Numlock News: July 10, 2025 • Bioluminescent, Koalas, Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository
By Walt Hickey
Waste
Eight groups from the American nuclear industry have signed a letter indicating that it is perhaps time to address all the nuclear waste that’s currently held at nuclear power plants around the country. They imply that it is to move forward with the plan to inter the waste deep underground at the designated Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. In general, nuclear waste isn’t a huge problem — all the spent fuel from the entire history of America’s commercial nuclear program would fit on a football field. However, with a possible reactor buildout on the horizon (fission notoriously doesn’t spew carbon into the atmosphere), there is an argument to properly settle on a spot to retire spent fuel. It’s not like there’s a lack of money — $50 billion has accrued in the federal Nuclear Waste Fund over the years to explicitly solve this problem — but there is a lack of will to be the guy that points at a spot on a map in a swing state and say “that’s where all the nuclear waste should go.”
Alexander C. Kaufman, Field Notes
The Price of Vibes
If a restaurant wants to play music, it actually has to pay an annual fee to a Performing Rights Organization (or PRO) to prevent being sued by the musicians. The big two PROs are ASCAP and BMI, which represent 90 percent of musical compositions, and SESAC represents the other major player. It’s hardly the most glamorous part of the music industry, but it drives a lot of revenue. ASCAP is the only one that publicly shares collections data, and revenue has risen from $935 million in 2010 to $1.8 billion in 2024. That said, the restaurants on the other side of that transaction are smarting, especially as new PROs emerge and more bills have to be paid. The National Restaurant Association says the average member pays $4,500 per year to license music. A large hotel that hosts occasional live music would probably pay $5,000 to $20,000 per year to a single PRO, and would spend to the order of $80,000 a year if the hotel is paying all of them.
Ashley Carman and Aruni Soni, Bloomberg
Dr. Phil
Phil McGraw, the television figure best known as “Dr. Phil” in some circles and “somehow only the third-worst cultural force Oprah Winfrey unleashed upon the population” in others, is in a legal kerfuffle over his television network as it undergoes financial problems. His Merit Street Media is in bankruptcy court and is suing its distribution partner, Trinity Broadcasting. The network reaches 65 million homes, but boy howdy is it not resonating in them. Merit TV averaged 27,000 viewers during primetime in 2024, ranking 130th among broadcast and cable networks. This audience number means that Numlock News might actually be punching down on Dr. Phil here. As of the second quarter of 2025, the audience is down to 17,000 primetime viewers.
Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter
Streaming Wars of Attrition
In 2021, Netflix programs accounted for 80 percent of all the programs that made Nielsen’s weekly list of the top 10 original shows on streaming at some point in the year. The streamer is followed by Disney+ (8 percent), Hulu (5 percent) and Prime Video (5 percent). By 2023, Netflix’s share had slipped to 69 percent of those shows, then 62 percent in 2024. So far this year, Netflix is responsible for only 52 percent to make Nielsen’s list, which compares the performance of streamers as best as can be. The rise of multiple other streamers has been devouring a market that Netflix once dominated, with robust competition from Prime Video (13 percent), Hulu (10 percent), Paramount+ (9 percent), Apple TV+ ( 7 percent) and yes, even Peacock (4 percent).
Koalas
A new study tracking the fine-scale movements of koalas has found that they only spend about 10 minutes per day on the ground (heading down 2 to 3 times in a night) or about 1 percent of their lives. However, 66 percent of recorded koala deaths happen when they’re out of the trees and on the ground. This is a problem because extensive land clearance means that the tree-dwelling animal is forced to spend more time on the ground to move between sources of food. It forces these koalas to be vulnerable to dog attacks and vehicle strikes.
Society for Experimental Biology
Robots
There is a poorly-kept secret of the marble sculpture business: sophisticated robots emerging on the Italian scene have made it considerably cheaper and less time-intensive to produce stunning marble sculptures and reproductions of iconic works. A Robotor robot can sculpt stone based on a 3D model 24 hours a day and can prepare a piece of rock for human hands to bring in for the finish. The basic software costs $5,000 per year, encoding toolpath carving instructions that might be executed by a $200,000 sculpting robot that is actually a reassembled version of the standard $70,000 basic robot you might find on an assembly line. That’s steep up front, but pays out in short time. A machine-assisted reproduction of Amore e Psiche by Antonio Canova with manual finishing would take just 77 days and cost 64,000 euros in labor. This is in comparison to a solo manual process, which would take 132 days and cost 90,000 euros in labor.
Haute Couture
At the Paris Haute Couture Week, the event where pioneering or experimental fashion gets revealed to the world, one particular dress produced by biodesigner Chris Bellamy in cooperation with researchers from the University of Amsterdam caught attention. The garment was created from 125 million living Pyrocystis lunula algae, and was bioluminescent, a first-of-its-kind “living look.” The dress is made from a gel material that contains the bioluminescent blooms, emitting light when it’s moved.
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Without Harry Reid to block Yucca Mountain, I suppose it'll finally go forward. I mean, I sympathized with him -- I wouldn't want it in my district either -- but it's got to go somewhere, and we can't currently inject it below the earth's crust or shoot it into the sun, so the barren Nevada desert is as good as anywhere else.
Dr. Phil as “somehow only the third-worst cultural force Oprah Winfrey unleashed upon the population”. Incredible stuff. Definitely in the top three.
This of course made me think about number 1 and 2. Mehmet Oz is number one and number two is Suze Orman? Or is number two giving a platform to anti-vax Jenny McCarthy?