Many plans have been hatched to bring more water to CA, but it’s better to build desalination plants. And even better to power them with small nuclear reactors. Thirty desal plants produces a billion gallons/day and would cost the same as a water pipeline stealing water from the Pacific Northwest.
Physicists have scaled down the maximum possible mass of an elusive “ghost particle” called a neutrino to at least one-millionth the weight of an electron. The revision takes scientists one more step toward a discovery that could alter or even upend the Standard Model of particle physics.
Our universe is awash with phantom specks of matter. Every second, around 100 billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body. They’re produced in multiple places: the nuclear fire of stars, in enormous stellar explosions, by radioactive decay and in particle accelerators and nuclear reactors on Earth.
Even though they’re the most common form of matter in the cosmos, neutrinos’ minimal interactions with other matter types makes them notoriously difficult to detect, and they’re the only particles in the Standard Model whose precise mass remains unaccounted for.
UPTON, N.Y. — High temperatures and ionizing radiation create extremely corrosive environments inside a nuclear reactor. To design long-lasting reactors, scientists must understand how radiation-induced chemical reactions impact structural materials. Chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory recently performed experiments showing that radiation-induced reactions may help mitigate the corrosion of reactor metals in a new type of reactor cooled by molten salts. Their findings are published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.
“Molten salt reactors are an emerging technology for safer, scalable nuclear energy production. These advanced reactors can operate at higher, more efficient temperatures than traditional water-cooled reactor technologies while maintaining relatively ambient pressure,” explained James Wishart, a distinguished chemist at Brookhaven Lab and leader of the research.
Unlike water-cooled reactors, molten salt reactors use a coolant made entirely of positively and negatively charged ions, which remain in a liquid state only at high temperatures. It’s similar to melting table salt crystals until they flow without adding any other liquid.
Research teams have established a theoretical method for designing smooth curved wall surfaces with variable cross-section shock tubes, and developed an integrated, high-intensity multifunctional shock tube device. Led by Prof. Luo Xisheng and Prof. Si Ting from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the study was published in Review of Scientific Instruments.
Based on the device and techniques, the research team further developed a discontinuous perturbation interface generation technology, pioneering the experimental and mechanistic study of strong shock wave impact on single-mode fluid interface instability in shock tubes. The results were published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
Shock wave-induced fluid interface instability is a common key scientific issue in aerospace vehicles and inertial confinement nuclear fusion, while the related basic theories are still insufficient. Shock tubes are often employed to carry out basic aerodynamics research. However, the controllable generation of regularly-shaped, high-energy utilization converging shock waves and strong shock waves still remains a challenge.
Top minds at the world’s largest atom smasher have released a blueprint for a much bigger successor that could vastly improve research into the remaining enigmas of physics.
The plans for the Future Circular Collider—a nearly 91-kilometer (56.5-mile) loop along the French-Swiss border and below Lake Geneva—published late Monday put the finishing details on a project roughly a decade in the making at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
The FCC would carry out high-precision experiments in the mid-2040s to study “known physics” in greater detail, then enter a second phase—planned for 2070—that would conduct high-energy collisions of protons and heavy ions that would “open the door to the unknown,” said Giorgio Chiarelli, a research director at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics.
Laser-powered nuclear fusion is now a reality! Achieved in just 20 quadrillionths of a second, this breakthrough could revolutionize clean energy production.
Facing a growing uranium demand fueled by expanding nuclear energy, China is turning to the vast reserves hidden in its oceans.
An international team led by Rutgers University-New Brunswick researchers has merged two lab-synthesized materials into a synthetic quantum structure once thought impossible to exist and produced an exotic structure expected to provide insights that could lead to new materials at the core of quantum computing.
The work, described in a cover story in the journal Nano Letters, explains how four years of continuous experimentation led to a novel method to design and build a unique, tiny sandwich composed of distinct atomic layers.
One slice of the microscopic structure is made of dysprosium titanate, an inorganic compound used in nuclear reactors to trap radioactive materials and contain elusive magnetic monopole particles, while the other is composed of pyrochlore iridate, a new magnetic semimetal mainly used in today’s experimental research due to its distinctive electronic, topological and magnetic properties.
Nuclear fusion is a source of great hope for future energy security, with this field being explored in research reactors around the world. Accurately detecting their performance requires measurement systems that supply valid data even under extreme conditions. And the centerpiece of those systems are the bolometers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM. Experts from the institute will be presenting their sophisticated sensors at the joint Fraunhofer booth (Hall 2, Booth B24) at this year’s Hannover Messe trade show from March 31 to April 4.
Fusion technology could be the solution to the increasing energy needs of the growing global population, but it is a highly demanding technology. The current challenge is to carry out fusion experiments that produce more energy than they consume. To accurately capture advances in this field, specialists need exceptionally sensitive measuring instruments to analyze and control the complex processes taking place inside the reactors. Determining how much power is emitted from the fusion plasma is crucial to this.
A newly developed framework for quantifying uncertainties enhances the predictive power of analog quantum simulations. Simulating quantum many-body systems is a major objective in nuclear and high-energy physics. These systems involve large numbers of interacting particles governed by the laws of