Angelica Oung

4 weeks ago | elementalenergy.substack.com | Angelica Oung

I’ve been hearing rumors for quite a while that China’s TMSR-LF1, the world’s first thorium-containing molten salt reactor (MSR), has been running for quite a while now in Gansu province, on the edge of the Gobi Desert. I’ve heard that it’s not only been running, but that it runs well. But there was nothing formal I could cite until I saw this on Nick Touran’s twitter:Nick’s source is a presentation by MSR expert Dr. Jiri Krepel.

1 month ago | taipology.substack.com | Angelica Oung

Taiwan is between a rock and a hard place. America’s shocking about-face on Ukraine inevitably triggers the thought that one day it might be Taiwan that has the rug pulled out from under it in a future conflict with China. If that happens, and Donald Trump is still the president, I have a feeling I know just exactly what he is going to tweet: “A small island, thousands of miles away, and we’ve been paying BILLIONS to protect them while getting NOTHING in return.

2 months ago | elementalenergy.substack.com | Angelica Oung

Estonia and its Baltic neighbors Lithuania and Latvia finally cut itself off from the Russian Grid this week. This separation was decades in the making. Ever since the three Baltic States joined the EU and NATO in 2004 they’ve been upgrading their grid in preparation for this transition. “Russia can no longer use energy as a tool of blackmail,” wrote Kaja Kallas, Estonia's former prime minister and the EU’s current top diplomat.

2 months ago | elementalenergy.substack.com | Angelica Oung

Jevons' Paradox states that when a resource becomes cheaper or more efficient to use, its overall demand often increases rather than decreases. If you’re in the energy world, you probably already heard of it. Well this was the week that everybody else in the world caught up thanks to a Chinese AI model called “DeepSeek-R1.”To cut a long story short, DeepSeek-R1 took the world by storm by matching or even outperforming top western models by certain metrics.

Jan 24, 2025 | taipology.substack.com | Angelica Oung

When I started noticing the hype around DeepSeek-R1 all over my Twitter timeline four days ago, I decided to do a test. “I’m trying to pick one growth area in my life, choose one highly effective technique and practice it every day. Can you come up with some ideas?” I asked, not really caring about the answer. DeepSeek gave me a pretty generic list of self-help tropes. Serviceable but unimpressive. Then I noticed the little “DeepThink” button on the interface.