Power Industry
Drone hits nuclear facility as Kyiv and Moscow trade strikes
Rescuers work at the site of an apartment building hit by a Russian drone strike in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on Saturday. Ukraine and Russia traded aerial attacks on Saturday as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held what he called a special meeting on next steps with top aides. A Ukrainian drone struck the machine room building of one of power units at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine on Saturday afternoon, causing unspecified damage, Interfax reported, citing Rosatom Chief Executive Officer Alexey Likhachev. Core equipment wasn't damaged, he said. Ukraine's southern military command denied any strikes, saying its military personnel "act exclusively within the framework of international humanitarian law and are aware of the consequences of any actions against nuclear facilities." In a post on Facebook late Saturday, it added, "It is the Russian Federation that has illegally kept the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant under military control since March 2022, turning a civilian nuclear facility into an element of military infrastructure."
Blockbuster Game 7 showdown: Four best bets for San Antonio Spurs at Oklahoma City Thunder
Umpire Dan Bellino's baffling foul tip call on Seiya Suzuki renews calls for robot review in MLB Dakich: sports media has created an'industry' out of complaining about white athletes like Caitlin Clark Greg Sankey insists SEC is'strongest league' despite Big Ten winning three straight national championships Phillies look to upset Dodgers behind Zack Wheeler as Philadelphia's turnaround continues in LA Joey McGuire calls Steve Sarkisian's bluff, dares Texas to play Texas Tech in Week 1 Rams troublemaker WR Puka Nacua says he's a changed man after biting incident and stint in rehab Chiefs have no plans to release Rashee Rice and see jail time as a'life lesson' opportunity Dr Oz: Is this a flaw or a feature? Father Mike Schmitz: Pope Leo XIV wants this world view in line with humanity's good Pompeo warns Iran will rebuild nuclear facilities'the moment' it gets the chance Purple Heart recipient speaks out after Graham Platner's controversial remarks'Chipotle Karen' caught hurling burrito bowl at worker's face Oklahoma City is -162 on the moneyline and -3.5 favorites with the total set at 212.5 as of Friday afternoon Despite getting to a Game 7, the 2026 Western Conference Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder haven't lived up to the Game 1 double-overtime instant classic. While the winning team has alternated over the past four games, the margin has been at least 13 points. Plus, Oklahoma City's flopping has been the biggest storyline of the conference finals, which is a bummer for us die-hard NBA fans. However, that will be mostly forgotten if the Spurs-Thunder series finale is another thriller.
Hurricanes froward preaches not looking past potentially decisive Game 5 against Canadiens
Umpire Dan Bellino's baffling foul tip call on Seiya Suzuki renews calls for robot review in MLB Dakich: sports media has created an'industry' out of complaining about white athletes like Caitlin Clark Greg Sankey insists SEC is'strongest league' despite Big Ten winning three straight national championships Phillies look to upset Dodgers behind Zack Wheeler as Philadelphia's turnaround continues in LA Joey McGuire calls Steve Sarkisian's bluff, dares Texas to play Texas Tech in Week 1 Rams troublemaker WR Puka Nacua says he's a changed man after biting incident and stint in rehab Chiefs have no plans to release Rashee Rice and see jail time as a'life lesson' opportunity Diamondbacks fans catch same player's home run on back-to-back nights after showing up on the wrong date Dr Oz: Is this a flaw or a feature? Father Mike Schmitz: Pope Leo XIV wants this world view in line with humanity's good Pompeo warns Iran will rebuild nuclear facilities'the moment' it gets the chance Purple Heart recipient speaks out after Graham Platner's controversial remarks'Chipotle Karen' caught hurling burrito bowl at worker's face The Carolina Hurricanes are in the Eastern Conference Final for the second straight season and the fourth of Rod Brind'Amour's tenure behind the bench, and they've got the chance to close things out in Game 5 against the Montreal Canadiens. Of course, teams coming into Game 5 with a 3-1 lead are historically almost guaranteed to move on to the Stanley Cup Final; the Canes are not going to get ahead of their skis. Hurricanes forward Jackson Blake, who scored the OT-winner to sweep the Philadelphia Flyers and send Carolina to the conference final, talked about the need to focus on the game tonight and not start thinking ahead to the Western Conference Champion Vegas Golden Knights. It's exciting for sure, Blake said.
China's secret weapon in AI race with US? Lots of cheap energy
In the race against China for AI supremacy, the United States dominates when it comes to access to the most cutting-edge semiconductors. But when it comes to powering the huge data centres that run on AI chips, China holds the clear advantage. A typical data centre can consume as much electricity as 100,000 households, while next-generation "hyperscale" facilities can gobble up as much power as two million homes, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). China's access to an abundant supply of cheap electricity places it in the ideal position to meet such colossal energy demands. China already generates more than twice as much electricity as the US, a lead that is expected to widen amid an aggressive state-led investment in the country's energy grid.
Nonlinear and Heavy-Tailed Predictability in Transition-Energy Financial Markets
Gnandi, Kpante Emmanuel, Pokou, Fredy, Kamdem, Jules Sadefo
Transition-related financial markets are increasingly exposed to abrupt repricing episodes, elevated volatility, and heterogeneous macro-financial shocks. Under such conditions, conventional Gaussian-linear forecasting frameworks may provide an incomplete representation of the dependence structure linking fossil-energy, renewable-energy, technology, and utility-sector assets. This paper investigates whether transition-related financial returns exhibit residual non-linear predictability after controlling for heavy-tailed multivariate linear dynamics. To address this question, we develop a hybrid forecasting framework combining Student-t Vector Autoregressions with nonlinear recurrent residual learning architectures. The empirical analysis considers six major exchange-traded funds representing broad equity markets and key transition-sensitive sectors. The results reveal substantial departures from Gaussian-linear behavior, including excess kurtosis, volatility clustering, and remaining nonlinear dependence after econometric filtering. Out-of-sample forecasting experiments show that the proposed framework consistently improves predictive accuracy relative to conventional VAR models, standalone machine-learning methods, and alternative hybrid specifications. The forecasting gains become more pronounced during periods of macro-financial stress, particularly during the COVID-19 crisis and the Ukraine-related energy shock. Overall, the findings suggest that transition-related financial systems exhibit regime-sensitive and heavy-tailed predictive dynamics that are insufficiently captured by standard Gaussian-linear models alone.
Mapping the Schedule x Bit-Width Boundary in Sub-100M Quantisation-Aware Training
We test whether the optimal learning-rate schedule depends on bit-width during from-initialisation quantisation-aware training (QAT) for sub-100M decoder language models. A 720-run factorial grid (Phase 2) over bit-width x warmdown fraction x LR magnitude x model size x seed (FP16/INT8/INT6, 15M-100M, 5 seeds) finds the optimal warmdown is 33% at every (bit-width, size) cell. The primary hypothesis -- that INT6 QAT requires a different schedule than higher-precision training -- is falsified at FP16/INT8/INT6. A 625-run follow-up (Phase 5) probes the null along five axes: optimiser (AdamW), schedule shape (cosine), training length (up to 9x more iterations), an extended size sweep (5M-350M), and an INT4 sweep from 3M to 100M. The null is robust under all three setup changes. The INT6 penalty follows a log-linear scaling law whose fit on Phase 2 predicts the five held-out Phase 5 sizes (5M, 8M, 175M, 250M, 350M) within their 95% prediction intervals (5/5). For INT4 the picture is sharper than the higher precisions: at 50M and 100M, wd33 is decisively optimal (paired z ~ 12-15, 10/10 seeds); below 50M, across the six tested sizes from 3M to 30M, no individual size shows a statistically significant schedule preference and the per-size mean penalty oscillates within seed-level noise. The boundary is therefore a transition between a noise-dominated regime below 50M and a decisive wd33 regime at and above 50M, not a clean wd10 region. A weight-to-grid-distance probe falsifies the simplest mechanism for the FP16/INT8/INT6 null result (rapid grid-snapping): pre-warmdown, INT6-QAT weights sit at essentially the same distance from the INT6 grid as FP16 weights (ratio ~ 1.04). Practical recommendation: at sub-100M scale, tune the LR schedule once at FP16 and apply unchanged to INT8/INT6 QAT; for INT4 at 50M+ use wd33; for INT4 below 50M the schedule choice is in the noise.
Strike near UAE reactor revives concerns over nuclear plant safety in wartime
Reactor no 3 lost off-site power for about 24 hours after the attack. Reactor no 3 lost off-site power for about 24 hours after the attack. A drone strike that cut off external power to a nuclear reactor in the United Arab Emirates this week has revived concerns over the safety of nuclear plants during wartime. Reactor no 3 at the Barakah nuclear plant lost vital off-site power for about 24 hours after the attack on Sunday, forcing it to rely on emergency diesel generators. The UAE's defence ministry said on Tuesday that three drones targeting the plant had originated from Iraqi territory, suggesting a pro-Iranian proxy group was most likely to have been behind the strike.
TailedTS: Benchmark Dataset for Heavy-Tailed Time Series Prediction and Periodicity Quantification
Chen, Xinyu, Cai, HanQin, Ding, Lijun, Zhao, Jinhua
We present TailedTS, a large-scale benchmark dataset derived from Wikipedia hourly page view observations throughout 2024, specifically designed to test time series forecasting models under heavy-tailed, zero-inflated, and non-Gaussian conditions. The dataset comprises approximately 24.69 billion data points spanning roughly 3 million unique Wikipedia pages per month, stored in high-efficiency Apache Parquet format. Wikipedia traffic follows a pronounced power-law distribution where roughly 5% of pages account for over 70% of total page views, creating a natural and rigorous testbed for model robustness against extreme volatility that are absent from or underrepresented in existing benchmarks such as M4, M5, and UCI electricity datasets. TailedTS enables several research tasks. First, we introduce a periodicity quantification framework based on sparse autoregression with sparsity and non-negativity constraints, revealing that frequently-viewed pages exhibit significantly weaker periodic structure than their less-viewed counterparts, showing direct implications for server allocation and traffic forecasting on large digital platforms. Second, we provide standardized prediction benchmarks evaluated under a suite of non-Gaussian loss functions, including $\ell_1$-norm, Huber, quantile, and $\ell_p$-norm losses, demonstrating that standard Gaussian-based estimators degrade substantially on high-volume page categories, while robust alternatives provide consistent gains across all traffic scales. TailedTS is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17070469.
Generalized Functional ANOVA in Closed-Form: A Unified View of Additive Explanations
Ferrere, Baptiste, Bousquet, Nicolas, Gamboa, Fabrice, Loubes, Jean-Michel
The functional ANOVA, or Hoeffding decomposition, provides a principled framework for interpretability by decomposing a model prediction into main effects and higher-order interactions. For independent inputs, this classical decomposition is explicit. It is closely connected to SHAP values, generalized additive models, and orthogonal polynomial expansions, and therefore constitutes a fundamental tool for additive explainability. In the more general and realistic dependent setting, however, obtaining a tractable representation and estimating the decomposition from data remain challenging. In this work, we address this problem for continuous inputs. By combining Hilbert space methods with the generalized functional ANOVA, we build an explicit decomposition Riesz Basis allowing to easily compute the decomposition. Our formulation recovers the classical independent case and its associated orthogonal decomposition. Building on this representation, we propose a simple but mighty algorithm to estimate the decomposition from a data sample in a model-agnostic setting and we compare it empirically with several state-of-the-art explanation methods, demonstrating the power of the approach.
NextEra, Dominion to create huge power biz as AI drives US energy demand
NextEra Energy is seeking to acquire Dominion Energy in an all-stock deal valued at about $67bn, creating a massive power company as the energy needs of artificial intelligence (AI) drive demand higher in the United States. It is one of the biggest proposed mergers so far this year and would create the world's largest regulated electric utility business by market capitalisation, the companies said on Monday. The region has a fast-growing population and the world's biggest data centre hub, which is in Virginia. The deal will enable a swifter build-out of power infrastructure to deliver electricity to data centres proposing to connect to NextEra and Dominion, which total about 130 gigawatts of electricity demand, the companies' executives said. One gigawatt can power about 750,000 homes. The merger builds on NextEra's efforts to tap into surging demand for supplying electricity to data centres developed by Big Tech, largely for training and rolling out AI technologies.