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Category: nuclear energy – Page 2

Metals’ atomic arrangement can create ‘corrosion highways’ in nuclear reactors

Nuclear reactors are traditionally powered with dense fuel rods that can produce about 1 gigawatt of carbon-free electricity, enough to power about 100,000,000 lightbulbs. Newer power plant designs using molten salt for cooling instead of the water found in traditional reactors could offer better efficiency and stability, but they face a problem—the extreme chemical environment created by the molten salt can corrode the metal comprising the reactor.

A team led by engineers at Penn State found that adjusting the subtle atomic arrangement of structural metals can significantly affect the rate and extent of this corrosion, even with identical baseline chemical compositions. They did this by creating a series of reactive simulations to isolate and study this corrosion mechanism. Their findings are available online ahead of publication in the August issue of Corrosion Science.

Quantum computers model nine fusion fuel material configurations for first time

A team of scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Cleveland Clinic and IBM has calculated nine molecular configurations of a promising material to produce fuel for fusion energy—the first known instance of such computations on quantum computers.

Such calculations, demonstrated in a new paper published on the arXiv preprint server, are computationally challenging for classical computers to scale when working alone. They are a fundamental step toward optimizing the production and extraction of tritium—an extremely rare material in nature that is necessary to produce fusion energy with most of the proposed machines. Ensuring adequate supplies of tritium has long been a barrier to realizing the promise of clean, abundant energy from fusion power plants, and solving this issue is a key objective of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission.

Quantum computers are well-suited to computing the atomic-level chemistry of a liquid salt that contains fluorine, lithium and beryllium (FLiBe), one of the leading candidate materials for extracting tritium fuel in fusion reactors. To compute different configurations of clusters of FLiBe, the team used the same quantum-centric supercomputing techniques now being applied to 12,635-atom protein simulations with Cleveland Clinic. These methods can calculate the quantum behavior of electrons in complex materials, complementing and enhancing the capabilities of classical supercomputers and algorithms.

Detecting neutron sources by borrowing inference tools from cosmology

Neutron sources can be directly identified from measured spectra rather than proxies using inference tools adapted from cosmology, according to a University of Michigan Engineering study published in Physical Review Applied. The method can improve nuclear security by helping intercept materials at ports or borders or guide first responders during emergency response.

Directly detecting and characterizing a neutron source remains a challenge because most nuclear materials emit neutrons with energy patterns, called neutron spectra, that look similar to one another—whether from a benign industrial isotope or fissile material.

“This problem sits at the intersection of fundamental physics, statistics and real-world nuclear security. There is a very practical need to identify unknown neutron-emitting materials, but there is also a deep scientific challenge: How do you extract reliable information from signals that are weak, noisy and highly similar?” said David Breitenmoser, a postdoctoral research fellow of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at U-M and lead author of the study.

Startup activates nuclear microreactor live on stage to power an Nvidia RTX Spark desktop PC — firm working with Nvidia to build a 30MW closed loop AI factory that doesn’t use local water

Will this solve the AI boom’s power and water bottlenecks?

Plutonium compound unlocks rare topological quantum behavior with potential nuclear science applications

Plutonium is one of the most complex elements in the periodic table. First synthesized and isolated in 1940 by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, plutonium has been studied closely for more than eight decades. It’s most often associated with its role in nuclear security, but it’s also vital to nuclear power, where it is produced in reactors and can be recycled as fuel. Despite plutonium’s importance, some of its most fundamental behaviors remain a mystery.

Scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have made an important discovery: A compound called plutonium hexaboride (PuB₆) exhibits a one-of-a-kind quantum property known as a topological Kondo insulating state. Published in Physical Review Research, this finding marks one of only a handful of times such behavior has been observed in a plutonium material—opening a new window for research into how some of nature’s most complex elements actually work.

First-of-a-kind laser spring opens up new avenues for plasma control

When a high-intensity laser interacts with plasma, the charged particles typically oscillate back and forth like waves on the ocean. But what if the laser itself could twist like a whirlpool? Researchers have now demonstrated a rotating, spring-shaped laser pulse, opening new possibilities for fusion energy, particle acceleration, astrophysics and beyond.

In new research published in Nature Photonics, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the University of California, Irvine, demonstrated the first high-intensity “light spring” laser.

Unlike conventional laser beams, a light spring rotates around its central axis at a controllable rate. If shone onto a wall, the beam pattern would trace out circles over time.

New superconductors identified, unlocking process that could yield thousands more

An international team of quantum researchers has shown how machine learning can be used to filter a practically infinite number of possible material combinations to identify candidates for superconductivity. Thanks to the breakthrough, new superconductors can now be found much faster, says Aalto University Professor Päivi Törmä, who leads the SuperC consortium behind the research.

Superconductors carry electric current with zero resistance, thanks to a quantum effect appearing only at extremely low temperatures. They power not only quantum computers but many other things, from neuroimaging to fusion reactors and maglev trains.

However, these unicorn materials are prohibitively hard to identify. Any endlessly variable combination of elements could be a superconductor—yet few actually are. And the ones already discovered require expensive cooling equipment to bring them to the near-absolute-zero temperatures that give them their quantum properties.

The Intelligence Explosion is Coming

The race toward an imminent intelligence explosion has escalated from a sci-fi thought experiment into a high-stakes global debate.

Accelerating progress across model reasoning and compute infrastructure forces a critical question: is Artificial General Intelligence already arriving?

Silicon Valley insiders frequently claim human-level AI has passed us by, though critics warn these declarations are heavily warped by financial incentives.

If an AI system successfully achieves recursive self-improvement, the resulting technological singularity could compress centuries of human progress into mere hours.

A best-case takeoff promises staggering rewards like clean fusion energy, automated economic abundance, and radical medical breakthroughs that extend human lifespans indefinitely.

Modeling nuclear fusion at lightning speed

As we scour and scorch the Earth for deeper wells of energy, investors and government agencies are pouring billions into nuclear fusion research. The hope is that fusion may ultimately provide a virtually limitless source of clean energy.

And there’s reason to hope.

Fusion powers the stars, including our sun, and scientists have recently shown that it’s feasible to replicate this reaction here on Earth.

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