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Category: nuclear energy – Page 67

But the benefits of fusion reaction are immense. Apart from generating much more energy, fusion produces no carbon emissions, the raw materials are in sufficient supply, produces much less radioactive waste compared to fission, and is considered much safer.

Over the years, scientists have been able to draw up the plan for a fusion nuclear reactor. It is called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) and is being built in southern France with the collaboration of 35 countries, including India which is one of the seven partners, alongside the European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China.

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European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion — the energy process that powers the stars.

The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen.

If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy.

The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds, more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.

Continue reading “Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy — BBC News” | >

Feb 2 (Reuters) — State-owned China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) has signed a contract in Argentina to build the $8 billion Atucha III nuclear power plant using China’s Hualong One technology, reviving a deal that had been stalled for years.

CNNC said on its WeChat account late on Tuesday that ithad signed an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract, which comes ahead of Argentine President Alberto Fernandez’s trip to China later this week.

Progress on the nuclear deal between the two nations had stalled since it was first negotiated by the administration of former President Cristina Fernandez, a left-wing populist who left office in 2015. She is now Argentina’s vice president.

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Stars are giant balls of gas that emit light and heat. They are mostly made up of hydrogen and helium gases and can have huge masses. For instance, the heaviest star yet found in our universe, called R136a1, has a mass of around 315 times that of our Sun and is almost 9 million times more luminous.

Stars are so heavy that they should collapse due to the inward force of gravity exerted by their own weight but thanks to the nuclear fusion reactions taking place in their cores, the massive inward gravitational force is balanced by the strong heat and pressures found within a star. This balance between gravity and gas pressure from energy generation is called hydrostatic equilibrium, and it is both self-regulating and finely tuned. goes up must come down, as the saying goes, but what is gravity?

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New research published in Human Brain Mapping provides evidence of a shared neural mechanism that underlies sleep disturbance and mental disorders in preadolescents. The findings indicate that sleep disturbance and mental health problems are both related to the connectivity between and within two important brain networks.

“I noticed the importance of sleep years ago when I read several papers about the immediate amyloid protein deposition in the brain after short-term sleep deprivation. Amyloid is neurotoxic waste in the brain and needs to be transported out by cerebrospinal fluid,” said study author Ze Wang, an associate professor of diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“But cerebrospinal fluid is basically static most of the time. The best time to have more cerebrospinal fluid and increased flow rate is at night when you lay down and fall asleep. It is this time that our cerebral blood flow reduces. Because our brain has a fixed size, the reduction of cerebral blood flow creates space for cerebrospinal fluid and the inhomogeneous change of blood flow creates power for cerebrospinal fluid to flow and then transport the neural waste out. This is why our brain generates two times as much cerebrospinal fluid at night than daytime.”

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We’ve been trying for a long time to make a tiny Sun on Earth, one that would sustainably produce energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen or similar atoms. Come to think of it, I’d like one for my basement.

Fusion requires quite a bit of heat to get going, but once it does, it starts producing its own heat. If you can keep that system contained so it doesn’t expand too much or allow too much heat to escape, further fusion happens. If it reaches a point where self-heating becomes the primary driver of fusion, you have yourself a “burning plasma”.

The actual Sun has a pretty easy time sustaining fusion because of the crushing gravity at its center, but we Earthlings need to be a bit more creative to achieve that here at home (because we don’t have any 4-nonillion pound weights handy). The burning plasma, indeed a tiny star, is one of the key milestones on the path to usable nuclear fusion. Until now, no one had ever made such a thing.

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Using less power than a lightbulb. A team of engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) has developed a relatively low-cost “artificial leaf” that can capture carbon dioxide at rates 100 times faster than existing systems, bringing us one step closer to the goal of engineering the process of photosynthesis by which plants convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into energy.

Nuclear waste can be very harmful to humans and the ecosystem. Watch how it’s handled in our video.

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