Aug 15, 2019
The new nuclear option: small, safe and cheap
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in category: nuclear energy
Can an emerging generation of small-scale reactors overcome Australians’ resistance to nuclear power?
Can an emerging generation of small-scale reactors overcome Australians’ resistance to nuclear power?
A new type of nuclear reactor designed to power crewed outposts on the moon and Mars could be ready for its first in-space trial just a few years from now, project team members said.
A flight test is the next big step for the Kilopower experimental fission reactor, which aced a series of critical ground tests from November 2017 through March 2018. No off-Earth demonstration is on the books yet, but Kilopower should be ready to go by 2022 or so if need be, said Patrick McClure, Kilopower project lead at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Seven years. 13 miles. 22 samples. NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover has come a long way since touching down on the Red Planet seven years ago. See for yourself: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/new-finds-for-mars-rover-se…er-landing
NASA’s Curiosity rover has come a long way since touching down on Mars seven years ago. It has traveled a total of 13 miles (21 kilometers) and ascended 1,207 feet (368 meters) to its current location. Along the way, Curiosity discovered Mars had the conditions to support microbial life in the ancient past, among other things.
Continue reading “New Finds for Mars Rover, Seven Years After Landing” »
Lux Capital, a New York-based venture capital firm, has raised more than $1 billion across two new funds to back companies on “the cutting edge of science.” The firm raised $500 million for its sixth flagship early-stage fund and another $550 million for an opportunity fund focused on growth-stage investments. Limited partners include global foundations, university endowments, and tech billionaires.
Lux also announced a new hire: Deena Shakir, formerly of GV (Google Ventures), has joined as an investment partner.
To the regular person, Lux’s investments are considered moonshot. The firm has backed entrepreneurs that are working on everything from neurostimulation to nuclear energy to synthetic biology. During my last interview with co-founder and managing partner Josh Wolfe, I actually called one of his portfolio companies “freaking crazy.”
A team of fusion researchers succeeded in proving that energetic ions with energy in mega electron volt (MeV) range are superiorly confined in a plasma for the first time in helical systems. This promises the alpha particle (helium ion) confinement required for realizing fusion energy in a helical reactor.
The deuterium-tritium reaction in a high-temperature plasma will be used in fusion reactors in the future. Alpha particles with 3.5 MeV energy are generated by the fusion reaction. The alpha particles transfer their energy to the plasma, and this alpha particle heating sustains the high-temperature plasma condition required for the fusion reaction. In order to realize such a plasma, which is called a burning plasma, the energetic ions in the MeV range must be tightly confined in the plasma.
Numerical simulations predicted the favorable results of MeV ion confinement in a plasma in helical systems that have the advantage of steady-state operation in comparison with tokamak systems. However, demonstration of MeV ion confinement by experiment had not been reported. Recently, the study was greatly advanced by an MeV ion confinement experiment performed in the deuterium operation of the Large Helical Device (LHD), which is owned by National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS), in Japan. In deuterium plasmas, 1 MeV tritons (tritium ions) are created by deuteron-deuteron fusion reactions. The tritons have the similar behavior with alpha particles generated in a future burning plasma.
This will be the company’s fifth major design iteration as it pushes ahead toward building a potentially revolutionary practical prototype.
One of the main speculations about future technology is uploading. This is where our minds are copied in exact detail from our biological physical bodies and then created in artificial bodies. Alexander Bolonkin has posited many kinds of technology over the decades. He has a recent work which is summarized here where he considers that future uploading will mean that we can then use super-technology (nanotechnology, nuclear fusion etc…) to make people into literal gods and supermen. We can use control of matter, energy and information to make what he calls the E-man. Bolonkin then indicates that uploading and creation of minds could be used for the resurrection of long-dead people. This would be where we create the very close approximation of dead people. This would be like using gene editing to turn an African Elephant into a Whooly Mammoth. The vast technological capability would let us actualize what would be a simulation into living entities.
Bolonkin’s Case for E-Man and Resurrection
Alexander Bolonkin looks at methods and possibilities for electronic resurrection of long-dead outstanding personalities. He also considers the principles and organization of the new E-society, its goals and conditions of existence.
To finance the containment structure, the EBRD managed a fund with contributions from 45 countries, the European Union, and the bank’s own resources. Ukraine contributed 100 million euros (about $112 million).
Deputy project manager Victor Zalizetskyi, who has been part of construction and repairs at the Chernobyl plant since 1987, said he was “filled with pride” that he got to work on a job “that has such a big importance for all humankind.”
However, Zalizetskyi expressed concern in an interview last week that war-torn Ukraine might struggle to cover the maintenance costs for the reactor’s new enclosure. He noted that costly and complicated work such as dismantling unstable sections of the power plant still needs to be done.
Scientists seeking to bring to Earth the fusion that powers the sun and stars must control the hot, charged plasma—the state of matter composed of free-floating electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions—that fuels fusion reactions. For scientists who confine the plasma in magnetic fields, a key task calls for mapping the shape of the fields, a process known as measuring the equilibrium, or stability, of the plasma. At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), researchers have proposed a new measurement technique to avoid problems expected when mapping the fields on large and powerful future tokamaks, or magnetic fusion devices, that house the reactions.
Neutron bombardments
Such tokamaks, including ITER, the large international experiment under construction in France, will produce neutron bombardments that could damage the interior diagnostics now used to map the fields in current facilities. PPPL is therefore proposing use of an alternative diagnostic system that could operate in high-neutron environments.
From returning to the Moon to establishing outposts on Mars, NASA has the need for more power than ever before. Could nuclear fission be the solution they’ve been searching for?
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