Lifeboat Foundation

Stellarators, twisty machines that house fusion reactions, rely on complex magnetic coils that are challenging to design and build. Now, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has developed a mathematical technique to help simplify the design of the coils, making stellarators a potentially more cost-effective facility for producing fusion energy.

“Our main result is that we came up with a new method of identifying the irregular magnetic fields produced by stellarator coils,” said physicist Caoxiang Zhu, lead author of a paper reporting the results in Nuclear Fusion. “This technique can let you know in advance which coil shapes and placements could harm the plasma’s magnetic confinement, promising a shorter construction time and reduced costs.”

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, is the fusing of light elements in the form of plasma—the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei—that generates massive amounts of energy. Twisty, cruller-shaped stellarators are an alternative to doughnut-shaped tokamaks that are more commonly used by scientists seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

Scientists from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria, released footage of the effect at work in a research reactor…

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, released footage of the effect — a visual equivalent to the ‘sonic boom’ — at work.

Continue reading “Footage reveals the moment a nuclear reactor pulses and glows blue” »

Can an emerging generation of small-scale reactors overcome Australians’ resistance to nuclear power?

A new type of nuclear reactor designed to power crewed outposts on the moon and Mars could be ready for its first in-space trial just a few years from now, project team members said.

A flight test is the next big step for the Kilopower experimental fission reactor, which aced a series of critical ground tests from November 2017 through March 2018. No off-Earth demonstration is on the books yet, but Kilopower should be ready to go by 2022 or so if need be, said Patrick McClure, Kilopower project lead at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Seven years. 13 miles. 22 samples. ⁣ ⁣ NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover has come a long way since touching down on the Red Planet seven years ago. See for yourself: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/new-finds-for-mars-rover-se…er-landing

NASA’s Curiosity rover has come a long way since touching down on Mars seven years ago. It has traveled a total of 13 miles (21 kilometers) and ascended 1,207 feet (368 meters) to its current location. Along the way, Curiosity discovered Mars had the conditions to support microbial life in the ancient past, among other things.

Continue reading “New Finds for Mars Rover, Seven Years After Landing” »

Lux Capital, a New York-based venture capital firm, has raised more than $1 billion across two new funds to back companies on “the cutting edge of science.” The firm raised $500 million for its sixth flagship early-stage fund and another $550 million for an opportunity fund focused on growth-stage investments. Limited partners include global foundations, university endowments, and tech billionaires.

Lux also announced a new hire: Deena Shakir, formerly of GV (Google Ventures), has joined as an investment partner.

To the regular person, Lux’s investments are considered moonshot. The firm has backed entrepreneurs that are working on everything from neurostimulation to nuclear energy to synthetic biology. During my last interview with co-founder and managing partner Josh Wolfe, I actually called one of his portfolio companies “freaking crazy.”

A team of fusion researchers succeeded in proving that energetic ions with energy in mega electron volt (MeV) range are superiorly confined in a plasma for the first time in helical systems. This promises the alpha particle (helium ion) confinement required for realizing fusion energy in a helical reactor.

The deuterium-tritium reaction in a high-temperature plasma will be used in fusion reactors in the future. Alpha particles with 3.5 MeV energy are generated by the fusion reaction. The alpha particles transfer their energy to the plasma, and this alpha particle heating sustains the high-temperature plasma condition required for the fusion reaction. In order to realize such a plasma, which is called a burning plasma, the energetic ions in the MeV range must be tightly confined in the plasma.

Numerical simulations predicted the favorable results of MeV ion confinement in a plasma in helical systems that have the advantage of steady-state operation in comparison with tokamak systems. However, demonstration of MeV ion confinement by experiment had not been reported. Recently, the study was greatly advanced by an MeV ion confinement experiment performed in the deuterium operation of the Large Helical Device (LHD), which is owned by National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS), in Japan. In deuterium plasmas, 1 MeV tritons (tritium ions) are created by deuteron-deuteron fusion reactions. The tritons have the similar behavior with alpha particles generated in a future burning plasma.

This will be the company’s fifth major design iteration as it pushes ahead toward building a potentially revolutionary practical prototype.

One of the main speculations about future technology is uploading. This is where our minds are copied in exact detail from our biological physical bodies and then created in artificial bodies. Alexander Bolonkin has posited many kinds of technology over the decades. He has a recent work which is summarized here where he considers that future uploading will mean that we can then use super-technology (nanotechnology, nuclear fusion etc…) to make people into literal gods and supermen. We can use control of matter, energy and information to make what he calls the E-man. Bolonkin then indicates that uploading and creation of minds could be used for the resurrection of long-dead people. This would be where we create the very close approximation of dead people. This would be like using gene editing to turn an African Elephant into a Whooly Mammoth. The vast technological capability would let us actualize what would be a simulation into living entities.

Bolonkin’s Case for E-Man and Resurrection

Alexander Bolonkin looks at methods and possibilities for electronic resurrection of long-dead outstanding personalities. He also considers the principles and organization of the new E-society, its goals and conditions of existence.