Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: nuclear energy – Page 123

New Technique Streamlines Design of Intricate Fusion Devices

O.o.

Stellarators, twisty machines that house fusion reactions, rely on complex magnetic coils that are challenging to design and build. Now, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory ( PPPL ) has developed a mathematical technique to help simplify the design of the coils, making stellarators a potentially more cost-effective facility for producing fusion energy.

“Our main result is that we came up with a new method of identifying the irregular magnetic fields produced by stellarator coils,” said physicist Caoxiang Zhu, lead author of a paper reporting the results in Nuclear Fusion. “This technique can let you know in advance which coil shapes and placements could harm the plasma ’s magnetic confinement, promising a shorter construction time and reduced costs.”

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, is the fusing of light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei — that generates massive amounts of energy. Twisty, cruller-shaped stellarators are an alternative to doughnut-shaped tokamaks that are more commonly used by scientists seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

DARPA’s Handheld Nuclear Fusion Reactor

fusionsunLast year, Pentagon mad science arm DARPA was working on one of its wildest projects yet: a microchip-sized nuclear reactor. The program is now officially done, the agency says. But these sorts of far-out projects have a habit of being reemerging under new managers and new names.

The project, known as the “Chip-Scale High Energy Atomic Beams” program, is an effort aimed at working on the core technologies behind a tiny particle accelerator, capable of firing subatomic particles at incredible speeds. It’s part of a larger DARPA plan to reduce all sorts of devices to microchip-scale – including cryogenic coolers, video cameras and multi-purpose sensors. All of the projects are ambitious (this is DARPA, after all). But this had to be the most ambitious of the lot. Here’s how DARPA’s plans for fiscal year 2009 described it:

You’ve read your last complimentary article this month. To read the full article, SUBSCRIBE NOW. If you’re already a subscriber, please sign in and and verify your subscription.

Employees connect nuclear plant to the internet so they can mine cryptocurrency

Ukrainian authorities are investigating a potential security breach at a local nuclear power plant after employees connected parts of its internal network to the internet so they could mine cryptocurrency.

The investigation is being led by the Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU), who is looking at the incident as a potential breach of state secrets due to the classification of nuclear power plants as critical infrastructure.

Investigators are examining if attackers might have used the mining rigs as a pivot point to enter the nuclear power plant’s network and retrieve information from its systems, such as data about the plant’s physical defenses and protections.

New technique could streamline design of intricate fusion device

Stellarators, twisty machines that house fusion reactions, rely on complex magnetic coils that are challenging to design and build. Now, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has developed a mathematical technique to help simplify the design of the coils, making stellarators a potentially more cost-effective facility for producing fusion energy.

“Our main result is that we came up with a new method of identifying the irregular magnetic fields produced by coils,” said physicist Caoxiang Zhu, lead author of a paper reporting the results in Nuclear Fusion. “This technique can let you know in advance which coil shapes and placements could harm the plasma’s magnetic confinement, promising a shorter construction time and reduced costs.”

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, is the fusing of light elements in the form of plasma—the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei—that generates massive amounts of energy. Twisty, cruller-shaped stellarators are an alternative to doughnut-shaped tokamaks that are more commonly used by scientists seeking to replicate on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

Nuclear Reactor for Mars Outpost Could Be Ready to Fly by 2022

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.

New Finds for Mars Rover, Seven Years After Landing

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.

And the rover is far from done, having just drilled its 22nd sample from the Martian surface. It has a few more years before its nuclear power system degrades enough to significantly limit operations. After that, careful budgeting of its power will allow the rover to keep studying the Red Planet.

Curiosity is now halfway through a region scientists call the “clay-bearing unit” on the side of Mount Sharp, inside of Gale Crater. Billions of years ago, there were streams and lakes within the crater. Water altered the sediment deposited within the lakes, leaving behind lots of clay minerals in the region. That clay signal was first detected from space by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) a few years before Curiosity launched.

Exclusive: Lux Capital Raises More Than $1 Billion Across Two New Funds to Invest in Companies Building a Sci-Fi Future

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.”

Demonstration of alpha particle confinement capability in helical fusion plasmas

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 in the MeV range must be tightly confined in the plasma.

Numerical simulations predicted the favorable results of MeV ion 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 generated in a future burning plasma.