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Category: nuclear energy

To develop a practical fusion power system, scientists need to fully understand how the plasma fuel interacts with its surroundings. The plasma is superheated, which means some of the atoms involved can strike the wall of the fusion vessel and become embedded. To keep the system working efficiently, it’s important to know how much fuel might be trapped.

“The less fuel is trapped in the wall, the less radioactive material builds up,” said Shota Abe, a staff research physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

Abe is the lead researcher on a study published in Nuclear Materials and Energy. The study looks specifically at how much —thought to be one of the best fuels for —might get stuck in the boron-coated, graphite walls of a doughnut-shaped fusion vessel known as a tokamak. Boron is used in some experimental fusion systems to reduce plasma impurities. However, researchers do not fully understand how a boron coating might impact the amount of fusion fuel that leaves the plasma and becomes embedded in the vessel walls.

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Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have invented an entirely new field of microscopy called nuclear spin microscopy. The team can visualize magnetic signals of nuclear magnetic resonance with a microscope. Quantum sensors convert the signals into light, enabling extremely high-resolution optical imaging.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners are known for their ability to look deep into the human body and create images of organs and tissues. The new method, published in the journal Nature Communications, extends this technique to the realm of microscopic detail.

“The used make it possible to convert signals into optical signals. These signals are captured by a camera and displayed as images,” explains Dominik Bucher, Professor of Quantum Sensing and researcher at the Cluster of Excellence Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology (MCQST).

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Researchers have developed a battery that can convert nuclear energy into electricity via light emission, a new study suggests.

Nuclear power plants, which generate about 20% of all electricity produced in the United States, produce almost no greenhouse gas emissions. However, these systems do create , which can be dangerous to human health and the environment. Safely disposing of this waste can be challenging.

Using a combination of scintillator crystals, high-density materials that emit light when they absorb radiation, and , the team, led by researchers from The Ohio State University, demonstrated that ambient gamma radiation could be harvested to produce a strong enough electric output to power microelectronics, like microchips.

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General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) recently announced that it has successfully completed a series of key tests at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). These tests are a major step forward in developing Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) technology, which could enable faster and more efficient transportation for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Conducted in collaboration with NASA, the tests evaluated whether GA-EMS’s specially designed nuclear fuel can withstand the extreme conditions required for space travel.

Advancing Deep Space Travel

“The recent testing results represent a critical milestone in the successful demonstration of fuel design for NTP reactors,” said Scott Forney, president of GA-EMS. “Fuel must survive extremely high temperatures and the hot hydrogen gas environment that an NTP reactor operating in space would typically encounter. We’re very encouraged by the positive test results proving the fuel can survive these operational conditions, moving us closer to realizing the potential of safe, reliable nuclear thermal propulsion for cislunar and deep space missions.”

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A team of engineers and physicists at Southern University of Science and Technology, in China, has created a nickel-based material that behaves as a superconductor above the −233°C (40 K) threshold under ambient pressure. In their study published in Nature, the researchers synthesized thin films of bilayer nickelate (La₂.₈₅Pr₀.₁₅Ni₂O₇) and found one that behaved as a high-temperature superconductor.

The −233°C threshold (40 K), often associated with the McMillan limit, marks a boundary beyond which conventional superconductivity theories become less predictive.

Scientists have been searching for a room-temperature superconductor that could revolutionize a wide range of technologies. The ability to achieve superconductivity without the need for costly and complex cooling systems would significantly reduce energy loss due to heat conversion in electrical transmission, leading to dramatic improvements in efficiency and cost reduction. This breakthrough could lead to advancements in numerous fields, including maglev trains, fusion reactors and MRI machine components. This new effort by the team in China represents another step in reaching the ultimate goal.

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A strontium optical clock produces about 50,000 times more oscillations per second than a cesium clock, the basis for the current definition of a second.

Advances in atomic clocks may lead to a redefinition of the second, replacing the caesium standard (recent work on thorium nuclear transitions is still a long way from taking that role).

Also, NIST uses egg incubators(!) to control temperature & humidity.

New atomic clocks are more accurate than those used to define the second, suggesting the definition might need to change.

Continue reading “World’s Most Accurate Clocks Could Redefine Time” | >

In today’s AI news, in a social media post, DeepSeek said the daily releases it is planning for its Open Source Week would provide visibility into these humble building blocks in our online service that have been documented, deployed and battle-tested in production. As part of the open-source community, we believe that every line shared becomes collective momentum that accelerates the journey.

In other advancements, Together AI an AI cloud platform that enables companies to train and deploy artificial intelligence models — has raised $305 million in Series B funding in a round led by General Catalyst, more than doubling its valuation to $3.3 billion from $1.25 billion last March. The funding comes amid growing demand for computing power to run advanced open-source models.

In personal and professional development, if you’re curious about how to integrate AI smartly into your business, here are some friendly tips to get you started while keeping things safe and effective. The key is strategic integration with safeguards in place, use AI’s strengths — without losing your own.

Then, search startup Genspark has raised $100 million in a series A funding round, valuing the startup at $530 million, according to a source familiar with the matter, as the race to use artificial intelligence to disrupt Google’s stranglehold on the search engine market heats up. The Palo Alto-based company currently has over 2 million monthly active users, and the round was led by a group of U.S. and Singapore-based investors.

S like to compete with Google, and what the future of search could look like. + Then, as AI scales from the cloud to the very edges of our devices, the potential for transformative innovation grows exponentially. In this Imagination In Action session at Davos, Daniel Newman, CEO The Futurum Group moderates this expert panel which includes: Åsa Tamsons, Executive VP, Ericsson, Gill Pratt, CEO Toyota Research, Chief Scientist Toyota, Kinuko Masaki, CEO, VoiceBrain, Cyril Perducat, CTO, Rockwell Automation, and Alexander Amini, CSO, Liquid AI.

Continue reading “DeepSeek Goes Beyond “Open Weights” AI With Plans For It’s Source Code Release” | >

UK-based Core Power has announced that it plans to mass produce a fleet of floating nuclear power plants (FNPPs) using advanced reactor design and modular shipbuilding to be anchored off the US coast in about 10 years.

Nuclear power is enjoying something of a renaissance with many countries turning to the atom to meet their energy needs. However, the bottleneck for increasing the nuclear sector isn’t with manufacturing reactors. It’s the civil engineering side of things, with most of the time and cost going to securing real estate for building the foundations and buildings for the plant as well as navigating a bewildering maze of permits, licenses, and planning permissions.

To get around this as well as speed up production, Core Power plans to use Generation 4 reactor design combined with conventional modular shipbuilding methods to crank out floating nuclear plants on an assembly line basis. To reflect this, the company is referring to this as the “Liberty program” in a call back to the famous Liberty ships of the Second World War that were built at a speed of as fast as four days for one hull.

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Particles in high-energy nuclear collisions move in a way that follows a pattern known as Lévy walks, a motion found across many scientific fields.

Named after mathematician Paul Lévy, Lévy walks (or, in some cases, Lévy flights) describe a type of random movement seen in nature and various scientific processes. This pattern appears in diverse phenomena, from how predators search for food to economic fluctuations, microbiology, chemical reactions, and even climate dynamics.

Lévy walks in high-energy nuclear collisions.

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Plasma arc cutting (PAC) is a thermal cutting technique widely used in manufacturing applications such as shipbuilding, aerospace, fabrication, nuclear plants decommissioning, construction industry, and the automotive industry. In this process, a jet of plasma or ionized gas is ejected at high speeds, which melts and subsequently removes unwanted parts of materials from electrically conductive workpieces such as metals.

The plasma jet is typically produced in two steps: pressuring a gas through a small nozzle hole and generating an electric arc via power supply. Remarkably, the introduced arc ionizes the gas coming out of the nozzle, which in turn generates plasma with extremely high temperatures. This enables the plasma jet to easily, quickly, and precisely slice different metals and alloys.

The quality of workpieces cut using PAC depends on various factors: kind of plasma gas and its pressure, nozzle hole shape and size, arc current and voltage, cutting speed, and distance between the torch and the workpiece. While most of these factors are well understood in the context of PAC, the impact of gas flow dynamics on cut quality remains less clearly known. This is mainly due to challenges in visualization of the flow dynamics.

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