Lifeboat Foundation

Materials are crucial to modern technology, especially those used in extreme environments like nuclear energy systems and military applications. These materials need to withstand intense pressure, temperature and corrosion. Understanding their lattice-level behavior under such conditions is essential for developing next-generation materials that are more resilient, cheaper, lighter and sustainable.

Using a novel laser method, scientists mimicked the extreme environments of stars and planets, enhancing our understanding of astrophysical phenomena and supporting nuclear fusion research.

Extreme conditions prevail inside stars and planets. The pressure reaches millions of bars, and it can be several million degrees hot. Sophisticated methods make it possible to create such states of matter in the laboratory – albeit only for the blink of an eye and in a tiny volume. So far, this has required the world’s most powerful lasers, such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California. But there are only a few of these light giants, and the opportunities for experiments are correspondingly rare.

A research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), together with colleagues from the European XFEL, has now succeeded in creating and observing extreme conditions with a much smaller laser. At the heart of the new technology is a copper wire, finer than a human hair, as the group reports in the journal Nature Communications.

China has announced the construction of a nuclear power plant that will be fuelled by liquid fuel based on molten thorium salt. The Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP) has been engaged in research in this area since 2011 focusing on liquid fluoride-thorium reactors (LFTRs). The construction of a prototype of a thorium molten salt reactor (TMSR) with a capacity of 2 MW began in September 2018 and was reportedly completed in August 2021. China is seeking to get full intellectual property rights to this technology.

Now China plans to build the world’s first NPP based on molten salt in the Gobi desert. Construction will begin in 2025 with the aim of developing safer and more environmentally friendly nuclear energy. The reactor does not need water for cooling, since it uses liquid salt and carbon dioxide to transfer heat and generate electricity.

In 2022, SINAP received permission from the Ministry of Ecology and Environmental Protection to commission an experimental MTSR. This is the first nuclear molten salt reactor since the United States stopped its molten salt test reactor in 1969. The application for the operation of the experimental reactor was considered in China in June 2023, it was considered to be fully compliant with safety requirements.

Hydrogen has been defined on numerous occasions as “the fuel of the future”. We have seen other alternatives, such as ammonia or even methanol (which you may remember meeting with us), but what if there was an even more powerful one? Hawking predicted decades ago that the most powerful one could exist, and now they have finally created it. This is the new engine that has everything to revolutionize the planet but would require a huge mobilization of resources to manufacture.

The idea of using thorium for fueling cars has created the immense interest from auto enthusiasts, as such cars may become a clean, efficient and almost inexhaustible energy source for transport in the future. Nevertheless, the prospects of this technology are not as simple as may be suggested by this example, and at the moment, this technology is still rather hypothetical.

A thorium-powered car engine concept is based on the use of the radioactive material known as thorium as fuel. In principle, this engine employed a tiny measure of thorium to release heat through nuclear fission, and the heat was further transformed into electricity to run the car.

One startup is planning to place a nuclear reactor one mile below the Earth’s surface to generate cleaner energy.

Building a nuclear fusion reactor capable of providing green energy for homes and industry is the goal of many physicists around the world, but many roadblocks stand between our present and this green energy future. While some of those hurdles have been overcome, building robust materials capable of surviving the hellish conditions inside tokamaks is the next frontier.

As engineers construct next-generation fusion reactors, like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France, labs around the world are working on creating exotic materials capable of containing super-hot plasma while also generating electricity. One of those labs is MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), which is dedicated to finding ways to make future reactors more robust and reliable.

Lithium metal exposed to the heat of a fusion reaction chamber’s hot plasma can serve as a coolant to protect the reactor vessel.

The 2011 accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant in Japan inspired extensive research and analysis that elevated nuclear energy into a standard bearer for safety. It also inspired a number of studies at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. Scientists want to look more closely at nuclear fuel materials to better understand how they will behave at extremely high temperatures.

Magnetic confinement fusion devices are technologies that can attain controlled nuclear fusion reactions, using magnetic fields to confine hot plasmas. These devices could contribute to the ongoing transition towards more sustainable energy production methods.