Experiment at UK’s JET facility boosts hope that clean power source could soon be harnessed commercially.
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Feb 2 (Reuters) — State-owned China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) has signed a contract in Argentina to build the $8 billion Atucha III nuclear power plant using China’s Hualong One technology, reviving a deal that had been stalled for years.
CNNC said on its WeChat account late on Tuesday that ithad signed an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract, which comes ahead of Argentine President Alberto Fernandez’s trip to China later this week.
Progress on the nuclear deal between the two nations had stalled since it was first negotiated by the administration of former President Cristina Fernandez, a left-wing populist who left office in 2015. She is now Argentina’s vice president.
Stars are giant balls of gas that emit light and heat. They are mostly made up of hydrogen and helium gases and can have huge masses. For instance, the heaviest star yet found in our universe, called R136a1, has a mass of around 315 times that of our Sun and is almost 9 million times more luminous.
Stars are so heavy that they should collapse due to the inward force of gravity exerted by their own weight but thanks to the nuclear fusion reactions taking place in their cores, the massive inward gravitational force is balanced by the strong heat and pressures found within a star. This balance between gravity and gas pressure from energy generation is called hydrostatic equilibrium, and it is both self-regulating and finely tuned. goes up must come down, as the saying goes, but what is gravity?
New research published in Human Brain Mapping provides evidence of a shared neural mechanism that underlies sleep disturbance and mental disorders in preadolescents. The findings indicate that sleep disturbance and mental health problems are both related to the connectivity between and within two important brain networks.
“I noticed the importance of sleep years ago when I read several papers about the immediate amyloid protein deposition in the brain after short-term sleep deprivation. Amyloid is neurotoxic waste in the brain and needs to be transported out by cerebrospinal fluid,” said study author Ze Wang, an associate professor of diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
“But cerebrospinal fluid is basically static most of the time. The best time to have more cerebrospinal fluid and increased flow rate is at night when you lay down and fall asleep. It is this time that our cerebral blood flow reduces. Because our brain has a fixed size, the reduction of cerebral blood flow creates space for cerebrospinal fluid and the inhomogeneous change of blood flow creates power for cerebrospinal fluid to flow and then transport the neural waste out. This is why our brain generates two times as much cerebrospinal fluid at night than daytime.”
We’ve been trying for a long time to make a tiny Sun on Earth, one that would sustainably produce energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen or similar atoms. Come to think of it, I’d like one for my basement.
Fusion requires quite a bit of heat to get going, but once it does, it starts producing its own heat. If you can keep that system contained so it doesn’t expand too much or allow too much heat to escape, further fusion happens. If it reaches a point where self-heating becomes the primary driver of fusion, you have yourself a “burning plasma”.
Continue reading “Burning plasma! Controlled nuclear fusion on Earth briefly sustains itself” »
Using less power than a lightbulb. A team of engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) has developed a relatively low-cost “artificial leaf” that can capture carbon dioxide at rates 100 times faster than existing systems, bringing us one step closer to the goal of engineering the process of photosynthesis by which plants convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into energy.
Nuclear waste can be very harmful to humans and the ecosystem. Watch how it’s handled in our video.
Nuclear power could be essential to weaning the world off fossil fuels.
Nuclear power is a powerful form of energy that allows us to produce clean electricity. However, the waste it produces is difficult to tackle and is often the reason nuclear power has not become as popular as perhaps it should be. It is estimated that there are currently around 370,000 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel in temporary storage around the world, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The ultimate goal, still years away, is to generate power the way the sun generates heat, by smooshing hydrogen atoms so close to each other that they combine into helium, which releases torrents of energy.
WATCH: Is alluring but elusive fusion energy possible in our lifetime?
A team of more than 100 scientists published the results of four experiments that achieved what is known as a burning plasma in Wednesday’s journal Nature. With those results, along with preliminary results announced last August from follow-up experiments, scientists say they are on the threshold of an even bigger advance: ignition. That’s when the fuel can continue to “burn” on its own and produce more energy than what’s needed to spark the initial reaction.
The Concorde’s successor might be quieter.
NASA has completed the first test of the works on lowering the volume of supersonic flights in an effort to lift the ban on commercial supersonic flights, NASA’s Glenn Research Center announced.
The sonic booms happen when the merge of shock waves, created by breaking the sound barrier at the speed of 767 mph (1,235 kph). The huge amount of sound energy, approximately 110 decibels, generated by sonic booms sounds like thunderclaps or explosions and can be heard from 30 miles (48 km) away, which is why supersonic commercial flights are banned by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). physicists confirm that they have achieved a stage in nuclear fusion called “burning plasma”.
