Lifeboat Foundation

This could modernize the entire power grid with near-limitless energy.

Since scientists first demonstrated nuclear power 70 years ago, the second stage of nuclear power has remained just beyond our fingertips: nuclear fusion power. While promising, the ETA on the technology required to develop and build viable nuclear fusion has remained decades away.

Until now. Probably.

Less than a week after a Bill Gates-backed MIT startup announced it had successfully tested a massive magnet that could allow them to achieve “net energy” with their nuclear fusion reactor, scientists at France’s International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) received the first part of another huge magnet, an AP report explains.

That magnet is so strong that its American manufacturer claims it can lift an aircraft carrier. When it is fully assembled it will be almost 60 feet (20 meters) tall and 14 feet (over four meters) in diameter, and it could be the key to providing practically limitless energy via nuclear fusion.

Steam turbines could be replaced by pressurized carbon dioxide (CO₂) closed-loop systems to spin turbines.

Steam turbines in thermal power generation are today’s standard. But pressurized carbon dioxide (CO₂) in a closed-loop system could do the job. Supercritical CO₂ acting as both a liquid and a gas under extreme pressure would provide the impetus to spin a turbine. Using supercritical CO₂ may prove to be far more efficient than steam to provide emissions-free power to the electrical grid. Energy input coming from renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, as well as nuclear power, or even gas or coal-fired thermal energy power plants with accompanying carbon capture technology could be combined with this technology to be an effective addition to energy utilities.

Recently researchers at the Sandia National Laboratory Kirtland Air Force Base in the United States demonstrated a closed-loop Brayton Cycle engine technology as it delivered power to the electrical grid continuously. Sandia has been working with the Brayton Cycle technology for power generation for some time now because it is seen as having significant energy conversion advantages over conventional steam turbines by as much as 50%.

Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) celebrated the opening of its Pilot Fuel Manufacturing (PFM) facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on August 18 with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tour attended by assistant secretary for nuclear energy Kathryn Huff, Tennessee lieutenant governor Randy McNally, U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R.), representatives from the offices of Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R.) and Bill Hagerty (R.), and other distinguished guests. The next day, radiological operations began at the privately funded facility, which was designed and built in less than twelve months within an existing industrial building purchased by USNC in 2021.

Nuclear power will be capable of generating 38.4 percent of Poland’s electric power needs by 2043, and should raise the country’s GDP by over 1 percent, a report by the Polish Institute of Economics (PIE) has forecast.

The report, titled “Economic aspects of nuclear investment in Poland — influence on business, the labor market and local communities,” also says that the nuclear energy program will generate 40,000 jobs over the next five decades.

According to the most optimistic scenario, 70 percent of the value of the investments in nuclear energy should be realized by Polish companies, and the total investment realized by them could reach close to $40 billion.

The invasion that Russia has wrongfully started in Ukraine has led to more people talking about the threat of Nuclear war and World War 3. How does the Doomsday Clock relate to all this?

And Lifespan News: https://www.youtube.com/LifespanNews.

Continue reading “What Happens When the Doomsday Clock Hits Midnight?” »

Scientists have discovered the remarkable impact of reversing a standard method for combatting a key obstacle to producing fusion energy on Earth. Theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have proposed doing precisely the opposite of the prescribed procedure to sharply improve future results.

Tearing holes in plasma

The problem, called “locked tearing modes,” occurs in all today’s tokamaks, doughnut-shaped magnetic facilities designed to create and control the virtually unlimited fusion power that drives the sun and stars. The instability-caused modes rotate with the hot, charged plasma — the fourth state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei that fuels fusion reactions —and tear holes called islands in the magnetic field that confines the gas, allowing the leakage of key heat.

You don’t have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes normally suck things in, not spew things out. But NASA detected something mighty bizarre at the supermassive black hole Markarian 335. Two of NASA’s space telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), amazingly observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black hole.

Then an enormous pulse of X-ray energy spewed out. This kind of phenomena has never been observed before.

After decades of inertial confinement fusion research, a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) was achieved at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) National Ignition Facility (NIF) for the first time on Aug. 8, 2021, putting researchers at the threshold of fusion gain and achieving scientific ignition.

On the one-year anniversary of this historic achievement, the scientific results of this record experiment have been published in three peer-reviewed papers: one in Physical Review Letters and two in Physical Review E (See papers one and two). More than 1,000 authors are included in the Physical Review Letters paper to recognize and acknowledge the many individuals who have worked over many decades to enable this significant advance.

“The record shot was a major scientific advance in fusion research, which establishes that fusion ignition in the lab is possible at NIF,” said Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for LLNL’s inertial confinement fusion program. “Achieving the conditions needed for ignition has been a long-standing goal for all inertial confinement fusion research and opens access to a new experimental regime where alpha-particle self-heating outstrips all the cooling mechanisms in the fusion plasma.”