TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque told The Financial Times it plans to start work on a site in Wyoming in June even if it hasn’t got a permit by then.
Tokamak Energy reveals new laser technology which will be installed on its world record-breaking ST40 nuclear fusion reactor.
The particle accelerators that enable high-energy physics and serve many fields of science, such as materials, medical, and fusion research, are driven by superconducting magnets that are, to put it simply, quite finicky.
The Australian Synchrotron, a crown jewel of Australian scientific infrastructure, is making major strides towards sustainable energy independence. The nuclear research facility recently completed the installation of 3,200 solar panels which now blankets the facility’s rooftops. This move is expected to generate substantial savings and support Synchrotron’s world-class research.
The state-of-the-art particle accelerator has now gone green with a 1.59 MW/ 1,668 kWh rooftop solar system. The facility will save about $2 million in energy costs over the next five years.
Imagine never having to change a battery in a device ever again — or, in fact, a battery that could outlive you.
That’s what Betavolt, a Chinese tech company, is claiming with its newly unveiled miniature nuclear battery that it says can keep working for up to 50 years.
The Beijing-based company claims to have entered the “pilot stage” for the battery, which is smaller than a coin and will soon put it into mass production.
Learn about the breakthrough superconducting magnets for fusion reactors developed by MIT researchers. Step into a future of clean energy.
AWS to acquire nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania. Find out how this move will impact cloud services and energy consumption.
If two points were ripped apart faster than light, they would no longer interact through any force of physics. Whereas a constant dark energy would leave behind already-intact objects, like clusters of galaxies, phantom energy could tear them apart. In a finite amount of time, billions of years from now, clusters would tear apart, followed by ever-smaller objects. Even atomic and nuclear bonds would not withstand the onslaught.
Eventually, space itself would dissolve in an event known as the Big Rip. Any two points, no matter how close, would be ripped infinitely far away from each other. The very structure of space-time, the causal foundations that make our universe work, would no longer behave. The universe would just break down.
However, luckily, most physicists do not believe this scenario can actually happen. For one, it’s unclear how this process of ripping interacts with the other laws of physics. For example, quarks cannot be torn apart — when you attempt to do so, you need so much energy that new quarks materialize out of the vacuum. So ripping apart quarks just might lead to other, interesting interactions.
Most people know about solids, liquids, and gases as the main three states of matter, but a fourth state of matter exists as well. Plasma—also known as ionized gas—is the most abundant, observable form of matter in our universe, found in the sun and other celestial bodies.
Creating the hot mix of freely moving electrons and ions that compose a plasma often requires extreme pressures or temperatures. In these extreme conditions, researchers continue to uncover the unexpected ways that plasma can move and evolve. By better understanding the motion of plasma, scientists gain valuable insights into solar physics, astrophysics, and fusion.
In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the University of Rochester, along with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, discovered a new class of plasma oscillations—the back-and-forth, wave-like movement of electrons and ions. The findings have implications for improving the performance of miniature particle accelerators and the reactors used to create fusion energy.
Artificial intelligence is pivotal in advancing biotechnology and medical procedures, ranging from cancer diagnostics to the creation of new antibiotics. However, the ecological footprint of large-scale AI systems is substantial. For instance, training extensive language models like ChatGPT-3 requires several gigawatt-hours of energy—enough to power an average nuclear power plant at full capacity for several hours.
Prof. Mario Chemnitz and Dr. Bennet Fischer from Leibniz IPHT in Jena, in collaboration with their international team, have devised an innovative method to develop potentially energy-efficient computing systems that forego the need for extensive electronic infrastructure.
They harness the unique interactions of light waves within optical fibers to forge an advanced artificial learning system. Unlike traditional systems that rely on computer chips containing thousands of electronic components, their system uses a single optical fiber.
