US, Japan, And South Korea Push SMR Exports For "Energy Security Needs"
The American nuclear buildout is not just about the climate or powering data centers. It's a geopolitical war against the export of nuclear technology from Russia and China, mixed with a new demand for national energy security.
On the sidelines of the NATO Summit in Ankara, the United States, Japan, and South Korea signed a trilateral Memorandum of Cooperation aimed at accelerating small modular reactor (SMR) deployments in other countries, with an initial focus on the Indo-Pacific. The agreement is designed to bring together the complementary strengths of the three countries’ civil nuclear industries.
The US State Department also notes, “The MOC advances our mutual security interests and paves the way for partner countries to meet their energy security needs.”
In addition to deploying reactors in the Indo-Pacific, the initiative is also supported by the U.S. committing over $10 million in new funding to the State Department's Foundational Infrastructure for Responsible Use of Small Modular Reactor Technology (FIRST) Program.
Lastly, the U.S. also announced an industry initiative agreed upon with GE Vernova and their partner Hitachi, with Samsung C&T and SGE to deploy the BWRX-300 SMR in Europe.
The U.S. is continuing its trend, started after the executive orders were signed last year, of deploying American nuclear technology in foreign countries. In the executive orders, the State Department was directed to renew or start 20 civil nuclear cooperation agreements, sometimes referred to as “123 Agreements”.
The goal is to strengthen U.S. political ties with allies and other countries in Europe and Asia by supporting those countries' domestic energy security needs.
The reactor export story also has a fuel-chain counterpart. More allied SMR deployments would eventually require more allied fuel supply, and that is where companies like Centrus Energy and General Matter become relevant.
Centrus already has a direct South Korea connection. In 2025, Centrus announced that it had expanded its agreement with Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and POSCO International, including higher low-enriched uranium supply volumes tied to new enrichment capacity at the American Centrifuge Plant in Ohio.
The supply commitment remains contingent on Centrus receiving the necessary federal funding to build that capacity, but as we clearly identified just last week, Centrus should reasonably expect to receive whatever financial support they ask for from the federal government at this point.
General Matter adds another piece to the same puzzle. In March, the Export-Import Bank of the United States issued Letters of Interestsupporting up to $4.2 billion in potential financing for nuclear fuel sales by General Matter to nuclear power operators in Japan and South Korea.
The new US-Japan-Korea framework does not name a reactor developer, but it can be reasonably expected that GE Vernova (GEV) will lead the pack given its connection to all three countries. The framework does create a backdrop for additional US-aligned advanced reactor developers trying to work with Asian industrial partners.
NANO has already started building that lane in South Korea. In January, the company signed an MOU with DS Dansuk to advance potential deployment of its KRONOS MMR system in South Korea. Under the agreement, DS Dansuk is expected to help with site identification, supply-chain localization, regulatory engagement, and institutional partnerships.
Prosecutors with the office of former special counsel Jack Smith left classified materials unsecured and provided materials to at least one person without confirming that person needed to see them, a senator said on July 8.
A set of messages from Smith’s team showed that in 2024, the team left a facility designated for the review of sensitive information open overnight, and potentially longer.
“Who opened the [facility] yesterday?” one member of the team asked in a message.
“No one opened it yesterday because no one closed it the day before,” another member replied.
A second set of messages from 2024 outlined how the team provided classified materials to an unidentified person despite not having confirmation that the person needed to see the materials.
The incidents took place as Smith’s team, which was part of the Department of Justice (DOJ), was prosecuting then-presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified materials during his first term as president.
“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” Grassley said in a statement.
“According to these messages, Biden DOJ personnel may have committed the very offense for which Jack Smith was prosecuting President Trump. These records expose yet another double standard of justice.”
Grassley also wrote in a post on X that the messages “indicate hypocritical [and] careless behavior” and “merit further investigation.”
He pointed to how some former officials, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, mishandled classified information but were not charged.
Grassley asked Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, for more records, including whether the facility that was left unlocked contained any material that was part of Smith’s prosecution of Trump, and whether the DOJ investigated Smith’s team for giving classified information without the need-to-know confirmation.
“The Department is aware of the concerns raised in Senator Grassley’s letter and takes the safeguarding of classified information very seriously. Every official entrusted with sensitive materials must follow strict security protocols without exception — a standard Jack Smith’s team apparently failed to meet as they pursued a politically weaponized prosecution of President Trump,” a DOJ spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
“As with any alleged security lapse, the Department reviews such matters through established internal processes to determine whether protocols were followed, whether classified information was compromised, and whether any corrective steps are warranted. The Department will continue to apply those procedures rigorously, consistent with our longstanding commitment to protecting national security and maintaining the integrity of our operations.”
Smith, who has said his investigation was proper, was appointed in November 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to manage investigations into Trump, who at the time was out of office.
Federal prosecutors later charged Trump with violations of federal law governing the handling of classified information, as well as other charges such as illegally interfering in the 2020 presidential election.
Prosecutors dropped the cases after Trump won the 2024 election, noting that he would soon be president.
Part of Smith’s final report was released to the public prior to the start of Trump’s second term, outlining how Smith believed the evidence against Trump would have resulted in a conviction. A federal judge later ruled that the other part shall never be made public.
Starbucks Using AI To Build Software Replacing Applications It Buys From Microsoft, IBM
Corporate America has been desperate to see a burst of productivity (i.e., cost cutting) emerging from the latest flood of agentic AI euphoria, and it is slowly starting to get it. Not everyone will be pleased.
Starbucks is developing in-house tools with the help of artificial intelligence that could replace some software applications it now buys from companies such as Microsoft and IBM.
According to Bloomberg, the coffee chain, whose stock price has gone nowhere in the past 3 years, is building alternatives to a Microsoft system that tracks inventory and an IBM tool that manages maintenance. Some of the Starbucks-developed software could roll out by the end of next year, pending the results of testing, the report notes.
Before the advent of advanced AI models, businesses were tethered for years to their technology vendors due to fear of business disruption and the complexity of building in-house tools. But AI is shifting that calculus as it makes it easier to develop applications from scratch and as companies push workers to use the technology (especially when it means those very same workers are teaching AI models how to do their work for them).
This is hardly new: at the start of 2026 the software sector cratered as Wall Street expressed doubts about the "terminal value" of business models that can easily be disrupted by AI. Since then, sentiment has stabilized but leading software companies still face concerns about whether they’ll be able to fend off competition from products built by upstarts, or their own customers, using AI. This phenomenon has weighed on software stocks this year, with Microsoft and IBM both trailing the S&P 500.
Shares of both companies fell during trading on Thursday, with Microsoft down 2.4% and IBM sinking 5.2% at 9:30 a.m. in New York, following the Bloomberg report..
Starbucks spends about $400 million a year on software alone, CTO Anand Varadarajan told workers in an internal forum earlier this year. “There’s clear opportunities to reduce the spend in software,” Varadarajan said. In-house software can be cheaper, an incentive for companies such as Starbucks, which is looking to cut $2 billion in costs as part of a broader turnaround effort. That said, in the long run, building can lead a company to pay higher maintenance and labor costs.
When it comes to technology, Starbucks company is reviewing “every contract and service,” according to the presentation seen by Bloomberg. In some cases, that includes building products to replace software that its engineers have to heavily tailor anyway. As an example, the company has been working for several years on building a point-of-sale system that would take the place of Oracle Simphony. In a blog post earlier this year, the company said AI and other technology advancements will support its long-term growth and free up baristas to focus more on customer service.
AI-assisted coding was also key to developing the platform that could replace the IBM tool. Starbucks has been pushing tech workers to use artificial intelligence, even factoring usage into their bonuses, which is ironic since the better the model, the less need for the person who created it meaning the bonus will likely be their last.
To be sure, there’s skepticism about how much, or how quickly, AI can speed up and automate work. Starbucks recently pulled an AI-powered system to track inventory at stores, reverting to manual counting; According to Reuters, that tool was part of CEO Brian Niccol's efforts to fix the coffee chain's persistent product shortages that he has blamed for hurting sales. The app - designed to improve Starbucks’ visibility into shortages at stores - frequently miscounted and mislabeled items, such as confusing similar milk types or missing them altogether. It also continues to use software from third-party vendors, including from companies such as Microsoft.
The Starbucks enterprise technology team is on track to reduce its budget by about $30 million in the fiscal year ending in late September, according to the internal presentation. That includes cutting about $10 million in software spending. Another $13 million will be saved mostly by cutting back on contractors from professional services firms and backfilling some roles with its own staff. Starbucks is setting up offices in Nashville and India that will house some tech workers, while others will remain at its Seattle headquarters. The company has cut about 2,300 jobs since February of last year, including many in tech.
This is a lightly edited transcript of a July 6 segment of the Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words podcast.
One question that came up constantly during this 250th anniversary Fourth of July celebration was whether we were gonna make it another 250 years, 500 years. We could be longer than the Roman Republic. Longer than the Roman Empire.
And to answer that question, you have to know what allowed us to get this far, and for those who don't like us, what they would like to do to stop us.
And it turns out that the reasons that we survived 250 years and the reasons that we might survive another 250 years are precisely the areas where our critics would wish us to fail, or who are actively trying to see that we fail.
Take the first one, our Constitution. What's brilliant about the American Constitution is its federalism.
It outlines all the duties and prerogatives of the federal government, and then it says anything that is not relegated to the federal government is up to the states, and that's the majority of human experiences. It doesn't mean the states can fight one another or pass laws against one another or pass laws against the federal government.
The federal government has ultimate authority, but this federalism means that if California wants to tax 13.3 percent and Florida wants to tax 0 percent, then maybe 300,000 people a year will go to Florida and still enjoy the American experience, and vice versa.
You can go to any state in the country and what it really means is you're having 50 separate experiments.
You're all united by the federal government and the checks and balances of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But you have 50 different interpretations of them based on local and regional concerns, and that gives Americans a lot of choice, and that means when you're disaffected and you're angry at your lot in life, you have 49 other choices, and it's been a wonderful way of easing tensions.
The second is that we have been the beneficiary of legal immigration. We take more immigrants than any place in the world, and people have remarked that as we speak, the people who created Google, for example, or Elon Musk, were all legal immigrants, and they came to the United States because this is the only place in the world where you would have a free market economy, a protection of private wealth, and an encouragement of the population to be successful and to take risk.
And it's impossible to envision a Silicon Valley in the Muslim Middle East. It just wouldn't happen. Wouldn't happen. You couldn't have a Harvard or Yale or Princeton in today's China. They wouldn't allow free speech. You wouldn't have most of our American institutions in any other place.
And that means we get all of these legal immigrants, and they enrich our country if they come in diverse fashion, in numbers that can be assimilated legally with some knowledge of our country and preferably with English language fluency.
The other third reason is we were very lucky naturally. Once the United States, whether you like it or not, embraced Manifest Destiny and decided we were not going to be a continent of warring states as was Europe, 30 or 40 individual nations, but one uniform state in North America, then it was richly endowed for all of us.
We had mining, we had gold, we had silver, we had iron ore, we had almost... We even have rare minerals, rare earth minerals we have not fully tapped. We have oil, we have coal, we have hydroelectric. We have the richest energy nation in the world. We're pumping more oil and gas than any other country in the history of the universe.
We have plentiful timber. We have plentiful farmland. We're the largest farming producing country by the value of our exports and our domestic produce in the world. We have two huge coastlines, not to count the Gulf of America.
In other words, we're protected from the insanity that goes on in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, and we always have been.
So, the sheer size of the American continent, its role in American history as a frontier, its role as a safety valve where people could head West, young men, if they were disaffected by events on the East Coast, and they could make a fortune or make a livelihood farming or in timber or in minerals or in energy, you name it.
There's a fourth reason that we're very successful, and that is we have a free market, private property economy. We're not a socialist, we're not a communist country.
In other words, people flock to the United States from countries where there is no economic opportunity. It either is statism controlled by the state or it's crony capitalist, and that's why we have the most billionaires in the world.
China has more people than we do, four times more people. Russia has twice, three times the territory, but we have more people in the affluent class.
And finally, we have a middle class. Our middle class is the largest in the world. We're not a pyramidal society of a few rich people on top that use their wealth for special dispensations or to affect the government or a mass of poor who are subsidized and always demanding entitlements.
Free middle class. Now, those are our strengths.
So if you wanted to hurt the United States or to ensure that it would not last 250 years, what would you do to stop that? Well, the first thing that I would do is I would start questioning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. So, what do we see now from, for example, the left?
They're always attacking the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. They want to pack the court. They want to get rid of the filibuster. It is in the Constitution, the Electoral College. They want to ban or destroy the Electoral College.
They want to bring in two new states specifically, not one conservative and one liberal like the old Alaska-Hawaii compromise, but two liberal new states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., and get four senators.
Anytime you see anyone that wants to alter the system like that, you know that they don't have the best interest of the United States because the system has worked for 250 years in most of these cases.
The second thing is you would want to, as I said earlier, you would want to say, we don't want legal-only immigration. We want anybody to come in. So we have 30 million illegal immigrants right now. Ten to 12 million came in under Joe Biden. We have no idea who they are. You walk across the border.
Is he a criminal? I don't know. Is he Albert Einstein? I don't know. Does he have COVID-19? I don't know. We were vaccinating in a mandatory fashion Americans in 2020 while people were flooding across in 2020, '21, '22, flooding across the border without border security.
And today, even though legal immigration has been the bulwark of what we've seen, we are getting immigrants who even come in legally and have nothing but hostile attitudes toward their generous host.
If you also wanted to damage the United States, then you would look at what I just talked about, natural resources. You would say no mining. We're in a problem right now with rare earths. We're short. They're critical to our economy. China has a monopoly, but we have some of the most abundant rare earth minerals in the world and we've been prohibited from using them.
We have the richest deposits of oil. Until recently, we did not develop them all. We did not develop coal in the proper way.
Our farming sector, the best and most efficient in the world, is under attack by environmentalists who want to cut off the water here in California.
I'm speaking from the richest agricultural county in the United States, Fresno County, and yet it needs water that has been sent out on the San Joaquin River into the ocean.
If you also wanted to destroy the United States or see it not last too much longer, you would kind of assault the middle class.
You would look at the United States as a binary, a Marxist binary. It is comprised not by class but by race. So, 70 percent, 65 percent are white oppressors. They are mostly white male, to be more particular, or more sensational, white male Christian heterosexuals, or the white race, or whatever we call these silly terms.
They are the exploiter, victimizer, and everybody on the other side is the victimized or oppressed. This is the binary that the Democratic Socialists of America and like-minded people use to alienate and divide the country, and it's worked very well.
But in between those two racial binaries is a class system in which the middle class still is the largest class and was the exact form, shape of a class system that the founders thought would be essential to republican government.
And then finally, of course, one of our greatest strengths is we have institutionalized a free market private property economy. Do away with that, and we go the way of the old Soviet Union or Cuba or Venezuela.
And what do we see now? We have people in the Democratic Socialists of America that want to confiscate property, get the means of production, take over tenant-landlord relationships, and absorb the private sector into the state.
If that happens, we will be impoverished.
So, we can make it another 250 years if we do what we did the last 250 years. But if we let people destroy those strengths that I enumerated, then we won't last another 50 years.
A federal appeals court ruled July 6 that convicted sex offenders retain a fundamental constitutional right to live with their own children.
The new ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit arises out of an Alabama case but could help reshape strict sex offender residency laws in the other two states in the circuit—Florida and Georgia—and serve as persuasive authority elsewhere.
At the heart of the case is the constitutional doctrine of substantive due process, which protects certain fundamental rights that are not explicitly listed in the U.S. Constitution but deeply rooted in U.S. history and tradition, including the right of parents to live with and raise their children.
The court ruled 8–5 in favor of the plaintiff, Bruce Henry, in the case known as Henry v. Sheriff of Tuscaloosa County.
The majority opinion was authored by Circuit Judge Robin Rosenbaum.
In 2013, Henry pleaded guilty to “knowingly possess[ing] ... any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, computer disk, or any other material that contains an image of child pornography.”
The opinion recounts that the federal district court sentenced him to 70 months in prison and 60 months of supervised release.
He served five years before being released in March 2018.
He finished a qualified Sex Offender Treatment Program, along with individual and group counseling, and continues to attend weekly meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous. In addition, he has a steady job, attends church, and volunteers.
He violated the terms of supervised release twice by viewing pornography. He reported the violations to his sexual offender treatment provider but did not inform his probation officer. The officer filed a petition to revoke his supervised release, but the district court declined, choosing instead to extend the duration of the supervised release period through March of this year, according to the opinion.
Since the last incident in December 2019, Henry has followed the terms of his release. In August 2021, he and his wife had a son, but because he was a sex offender, the Alabama Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification Act barred him from living with the child.
The Act prohibits a sex offender from residing with or conducting overnight visits with any minor, but it contains a family exception that allows the offender to live with or stay overnight with their own children, grandchildren, step-children, siblings, or step-siblings.
That protection is removed for any adult convicted of a sex offense involving a child or any offense involving child sexual abuse material, legally referred to as child pornography.
“Alabama law affords no offramp to Henry or anyone else: the Act contains no mechanism for offenders to challenge its prohibitions on residing or staying overnight with their own children,” the opinion said.
After Henry’s son was born, he sued officials in Alabama under federal law to block enforcement of the Act’s prohibition against him living with his son. The district court agreed that the prohibition was unconstitutional and enjoined its enforcement.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled largely for Henry, finding that the Act’s prohibition against a parent living with his own child interfered with Henry’s “fundamental right to live with and raise [his] child,” and vacated the district court’s injunction.
The full 11th Circuit then reheard the case and ruled for Henry.
The Supreme Court has recognized that parents have a fundamental right to live with their children, and this right is “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” that the 14th Amendment protects, the opinion said.
By contrast, Alabama argued that not all parents enjoy this right and that entire categories of parents enjoy “no fundamental rights at all because they committed state-defined ‘misconduct’ years before their children were even born.” The Supreme Court has recognized that even a parent convicted of possessing “child pornography” still retains a fundamental right to live with his son, the opinion said.
“That does not mean that Alabama can’t regulate or even abrogate that right. But to do so, Alabama must show that its legislation is narrowly tailored to further its compelling interest in the safety of children,” the appeals court said. Abrogation is the act of formally annulling a law or legal provision.
The appeals court returned the case to the district court for reconsideration.
Chief Circuit Judge William Pryor filed a dissenting opinion, criticizing the majority for undermining Alabama’s child-protection efforts.
“All agree that parents generally enjoy a fundamental right to ‘make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children,’” Pryor said.
“But this appeal presents a different question: whether the Due Process Clause [in the 14th Amendment] grants child-sex convicts, not parents generally, a fundamental right to reside with their children. Of course not.”
Pryor said that using the majority’s reasoning, a father who raped his young child still enjoys the fundamental right to live with that child unless he has been judicially determined to be dangerous.
Pryor also said the doctrine of substantive due process creates a “treacherous field,” and the Supreme Court has directed courts to “exercise the utmost care whenever ... asked to break new ground,” to avoid usurping the authority that the Constitution entrusts to elected legislatures.
