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Category: nuclear energy – Page 3

In today’s AI news, a new $500 billion, private sector investment to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US, with Oracle, ChatGPT creator OpenAI, and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank among those committing to the project. The joint venture, called Stargate, is expected to begin with a data center project in Texas.

In other advancements, Perplexity has launched an aggressive bid to capture the enterprise AI search market, unveiling Sonar, an API service that outperforms offerings from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on key benchmarks while also undercutting their prices. Perplexity — now valued at $9 billion — directly challenges larger competitors.

And, Santee Cooper, the big power provider in South Carolina, has tapped financial advisers to look for buyers that can restart construction on a pair of nuclear reactors that were mothballed years ago. The state-owned utility is betting interest will be strong, with tech giants such as Amazon and Microsoft in need of clean energy to fuel AI.

Then, Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1 billion into AI startup Anthropic, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. This comes after Reuters and other media reported earlier in January that Anthropic was nearing a $2 billion fundraise in a round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, valuing the firm at about $60 billion.

In videos, Indeed CEO Chris Hyams, and Stanford Digital Economy Lab Director Erik Brynjolfsson, join Bloomberg’s Work for a discussion on the key trends impacting employees and employers in 2025 and beyond.

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In a pioneering approach to achieve fusion energy, the SMART device has successfully generated its first tokamak plasma. This step brings the international fusion community closer to achieving sustainable, clean, and virtually limitless energy through controlled fusion reactions.

The work is published in the journal Nuclear Fusion.

The SMART tokamak, a state-of-the-art experimental fusion device designed, constructed and operated by the Plasma Science and Fusion Technology Laboratory of the University of Seville, is a unique spherical tokamak due to its flexible shaping capabilities. SMART has been designed to demonstrate the unique physics and engineering properties of Negative Triangularity shaped plasmas towards compact fusion power plants based on Spherical Tokamaks.

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The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), commonly known as China’s “artificial sun,” has achieved a remarkable scientific milestone by maintaining steady-state high-confinement plasma operation for an impressive 1,066 seconds. This accomplishment, reached on Monday, sets a new world record and marks a significant breakthrough in the pursuit of fusion power generation.

The duration of 1,066 seconds is a critical advancement in fusion research. This milestone, achieved by the Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) at Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, far surpasses the previous world record of 403 seconds, also set by EAST in 2023.

The ultimate goal of developing an artificial sun is to replicate the nuclear fusion processes that occur in the sun, providing humanity with a limitless and clean energy source, and enabling exploration beyond our solar system.

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Astrophysicists have long been intrigued by the possibility of dark stars-massive celestial objects fueled not by nuclear fusion but by the enigmatic energy of dark matter. Thanks to images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the scientific community has perhaps also found signs of such elusive entities. Could these dark stars, which shine billions of times brighter than our sun, rewrite the story of the universe’s infancy?

Dark stars, despite the word “dark”, are hypothesized luminous sources that may have existed in the universe’s infancy. In contrast to traditional stars that work with nuclear fusion, dark stars are speculated to obtain their energy from self-annihilation of dark matter particles.

As a result, energy is released that warms the ambient hydrogen and helium, and this leads the primordial clouds to glow brightly and expand to enormous scale-some up to a million times mass of the sun. These stars may have also been born in “minihaloes”, dense pockets of dark matter in the early universe.

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Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is developing a tokamak device called SPARC. The company aims to demonstrate the critical fusion energy milestone of producing more output power than input power for the first time in a device that can scale up to commercial power plant size. However, this achievement is only possible if the plasma doesn’t melt the device.

Researchers from CFS and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have collaborated on fusion boundary research through a series of projects, including ORNL Strategic Partnership Projects and Laboratory Directed Research and Development projects, work under the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE), and other work in partnership with General Atomics.

Throughout this collaboration, ORNL has developed simulation capabilities required to address critical and time-sensitive design issues for the SPARC .

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A new analysis of data from the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) reveals fresh evidence that collisions of even very small nuclei with large ones might create tiny specks of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Scientists believe such a substance of free quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, permeated the universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

RHIC’s energetic smashups of gold ions—the nuclei of gold atoms that have been stripped of their electrons—routinely create a QGP by “melting” these nuclear building blocks so scientists can study the QGP’s properties.

Physicists originally thought that collisions of smaller ions with large ones wouldn’t create a QGP because the small ion wouldn’t deposit enough energy to melt the large ion’s protons and neutrons. But evidence from PHENIX has long suggested that these small collision systems generate particle flow patterns that are consistent with the existence of tiny specks of the primordial soup, the QGP.

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A joint research team from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully developed a continuous cryogenic pellet injection system for tokamak fueling. This innovative system addresses key technical challenges associated with cryogenic ice formation, pellet cutting, and launching.

Cryogenic pellet injection is a state-of-the-art technique in fusion research. It involves condensing hydrogen isotopic gases into solid ice pellets, which are then accelerated and injected into plasma. This method allows for deep particle and high fueling efficiency, making it crucial for the future of fusion reactors.

It is recognized as a critical fueling technology for next-generation fusion devices, including the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), and the European Demonstration Fusion Reactor (EU-DEMO).

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