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Category: nuclear energy

In a groundbreaking leap toward cleaner, more affordable energy, scientists in France held a fusion reaction steady for over 22 minutes — shattering the previous world record. If that number sounds insignificant, here’s why it’s a big deal: That is 1,337 seconds of controlled, blazing-hot plasma, the critical ingredient needed to power nuclear fusion, a nearly limitless energy source that does not rely on polluting fuels like gas, coal, or oil.

This milestone brings us one step closer to a dream energy future: one where our homes, cities, and electric cars are powered by a technology that mimics the sun — minus the radioactive waste and environmental damage of traditional nuclear power.

Nuclear fusion has the capability to solve a major problem with polluting energy sources. Right now, our power mostly comes from dirty energy that pollutes the air and contributes to extreme weather. While solar and wind energy are gaining momentum, fusion offers something different: the possibility of continuous, around-the-clock clean energy using hydrogen — the most common element in the universe — as fuel.

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IN A NUTSHELL 🔧 The United States has delivered a colossal superconducting magnet to France’s ITER project, advancing nuclear fusion technology. 🤝 Collaboration among eight American companies was essential to construct the solenoid’s support structure for the reactor. 🔄 Four out of six solenoid modules have been installed, with completion expected by the year’s end.

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*This video was recorded at Foresight’s Vision Weekend 2025 in Puerto Rico*
https://foresight.org/vw2025pr/

Our Vision Weekends are the annual festivals of Foresight Institute. Held in two countries, over two weekends, you are invited to burst your tech silos and plan for flourishing long-term futures. This playlist captures the magic of our Puerto Rico edition, held February 21–23, 2025, in the heart of Old San Juan. Come for the ideas: join the conference, unconference, mentorship hours, curated 1-1s, tech demos, biohacking sessions, prize awards, and much more. Stay for fun with new friends: join the satellite gatherings, solarpunk future salsa night, beach picnic, and surprise island adventures. This year’s main conference track is dedicated to “Paths to Progress”; meaning you will hear 20+ invited presentations from Foresight’s core community highlighting paths to progress in the following areas: Existential Hope Futures, Longevity, Rejuvenation, Cryonics, Neurotech, BCIs & WBEs, Cryptography, Security & AI, Fusion, Energy, Space, and Funding, Innovation, Progress.
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*About The Foresight Institute*

The Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1986 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support. From molecular nanotechnology, to brain-computer interfaces, space exploration, cryptocommerce, and AI, Foresight gathers leading minds to advance research and accelerate progress toward flourishing futures.

*We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page:* https://foresight.org/donate/

*Visit* https://foresight.org, *subscribe to our channel for more videos or join us here:*

Continue reading “Niamh Peren | From Neurons to Networks: Whole Brain Emulation @ Vision Weekend 2025, Puerto Rico” | >

*This video was recorded at Foresight’s Vision Weekend 2025 in Puerto Rico*
https://foresight.org/vw2025pr/

Our Vision Weekends are the annual festivals of Foresight Institute. Held in two countries, over two weekends, you are invited to burst your tech silos and plan for flourishing long-term futures. This playlist captures the magic of our Puerto Rico edition, held February 21–23, 2025, in the heart of Old San Juan. Come for the ideas: join the conference, unconference, mentorship hours, curated 1-1s, tech demos, biohacking sessions, prize awards, and much more. Stay for fun with new friends: join the satellite gatherings, solarpunk future salsa night, beach picnic, and surprise island adventures. This year’s main conference track is dedicated to “Paths to Progress”; meaning you will hear 20+ invited presentations from Foresight’s core community highlighting paths to progress in the following areas: Existential Hope Futures, Longevity, Rejuvenation, Cryonics, Neurotech, BCIs & WBEs, Cryptography, Security & AI, Fusion, Energy, Space, and Funding, Innovation, Progress.
══════════════════════════════════════

*About The Foresight Institute*

The Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1986 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support. From molecular nanotechnology, to brain-computer interfaces, space exploration, cryptocommerce, and AI, Foresight gathers leading minds to advance research and accelerate progress toward flourishing futures.

*We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page:* https://foresight.org/donate/

*Visit* https://foresight.org, *subscribe to our channel for more videos or join us here:*

Continue reading “Yuri Deigin | Brain Rejuvenation by Partial Reprogramming @ Vision Weekend 2025, Puerto Rico” | >

*This video was recorded at Foresight’s Vision Weekend 2025 in Puerto Rico*
https://foresight.org/vw2025pr/

Our Vision Weekends are the annual festivals of Foresight Institute. Held in two countries, over two weekends, you are invited to burst your tech silos and plan for flourishing long-term futures. This playlist captures the magic of our Puerto Rico edition, held February 21–23, 2025, in the heart of Old San Juan. Come for the ideas: join the conference, unconference, mentorship hours, curated 1-1s, tech demos, biohacking sessions, prize awards, and much more. Stay for fun with new friends: join the satellite gatherings, solarpunk future salsa night, beach picnic, and surprise island adventures. This year’s main conference track is dedicated to “Paths to Progress”; meaning you will hear 20+ invited presentations from Foresight’s core community highlighting paths to progress in the following areas: Existential Hope Futures, Longevity, Rejuvenation, Cryonics, Neurotech, BCIs & WBEs, Cryptography, Security & AI, Fusion, Energy, Space, and Funding, Innovation, Progress.
══════════════════════════════════════

*About The Foresight Institute*

The Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1986 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support. From molecular nanotechnology, to brain-computer interfaces, space exploration, cryptocommerce, and AI, Foresight gathers leading minds to advance research and accelerate progress toward flourishing futures.

*We are entirely funded by your donations. If you enjoy what we do please consider donating through our donation page:* https://foresight.org/donate/

*Visit* https://foresight.org, *subscribe to our channel for more videos or join us here:*

Continue reading “Niccolo Zanichelli | The State of Brain Emulation in 2025 @ Vision Weekend 2025, Puerto Rico” | >

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University (SBU) have shown that particles produced in collimated sprays called jets retain information about their origins in subatomic particle smashups. The study was recently published as an Editor’s Suggestion in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“Despite extensive research, the connection between a jet’s initial conditions and its final particle distribution has remained elusive,” said Charles Joseph Naim, a research associate at the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science (CFNS) in SBU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. “This study, for the first time, establishes a direct connection between the ‘entanglement entropy’ at the earliest stage of jet formation and the particles that emerge as a jet evolves.”

The evidence comes from an analysis of jet particles emerging from captured by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-circumference circular collider located at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. In these powerful collisions, the individual building blocks of the colliding protons, known as quarks and gluons, scatter off one another and sometimes get knocked free with enormous amounts of energy. But quarks can’t stay free for long. They and the gluons that normally hold them together immediately begin to split and reconnect through a branching process called fragmentation. The result is the formation of many new composite particles made of pairs or triplicates of quarks—collectively known as hadrons—that spray out of the collision in a coordinated way, that is, as a jet.

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Many plans have been hatched to bring more water to CA, but it’s better to build desalination plants. And even better to power them with small nuclear reactors. Thirty desal plants produces a billion gallons/day and would cost the same as a water pipeline stealing water from the Pacific Northwest.

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Physicists have scaled down the maximum possible mass of an elusive “ghost particle” called a neutrino to at least one-millionth the weight of an electron. The revision takes scientists one more step toward a discovery that could alter or even upend the Standard Model of particle physics.

Our universe is awash with phantom specks of matter. Every second, around 100 billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body. They’re produced in multiple places: the nuclear fire of stars, in enormous stellar explosions, by radioactive decay and in particle accelerators and nuclear reactors on Earth.

Even though they’re the most common form of matter in the cosmos, neutrinos’ minimal interactions with other matter types makes them notoriously difficult to detect, and they’re the only particles in the Standard Model whose precise mass remains unaccounted for.

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UPTON, N.Y. — High temperatures and ionizing radiation create extremely corrosive environments inside a nuclear reactor. To design long-lasting reactors, scientists must understand how radiation-induced chemical reactions impact structural materials. Chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory recently performed experiments showing that radiation-induced reactions may help mitigate the corrosion of reactor metals in a new type of reactor cooled by molten salts. Their findings are published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.

“Molten salt reactors are an emerging technology for safer, scalable nuclear energy production. These advanced reactors can operate at higher, more efficient temperatures than traditional water-cooled reactor technologies while maintaining relatively ambient pressure,” explained James Wishart, a distinguished chemist at Brookhaven Lab and leader of the research.

Unlike water-cooled reactors, molten salt reactors use a coolant made entirely of positively and negatively charged ions, which remain in a liquid state only at high temperatures. It’s similar to melting table salt crystals until they flow without adding any other liquid.

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Research teams have established a theoretical method for designing smooth curved wall surfaces with variable cross-section shock tubes, and developed an integrated, high-intensity multifunctional shock tube device. Led by Prof. Luo Xisheng and Prof. Si Ting from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the study was published in Review of Scientific Instruments.

Based on the device and techniques, the research team further developed a discontinuous perturbation interface generation technology, pioneering the experimental and mechanistic study of strong shock wave impact on single-mode fluid interface instability in shock tubes. The results were published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Shock wave-induced fluid interface instability is a common key scientific issue in aerospace vehicles and inertial confinement , while the related basic theories are still insufficient. Shock tubes are often employed to carry out basic aerodynamics research. However, the controllable generation of regularly-shaped, high-energy utilization converging and strong shock waves still remains a challenge.

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