Lifeboat Foundation

A laser-driven technique for creating fusion that dispenses with the need for radioactive fuel elements and leaves no toxic radioactive waste is now within reach, say researchers.

Dramatic advances in powerful, high-intensity lasers are making it viable for scientists to pursue what was once thought impossible: creating fusion energy based on hydrogen-boron reactions. And an Australian physicist is in the lead, armed with a patented design and working with international collaborators on the remaining scientific challenges.

In a paper in the scientific journal Laser and Particle Beams today, lead author Heinrich Hora from the University of New South Wales in Sydney and international colleagues argue that the path to hydrogen-boron fusion is now viable, and may be closer to realization than other approaches, such as the deuterium-tritium fusion approach being pursued by U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor under construction in France.

Continue reading “Laser-driven technique for creating fusion is now within reach, say researchers” »

This week, Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station will power down for the last time.

Over the next few years, workers will move the radioactive fuel into storage, dismantle the plant, and clean up the site. The process is called decommissioning, and a lot of people are worried about safety, cost and where the nuclear waste will finally end up.

Continue reading “Pilgrim Is Closing. So Then What Happens To The Radioactive Waste?” »

Scientists from Ireland and France today [Thursday 23rd May] announced a major new finding about how matter behaves in the extreme conditions of the Sun’s atmosphere.

The scientists used large radio telescopes and ultraviolet cameras on a NASA spacecraft to better understand the exotic but poorly understood “fourth state of matter”. Known as plasma, this matter could hold the key to developing safe, clean and efficient nuclear energy generators on Earth. The scientists published their findings in the leading international journal Nature Communications.

Most of the matter we encounter in our everyday lives comes in the form of solid, liquid or gas, but the majority of the Universe is composed of plasma — a highly unstable and electrically charged fluid. The Sun is also made up of this plasma.

Continue reading “Scientists uncover exotic matter in the sun’s atmosphere” »

E=m c

Albert Einstein proposed the most famous formula in physics in a 1905 paper on Special Relativity titled Does the inertia of an object depend upon its energy content?

Essentially, the equation says that mass and energy are intimately related. Atom bombs and nuclear reactors are practical examples of the formula working in one direction, turning matter into energy.

Continue reading “‘Einstein Was Right: You Can Turn Energy Into Matter’” »

Gamma radiation is the most penetrating and energetic form of nuclear radiation. To absorb half the incoming Gamma you need two and a half inches of concrete or almost half an inch of lead. So my eyebrows went up when I saw a press release for an organization called Radiation Shielding Technologies, or RST, selling protective clothing with this startling claim:

“DemronTM not only protects against particle ionizing/nuclear radiation (such as Beta and Alpha), but does what NO OTHER full body radiation protection can do: shield against X-ray and low-energy Gamma emissions.”

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For over 11 decades we have known that matter and energy are interchangeable. The development of nuclear power has shown us that matter can be converted into energy, but converting energy into matter has so far proven a lot more difficult.

The battlefield for such an achievement is at the end of the most powerful lasers ever envisioned, currently being planned and built in a number of different countries. Three projects top the “gone to watch list” of the laser world, prepared by the journal Science. They are China’s Station of Extreme Light (SEL), Russia’s Exawatt Center for Extreme Light Studies (XCELS), and the Department of Energy’s Optical Parametric Amplifier Line (OPAL).

These three lasers are planned to completely annihilate the current record for laser power, which is 5.3 million billion watts or 5.3 petawatts (PW) and obtained by Ruxin Li and colleagues at the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF). Li is also behind SEL and hopes that by 2023 his team could reach the goal of a 100-PW laser.

Continue reading “Scientists Are Creating Lasers So Powerful They Could Turn Light Into Matter” »

Some A-list names—including the Rockefellers, Charles Schwab and Buzz Aldrin—are chasing the sun at fusion-energy firm TAE Technologies.

It doesn’t exist officially. It uses highly pressured mercury accelerated by nuclear energy to produce a plasma that creates a field of anti-gravity around the ship. Conventional thrusters located at the tips of the craft allow it to perform all manner of rapid high speed maneuvers along all three axes. Interestingly, the plasma generated also reduces radar signature significantly. So it’ll be almost invisible on radar & remain undetected. This literally means that it can go to any country it likes without being detected by air traffic control & air defence systems.

Physicist plans to karate-chop them with super-fast blasts of light.