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“The twisted coils are the most expensive and complicated part of the stellarator and have to be manufactured to very great precision in a very complicated form,” physicist Per Helander, head of the Stellarator Theory Division at Max Planck and lead author of the new paper, told Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory News.

The new design offers a simpler approach by instead using permanent magnets, whose magnetic field is generated by the internal structure of the material itself. As described in an article published by Nature, Zarnstorff realized that neodymium–boron permanent magnets—which behave like refrigerator magnets, only stronger—had become powerful enough to potentially help control the plasma in stellarators.

Advanced Nuclear Power Advocacy For Humanity — Eric G. Meyer, Founder & Director, Generation Atomic

Eric G. Meyer is the Founder and Director of Generation Atomic (https://generationatomic.org/), a nuclear advocacy non-profit which he founded after hearing about the promise of advanced nuclear reactors, and he decided to devote his life to saving and expanding the use of atomic energy.

Continue reading “Eric G Meyer — Founder & Director — Generation Atomic — Advanced Nuclear Power Advocacy For Humanity” »

While wind turbine and solar power platforms are beginning to take to the sea, another, more established form of power might also avoid hiking real estate costs.

A Copenhagen-based startup just raised funding to the sum of eight figures in Euros to begin construction of a new kind of cheap, flexible, portable, and unyieldingly safe nuclear reactor, according to a press release shared by the company, Seaborg Technologies.

Continue reading “A Company Is Producing Thousands of Cheap, Floating Nuclear Reactors” »

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How close is nuclear fusion to break-even? If you trust the headlines we’re getting close and the international project ITER is going to be the first to produce energy from fusion power. But not so fast. Scientists have, accidentally or deliberately, come to use a very misleading quantity to measure their progress. Unfortunately we’re much farther away from generating fusion power than the headlines suggest.

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Editor’s note, 6/28/21, 3:35 PM: The article was updated to clarify that Natrium features a sodium‐cooled fast reactor and not a type of molten salt reactor, as previously reported.

A nuclear power startup founded by Bill Gates has announced plans to build a new kind of nuclear reactor at a retiring coal plant in Wyoming.

This reactor will be the first real-world demonstration of the startup’s technology, which could help power the world — without warming the climate.

Stellarators, twisty magnetic devices that aim to harness on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars, have long played second fiddle to more widely used doughnut-shaped facilities known as tokamaks. The complex twisted stellarator magnets have been difficult to design and have previously allowed greater leakage of the superhigh heat from fusion reactions.

Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), working in collaboration with researchers that include the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a collaborative national laboratory for plasma physics and nuclear fusion science. Its primary mission is research into and development of fusion as an energy source for the world.

Past and present nuclear activities (energy, research, weapon tests) have increased the urgency to understand the behavior of radioactive materials in the environment. Nuclear wastes containing actinides (e.g. plutonium, americium, curium, neptunium…) are particularly problematic as they remain radioactive and toxic for thousands of years.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and collaborators proposed a new mechanism by which nuclear waste could spread in the environment.

The new findings, that involve researchers at Penn State and Harvard Medical School, have implications for nuclear waste management and environmental chemistry. The research is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Continue reading “Nuclear waste interaction in the environment may be more complicated than once thought” »

The firm is looking into how a micro-nuclear reactor could be used to propel rockets while in space at huge speeds and how that technology could then be redeployed to provide energy for drilling, processing, and storage for “Moon mining” and possibly “Mars mining.”

Dave Gordon, head of the company’s defense division, said this work is possible thanks to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and their respective space companies.

He added that’s Rolls-Royce is the only company on the planet that does mechanical, electrical, and nuclear and a full end-to-end lifecycle of nuclear capability. He also noted that the firm could use its experience in developing nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Navy for 60 years to apply what it learned to spacecraft since submarines and spacecraft are somewhat similar.

Fusion power could be a silver bullet for the world’s energy and environmental woes, but it’s famously always 30 years away. A recent flurry of announcements is raising hopes that maybe the timeline has started to tighten.

The technology has huge potential because it promises to generate enormous amounts of energy from abundant fuel that can be cheaply extracted from seawater. On top of that, the process doesn’t create any long-lived radioactive waste, unlike conventional nuclear power plants.

The catch is that finding a way to contain the same reaction that powers the sun here on Earth is no easy feat. Now, though, MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has taken a significant step in that direction after carrying out the first tests of a magnet that can reach a field strength of 20 teslas, the highest ever achieved on Earth.