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Blog – Page 220

Tesla’s Megapack grid-scale storage systems have been selected for yet another solar energy and storage project, this time set to be installed in Chile.

Chilean energy storage developer Colbún has announced plans to install over 200 Tesla Megapacks as part of the 228 MW/912 MWh Celda Solar project in the northern part of the country, as detailed in a press release shared this week. The site will be constructed in the Camarones, Arica and Parinacota region, and the company estimates the total cost to be around $260 million.

“Energy storage will play an increasing role in the Chilean electricity system, allowing solar energy generated during the day to be accumulated and supplied to the system at night,” writes José Ignacio Escobar, Colbún CEO, as translated into English from Spanish. “Our energy stored in the reservoirs in the south complements perfectly with the energy that we will store in our batteries in the north, thus having a safe, diversified and competitive offer for our clients from Arica to Puerto Montt.”

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Scientists from the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reported evidence of a new antimatter particle called antihyperhelium-4, essentially the “evil twin” of another weird particle called hyperhelium-4. This incredibly exotic form of matter contains two antiprotons, an antineutron, and an unstable particle called an antilambda comprised of subatomic quarks.

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However, “the idea that Saturn’s rings are young seemed very strange in the context of the solar system’s long evolutionary history,” study lead author Ryuki Hyodo, a planetary scientist at the Institute of Science Tokyo, told Space.com. “A few million years ago is the time of the dinosaurs on Earth. This would mean that the solar system was already well-established and relatively stable.”

In contrast, when Saturn formed about 4.5 billion years ago, or during the era called the Late Heavy Bombardment about 4 billion years ago, “the solar system was far more chaotic,” Hyodo said. “Many large planetary bodies were still migrating and interacting, greatly increasing the chances of a significant event that could have led to the formation of Saturn’s rings.”

To shed light on the age of Saturn’s rings, in the new study, Hyodo and his colleagues developed 3D computer models simulating crashes between micrometeoroids and the rings. These impacts typically occur at speeds of about 67,100 mph (108,000 km/h), they said.

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Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup that was spun out of a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research labs, announced plans this week to break ground on what it calls “the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant.” The plant which is expected to come online sometime in the early 2030s, according to the company, will be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

The plan is certainly an ambitious one, starting with how the energy will be generated. Nuclear fusion is a notoriously difficult process that involves fusing together two light atomic nuclei into a single heavier one, resulting in the release of a massive amount of energy—it’s estimated to produce four times as much energy as nuclear fission reactions. The reaction that nuclear fusion generates is the same kind of reaction that powers the sun.

It’s not hard to imagine why one would want to be able to harness the energy of the sun. It is hard to actually, ya know, do that, though. To date, nuclear fusion has proven elusive—at least in a way that would produce usable energy. In 2022, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California reached nuclear fusion “ignition” for the first time, meaning they successfully produced an excess of energy from the reactions. Prior to that breakthrough, which has since been replicated, it took more energy to produce the reaction than energy that came from it.

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