A ground-breaking fusion reactor built by Chinese scientists is underscoring Beijing’s determination to be at the core of clean energy technology, as it eyes a fully-functioning plant by 2050.
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Category: nuclear energy – Page 123
Particles travelling through empty space can emit bright flashes of gamma rays by interacting with the quantum vacuum, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Strathclyde.
It has long been known that charged particles, such as electrons and protons, produce the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom when their speeds exceed that of photons in the surrounding medium. This effect, known as Cherenkov emission, is responsible for the characteristic blue glow from water in a nuclear reactor, and is used to detect particles at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
According to Einstein, nothing can travel faster than light in vacuum. Because of this, it is usually assumed that the Cherenkov emission cannot occur in vacuum. But according to quantum theory, the vacuum itself is packed full of “virtual particles”, which move momentarily in and out of existence.
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China’s “artificial sun” will achieve nuclear fusion by the middle of this century, one of the project leaders said Wednesday.
HL-2M Tokamak, the modified Chinese-designed “artificial sun” and a device to harness energy from fusion, will be completed this year. It is expected to increase the electricity intensity from one mega amperes to three mega amperes, an important step to achieve nuclear fusion, a spokesperson surnamed Liu with the press office of the Southwestern Institute of Physics (SWIP), affiliated with China National Nuclear Corporation, told the Global Times. An ampere is a standard measurement of electric current.
For instance, the deuterium (also known as heavy hydrogen) extracted from one liter of seawater releases the energy equivalent of burning 300 liters of gasoline in a complete fusion reaction, Liu said.
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Circa 2018
Lockheed Martin quietly obtained a patent for what could be a game-changing nuclear fusion reactor, one that could potentially fit into a fighter jet.
If the latest patent from defence manufacturing giant Lockheed Martin is anything to go by, nuclear fusion technology could revolutionise the future of travel.
For those not in the know, a nuclear fusion reactor is one of the holy grails of science, promising to replicate the inner workings of the sun in a confined reactor, capable of generating huge, near-limitless amounts of energy cheaply with no environmental impact.
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Artificial intelligence (AI), a branch of computer science that is transforming scientific inquiry and industry, could now speed the development of safe, clean and virtually limitless fusion energy for generating electricity. A major step in this direction is under way at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University, where a team of scientists working with a Harvard graduate student is for the first time applying deep learning—a powerful new version of the machine learning form of AI—to forecast sudden disruptions that can halt fusion reactions and damage the doughnut-shaped tokamaks that house the reactions.
Promising new chapter in fusion research
“This research opens a promising new chapter in the effort to bring unlimited energy to Earth,” Steve Cowley, director of PPPL, said of the findings, which are reported in the current issue of Nature magazine. “Artificial intelligence is exploding across the sciences and now it’s beginning to contribute to the worldwide quest for fusion power.”
When it comes to the kinds of technology needed to contain a sun, there are currently just two horses in the race. Neither is what you’d call ‘petite’.
An earlier form of fusion technology that barely made it out of the starting blocks has just overcome a serious hurdle. It’s got a long way to catch up, but given its potential cost and versatility, a table-sized fusion device like this is worth watching out for.
While many have long given up on an early form of plasma confinement called the Z-pinch as a feasible way to generate power, researchers at the University of Washington in the US have continued to look for a way to overcome its shortcomings.
The operator of Japan’s ruined Fukushima nuclear power plant began removing radioactive fuel rods on Monday at one of three reactors that melted down after an earthquake and a tsunami in 2011, a major milestone in the long-delayed cleanup effort.
Thousands of former residents have been barred from the area around the plant for years as crews carried out a large-scale radioactive waste cleanup in the aftermath of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The process of removing the fuel rods from a storage pool had been delayed since 2014 amid technical mishaps and high radiation levels.
The plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power, said in a statement that workers on Monday morning began removing the first of 566 spent and unspent fuel rods stored in a pool at the plant’s third reactor. A radiation-hardened robot had first located the melted uranium fuel inside the reactor in 2017.
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Nuclear fusion holds untold potential as a source of power, but to recreate the colliding atomic nuclei taking place inside the Sun and generate inexhaustible amounts of clean energy scientists will need to achieve remarkable things. Tokamak reactors and fusion stellarators are a couple of the experimental devices used in pursuit of these lofty goals, but scientists at the University of Washington (UW) are taking a far less-frequented route known as a Z-pinch, with the early signs pointing to a cheaper and more efficient path forward.
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