Small, easily transportable nukes could power our data driven future.
Category: nuclear energy – Page 24
Why are we called Fermilab?
On September 29, 1901 Enrico Fermi ForMemRS was born.
On May 11, 1974, National Accelerator Laboratory was given a new name: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The eponym honors famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, whose accomplishments in both theoretical and experimental physics place him among the greatest scientists of the 20th century.
Many visitors to Fermilab reasonably conclude from its name that Enrico Fermi worked at the laboratory, but he never did. In fact, he died in 1954, years before scientists even officially recommended the construction of a U.S. accelerator laboratory in 1963.
In 1938, Fermi won the Nobel Prize for work that eventually led to the first controlled release of nuclear energy. He and his family then left Italy and came to the United States, where he accepted a position at Columbia University. He later moved to the University of Chicago, where he built the first atomic pile in the squash court under the university’s Stagg Field. While there, he continued investigating the nature of particles that make up the nucleus. He was also active in the design of the school’s synchrocyclotron. At the time of its completion, it was one of the most powerful atom smashers in the world.
Autonomous robot replaces human fusion reactor inspectors in world-first trial
What just happened? Researchers have successfully deployed a fully autonomous robot to inspect the inside of a nuclear fusion reactor. This achievement – the first of its kind – took place over 35 days as part of trials at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Joint European Torus facility.
JET was one of the world’s largest and most powerful operational fusion reactors until it was recently shut down. Meanwhile, the robotic star of the show was, of course, the four-legged Spot robot from Boston Dynamics, souped up with “localization and mission autonomy solutions” from the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and “inspection payload” from UKAEA.
Spot roamed JET’s environment twice daily, using sensors to map the facility layout, monitor conditions, steer around obstacles and personnel, and collect vital data. These inspection duties normally require human operators to control the robot remotely.
Bubbling, frothing and sloshing: Long-Hypothesized Plasma Instabilities Finally Observed
Results could aid understanding of how black holes produce vast intergalactic jets. Scientists have observed new details of how plasma interacts with magnetic fields, potentially providing insight into the formation of enormous plasma jets that stretch between the stars.
Whether between galaxies or within doughnut-shaped fusion devices known as tokamaks, the electrically charged fourth state of matter known as plasma regularly encounters powerful magnetic fields, changing shape and sloshing in space. Now, a new measurement technique using protons, subatomic particles that form the nuclei of atoms, has captured details of this sloshing for the first time, potentially providing insight into the formation of enormous plasma jets that stretch between the stars.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) created detailed pictures of a magnetic field bending outward because of the pressure created by expanding plasma. As the plasma pushed on the magnetic field, bubbling and frothing known as magneto-Rayleigh Taylor instabilities arose at the boundaries, creating structures resembling columns and mushrooms.
Three Mile Island reactor to provide power for Microsoft data centers
HARRISBURG, Pa. — The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant said Friday that it plans to restart the reactor under a 20-year agreement that calls for tech giant Microsoft to buy the power to supply its data centers with carbon-free energy.
The announcement by Constellation Energy comes five years after its then-parent company, Exelon, shut down the plant, saying it was losing money and that Pennsylvania lawmakers had refused to bail it out.
The plan to restart Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 comes amid something of a renaissance for nuclear power, as policymakers are increasingly looking to it to bail out a fraying electric power supply, help avoid the worst effects of climate change and meet rising power demand driven by data centers.
Researchers build AI model database to find new alloys for nuclear fusion facilities
A study led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory details how artificial intelligence researchers have created an AI model to help identify new alloys used as shielding for housing fusion applications components in a nuclear fusion reactor. The findings mark a major step towards improving nuclear fusion facilities.
Zirconium metals under extreme conditions found to deform in surprisingly complex ways
Materials are crucial to modern technology, especially those used in extreme environments like nuclear energy systems and military applications. These materials need to withstand intense pressure, temperature and corrosion. Understanding their lattice-level behavior under such conditions is essential for developing next-generation materials that are more resilient, cheaper, lighter and sustainable.
Tiny Laser Transforms Copper Wire Into a 180,000°F Cosmic Furnace
Using a novel laser method, scientists mimicked the extreme environments of stars and planets, enhancing our understanding of astrophysical phenomena and supporting nuclear fusion research.
Extreme conditions prevail inside stars and planets. The pressure reaches millions of bars, and it can be several million degrees hot. Sophisticated methods make it possible to create such states of matter in the laboratory – albeit only for the blink of an eye and in a tiny volume. So far, this has required the world’s most powerful lasers, such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California. But there are only a few of these light giants, and the opportunities for experiments are correspondingly rare.
A research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), together with colleagues from the European XFEL, has now succeeded in creating and observing extreme conditions with a much smaller laser. At the heart of the new technology is a copper wire, finer than a human hair, as the group reports in the journal Nature Communications.