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They finally reached ignition again last week, according to a statement Sunday from the lab. The news was first reported by the Financial Times.

“In an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition,” the statement read. “Analysis of those results is underway. As is our standard practice, we plan on reporting those results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications.”

Unlike fission, the process used in current nuclear power plants, fusion involves smashing atoms together instead of splitting them apart. It theoretically can supply carbon-free energy without long-lasting radioactive waste. But generations of scientists have struggled to master it in a controlled reaction, even though it has been the power source of nuclear weapons for decades.

A collaboration of nuclear theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Temple University, Adam Mickiewicz University of Poland, and the University of Bonn, Germany, has used supercomputers to predict the spatial distributions of charges, momentum, and other properties of “up” and “down” quarks within protons. The results, just published in Physical Review D, revealed key differences in the characteristics of the up and down quarks.

“This work is the first to leverage a new theoretical approach to obtain a high-resolution map of quarks within a proton,” said Swagato Mukherjee of Brookhaven Lab’s nuclear theory group and a co-author on the paper. “Our calculations show that the up quark is more symmetrically distributed and spread over a smaller distance than the down quark. These differences imply that up and down quarks may make different contributions to the fundamental properties and structure of the proton, including its internal energy and spin.”

Co-author Martha Constantinou of Temple University noted, “Our calculations provide input for interpreting data from nuclear physics experiments exploring how quarks and the gluons that hold them together are distributed within the proton, giving rise to the proton’s overall properties.”

SHINE Technologies.

With the world looking for cleaner ways to meet its energy demands, nuclear power is gaining favor once again as a low-carbon source of energy. Companies are also focused on harnessing energy from nuclear fusion instead, which does not raise concerns about nuclear waste.

Editor’s note: “Nuclear Power Breakthrough Makes “Limitless” Energy Possible” was previously published in May 2023. It has since been updated to include the most relevant information available.

For a moment, imagine a world of limitless energy – one where energy is so abundant that everyone can power their homes and businesses for mere pennies.

These days, it’s tough to imagine a world like that. Last winter, the average U.S. heating bill was $1,000.

ATLANTA (AP) — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.

Georgia Power Co. announced Monday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing and is now sending power to the grid reliably.

At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity, Unit 3 can power 500,000 homes and businesses. Utilities in Georgia, Florida and Alabama are receiving the electricity.

The space race has been revived, but this time, the goal post has been shifted much further – to Mars. As recent technological advancements promise to open new horizons of exploration, NASA plans to cut the travel time to Mars with a nuclear-powered spacecraft.

A trip to Mars currently takes approximately seven months, covering a staggering 300-million-mile journey. NASA, in collaboration with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), now proposes an ambitious plan that hinges on the promise of nuclear thermal propulsion technology to reduce this duration significantly.

NASA aims to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft, known as DRACO (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations), into Earth’s orbit either by late 2025 or early 2026. The spacecraft, under construction by Lockheed Martin, a leading aerospace and defense company, will serve as a testbed for this groundbreaking technology.

Year 2019 mini fusion device 😗😁.

Researchers spot the signatures of nuclear fusion in a table-top-sized setup commonly used to study the plasmas found in stars and other astrophysical objects.

A revolutionary new high-temperature superconducting tape could lead to the development of small, efficient tokamak nuclear fusion reactors.

A groundbreaking high-temperature superconducting tape has been devised that could prove revolutionary in our quest to develop sustainable nuclear fusion, reports IEEE Spectrum.

Continue reading “A special new tape could make small, efficient nuclear fusion reactors possible” »

The first observation of neutrinos produced at a particle collider opens a new field of study and offers ways to test the limits of the standard model.

Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the Universe, but they rarely interact with matter: trillions pass through us every second, but most of us will never have even a single one interact with the matter in our bodies. Nonetheless, scientists can study these particles using high-intensity neutrino sources and detectors that are large enough to overcome the rarity of neutrino interactions. In this way, neutrinos have been observed from the Sun, from cosmic-ray interactions in the atmosphere, from Earth’s interior, from supernovae and other astrophysical objects, and from artificial sources such as nuclear reactors and particle accelerators in which a beam of particles hits a fixed target. But no one had ever detected neutrinos produced in colliding beams. This feat has now been achieved by the Forward Search Experiment (FASER), located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland [1].

As neutral particles, neutrinos cannot be directly observed by detectors of the kind used in particle colliders. Instead, scientists study neutrinos via the particles produced when incoming neutrinos interact with matter: the properties of the incoming neutrinos can be inferred from the measured properties of their interaction products. While these interactions are always rare, their probability increases with neutrino energy. In a particle collider, the highest energy neutrinos are most likely to be produced in a region of the collider where there are no particle detectors. Collider experiments are built to surround the colliding beams with detectors, with only a small central region left empty to allow for the entry and exit of the beams. It is in this empty “forward” region, along the collision axis, that the highest energy neutrinos are most likely to be produced.