Fusion – combining atomic nuclei to release energy – is a clean and safe way to power our homes and industry. This ‘holy grail’ of energy has eluded physicists for decades, but there are signs that a bright future could be on the horizon.
Category: nuclear energy – Page 94
Two Firms Are Building Romania’s First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor
A new joint project between the U.S. and Romania will bring small modular reactors to Eastern Europe! In addition to SMR simulators to train students.
Exploring Why This Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Matters
Use the code “Undecided” to get Curiosity Stream for less than $15 a year! https://curiositystream.com/Undecided. Before you blow your fuse and start leaving your nuclear fusion jokes in the comments, there’s been a major fusion development we have to talk about and it’s kind of a nuclear bombshell… poor choice of words… it’s big news. It’s all about high temperature semiconductors (ie. magnets).
Watch Exploring the 1,000 Mile Car Battery — Aluminum Air Hype? https://youtu.be/9OOq3f6mUxU?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7UWp64ZlOKUPNXePMTdU4d.
Special thanks to MIT (http://news.mit.edu/) and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (https://cfs.energy/) for some of the video and photos used, as well as Dr. Greenwald for his time and expertise.
Video script and citations:
https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/exploring-why-this-nuclear-…gh-matters.
Follow-up podcast:
Video version — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4-aWB84Bupf5hxGqrwYqLA
Audio version — http://bit.ly/stilltbdfm.
👋 Support Undecided on Patreon!
In This Nuclear Arms Race, China’s Hypersonic Gliders Are a Wake-Up Call
If China — and then Russia and other nuclear powers — get gliders, however, these defensive systems will be obsolete. Nuclear payloads could then zip around the South Pole instead, for instance. They’d never even exit the atmosphere. And they could change their trajectory, being controlled all along by a Chinese operator with a joystick.
All this makes China sound menacing and aggressive. In that sense, the news seems to rhyme with revelations that China is also building a couple of hundred silos for more conventional intercontinental missiles that could carry nukes.
In reality, China probably appears so aggressive only because it feels incredibly insecure. The greatest fear in Beijing is that in an escalating conflict — over Taiwan or whatever else — the U.S. might be tempted one day to launch preemptive nuclear strikes to take out all or most of China’s arsenal. The Americans would only contemplate such a drastic step, of course, if they thought that their own defenses could parry any remaining missiles coming from China in retaliation.
Australian Company Works to Make Energy From Nuclear Fusion — But Without the Fiery Ball of Plasma
PERHAPS THE MOST PROMISING ROUTE TO FUSION uses Boron instead, reqiring higher temperatures atainable by chirped lasers—using a widely available fuel, and an output which can be turned directly into energy without the need for steam turbines, etc.
“when it’s finally deployed on electric grids, humanity can leave uranium, coal, oil, and gas in the ground. We won’t need to drill for geothermal energy, or line our hills with unrecyclable wind turbines. It won’t matter if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing…”
Using super powerful lasers to create clean, emission-less energy, HB11 Energy is expanding options for commercial nuclear fusion.
The United States Air Force Is Making Its First-Ever Micro-Nuclear Reactor
As the U.S. military has finalized a space for its first micro-nuclear reactor. The Department of Air Force has chosen the Eielson Air Force Base (AFB) in Alaska to introduce this next-generation energy capability, a press release said.
The US military has been inclining towards electronic warfare along with nuclear reactors for cleaner sources of energy. Last month, we reported that the Department of Defense was planning to install a portable nuclear reactor in Idaho.
It is also being said that the micro-reactor pilot is being built in response to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 that requires potential locations to be identified to build and operate a microreactor before 2027. The Air Force will work in collaboration with the Department of Energy, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to execute the project of the micro-reactor pilot, and to ensure this pilot is conducted with safety as the number one priority, the press release said. This facility will have a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and will operate commercially.
Nuclear fusion edges toward the mainstream
ABINGDON, England — Harnessing fusion energy into something commercially viable — and maybe, ultimately, a clean source of power that replaces fossil fuels for centuries to come — has long been considered by some as the ultimate moonshot.
But investor interest in fusion energy continues to slowly rise, and the number of startups in the field is multiplying, with an estimated 1,100 people in several countries making their living at these firms. An industry is taking shape, with a growing network of companies that supply highly specialized equipment, like the components of the powerful magnets that fusion devices require.
The British government even recently saw the need to issue regulations for fusion energy — a kind of milestone for a burgeoning industry.
The U.S Department Of Energy Is Funding Projects To Convert Nuclear Energy Into Green Hydrogen
Nuclear energy is becoming more popular by the day and is being considered an eco-friendly option for the energy crisis we are going through. The US Department of Energy has dedicated US$20 million to a project that is based in Arizona that will use nuclear energy to make green hydrogen. They will be testing its capability as a liquid backup battery and as a secondary product for nuclear power installations.
The project will be headed by PNW Hydrogen LLC. They will build hydrogen production plants on-site at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Phoenix, Arizona. Storage tanks will be used that will be able to store six tonnes of hydrogen onsite, representing about 200 MWh of energy that can be converted back into electricity and given to the grid when demand is more than usual.
The hydrogen will also be “used to make chemicals and other fuels,” and the project will gauge how nuclear stations can export and sell extra energy as an extra revenue stream. It is said that in the future, baseline power providers like nuclear stations will only be needed when the sun’s not shining or the wind’s not blowing. Hence, it makes sense to use this technology to make use of it and produce energy in the downtime.
Covert Cognizance: A Novel Predictive Modeling Paradigm
(2021). Nuclear Technology: Vol. 207 No. 8 pp. 1163–1181.
Focusing on nuclear engineering applications, the nation’s leading cybersecurity programs are focused on developing digital solutions to support reactor control for both on-site and remote operation. Many of the advanced reactor technologies currently under development by the nuclear industry, such as small modular reactors, microreactors, etc., require secure architectures for instrumentation, control, modeling, and simulation in order to meet their goals. 1 Thus, there is a strong need to develop communication solutions to enable secure function of advanced control strategies and to allow for an expanded use of data for operational decision making. This is important not only to avoid malicious attack scenarios focused on inflicting physical damage but also covert attacks designed to introduce minor process manipulation for economic gain. 2
These high-level goals necessitate many important functionalities, e.g., developing measures of trustworthiness of the code and simulation results against unauthorized access; developing measures of scientific confidence in the simulation results by carefully propagating and identifying dominant sources of uncertainties and by early detection of software crashes; and developing strategies to minimize the computational resources in terms of memory usage, storage requirements, and CPU time. By introducing these functionalities, the computers are subservient to the programmers. The existing predictive modeling philosophy has generally been reliant on the ability of the programmer to detect intrusion via specific instructions to tell the computer how to detect intrusion, keep log files to track code changes, limit access via perimeter defenses to ensure no unauthorized access, etc.
The last decade has witnessed a huge and impressive development of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in many scientific disciplines, which have promoted many computational scientists to explore how they can be embedded into predictive modeling applications. The reality, however, is that AI, premised since its inception on emulating human intelligence, is still very far from realizing its goal. Any human-emulating intelligence must be able to achieve two key tasks: the ability to store experiences and the ability to recall and process these experiences at will. Many of the existing AI advances have primarily focused on the latter goal and have accomplished efficient and intelligent data processing. Researchers on adversarial AI have shown over the past decade that any AI technique could be misled if presented with the wrong data. 3 Hence, this paper focuses on introducing a novel predictive paradigm, referred to as covert cognizance, or C2 for short, designed to enable predictive models to develop a secure incorruptible memory of their execution, representing the first key requirement for a human-emulating intelligence. This memory, or self-cognizance, is key for a predictive model to be effective and resilient in both adversarial and nonadversarial settings. In our context, “memory” does not imply the dynamic or static memory allocated for a software execution; instead, it is a collective record of all its execution characteristics, including run-time information, the output generated in each run, the local variables rendered by each subroutine, etc.