembly, home to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, approved a bill on Monday that clears the way for utility company Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to restart one of the plant's seven reactors. The company plans to bring the No. 6 reactor back online around January 20, Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported...

Following the [2011] disaster, Japan shut down all 54 of its nuclear power stations including Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, which sits in the coastal and port region of Niigata about 320 kilometers (200 miles) north of Tokyo on Japan's main island of Honshu. Japan has since restarted 14 of the 33 nuclear reactors that remain operable, according to the World Nuclear Association. The Niigata plant will be the first to reopen under the operation of TEPCO, the company that ran the Fukushima Daiichi power station. It has been trying to reassure residents of the restart plan is safe...

About 60-70% of Japan's power generation comes from imported fossil fuels, which cost the country about 10.7 trillion yen ($68 billion) last year alone... Japan is the world's fifth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, after China, the United States, India and Russia, according to the International Energy Agency. But it has committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050, and renewable energy was at the center of its latest energy plan published earlier this year, with a push for greater investments in solar and wind. The country's energy demands are also expected to increase in the coming years due to a boom in energy-hungry data centers that power AI infrastructure. To achieve its energy and climate goals, Japan aims to double the share of nuclear power in its electricity mix to 20% by 2040...

On its website, TEPCO said Kashiwazaki-Kariwa had undergone multiple inspections and upgrades and that the company had learned "the lessons of Fukushima." The company said new seawalls and watertight doors would provide "stronger protection against tsunamis" and that mobile generators and more fire trucks would be on hand for "cooling support" in an emergency. It also said the plant now had "upgraded filtering systems designed to control the spread of radioactive materials."
A survey published by the prefecture in October "found 60% of residents did not think conditions for the restart had been met," reports Reuters, adding that "Nearly 70% were worried about TEPCO operating the plant."