Lifeboat Foundation

Nuclear energy has long been regarded as a next-generation energy source, and major countries around the world are competing to secure cutting-edge technologies by leveraging the high economic efficiency and sustainability of nuclear power. However, uranium, which is essential for nuclear power generation, has serious implications for both soil ecosystems and human health.

Despite being a key radioactive material, uranium poses significant health risks due to its chemical toxicity to the kidneys, bones, and cells. As a result, both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization recommend allowing and advocating for uranium concentrations in wastewater to be below 30 μg/L.

The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) has conducted research on a nano-material-based adsorption process to efficiently remove uranium wastewater extracted from actual radioactive-contaminated soil. They have also proposed its applicability to prevent secondary environmental pollutions.

Two important barriers to a stable, powerful fusion reaction have been leapt by an experiment in a small tokamak reactor, but we don’t yet know if the technique will work in larger devices.

By Matthew Sparkes

Two piloted one-seat eVTOLs flew in formation during an exciting premiere by Jetson, opening the road for a wide range of missions in the future.

In the nine decades since humans first produced fusion reactions, only a few fusion technologies have demonstrated the ability to make a thermal fusion plasma with electron temperatures hotter than 10 million degrees Celsius, roughly the temperature of the core of the sun. Zap Energy’s unique approach, known as a sheared-flow-stabilized Z pinch, has now joined those rarefied ranks, far exceeding this plasma temperature milestone in a device that is a fraction of the scale of other fusion systems.

The device, based on simple tetromino shapes, could determine the direction and distance of a radiation source, with fewer detector pixels.

The spread of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in 2011 and the ongoing threat of a possible release of radiation from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex in the Ukrainian war zone have underscored the need for effective and reliable ways of detecting and monitoring radioactive isotopes. Less dramatically, everyday operations of nuclear reactors, mining and processing of uranium into fuel rods, and the disposal of spent nuclear fuel also require monitoring of radioisotope release.

Innovative Sensor Design Inspired by “Tetris”

Extremely short pulses of laser light with a peak power of 6 terawatts (6 trillion watts)—roughly equivalent to the power produced by 6,000 nuclear power plants—have been realized by two RIKEN physicists. This achievement will help further develop attosecond lasers, for which three researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2023. The work is published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Stars like the sun are remarkably constant. They vary in brightness by only 0.1% over years and decades, thanks to the fusion of hydrogen into helium that powers them. This process will keep the sun shining steadily for about 5 billion more years, but when stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, their deaths can lead to pyrotechnics.

The sun will eventually die by growing large and then condensing into a type of star called a white dwarf. But stars more than eight times more massive than the sun die violently in an explosion called a supernova.

Supernovae happen across the Milky Way only a few times a century, and these violent explosions are usually remote enough that people here on Earth don’t notice. For a dying star to have any effect on life on our planet, it would have to go supernova within 100 light years from Earth.

I found this on NewsBreak: The big idea: are we about to discover a new force of nature?

Intriguingly, both disciplines are grappling with unexplained results that could be pointing to the existence of a new force of nature. If such a new force were to be confirmed, the implications for our understanding of the universe, its history and makeup would be profound.

There are four forces that we already know about. Gravity governs the grandest scales, marshalling the planets in their orbits and shaping the evolution of the universe as a whole. Electromagnetic force gives rise to a vast range of phenomena, from the magnetic field of the Earth to radio waves, visible light and X-rays, while also holding atoms, molecules and, by extension, the physical world together. Deep within the atomic nucleus, two further forces emerge: the vice-like “strong force”, which binds atomic nuclei, and the “weak force”, which among other things causes radioactive decay and enables the nuclear reactions that power the sun and the stars.

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The experimental fusion reactor sustained temperatures of 212 million degrees Fahrenheit for a record-breaking 48 seconds.