Lifeboat Foundation

Texas is known as the dominant oil state in the US, and its grid is not the most renewable in the world. But because of its size, its traditional reliance on fossil fuels, and its rapid recent uptake of solar and batteries in the face of fierce winter storms and searing summer heat, it has been centre stage for those watching the energy transition.

It’s also interesting for Australia, because although it has about the same population, its grid demand is almost twice as great as Australia’s main grid, yet its average wind and solar penetration (31 per cent) and its peak instantaneous wind and solar penetration (71 per cent) are about the same.

While Australia is dependent still on coal, the main fossil on the Texas grid is gas, with supporting roles for nuclear and an ever decreasing amount of coal. Texas made its initial move into renewables with big wind, but is now more focused on large scale solar and battery storage.

Scientists at PPPL have developed innovative solutions to manage the intense heat generated within fusion reactors.

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Nuclear power is one of the most promising ways to create a clean, cheap, and consistent flow of electricity. Unfortunately, it also produces radioactive waste, which can stick around for…a very long time. However, that waste issue might just be changing thanks to a process called transmutation. A Swiss company just got approval for the first accelerator-driven nuclear reactor that can do transmutation. How does this work? Let’s take a look.

Continue reading “Energy from Nuclear Waste: Switzerland Approves first Accellerator-Driven Reactor” »

In the scorched aftermath of World War III, the Earth is a nuclear wasteland, and humanity’s last hope lies in autonomous war machines called \.

Adding or removing neutrons from an atomic nucleus leads to changes in the size of the nucleus. This in turn causes tiny changes in the energy levels of the atom’s electrons, known as isotope shifts. Scientists can use precision measurements of these energy shifts to measure the radius of the nucleus of an isotope.

Nuclear power already has an energy density advantage over other sources of thermal electricity generation. But what if nuclear generation didn’t require a steam turbine? What if the radiation from a reactor was less a problem to be managed and more a source of energy? And what if an energy conversion technology could scale to fit nuclear power systems ranging from miniature batteries to the grid? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is asking these types of questions in a request for information on High Power Direct Energy Conversion from Nuclear Power Systems, released August 1.

Some experts believe that the future of fusion in the U.S. may be found in compact, spherical fusion vessels. A smaller tokamak is seen as a potentially more economical solution for fusion energy. The challenge lies in fitting all necessary components into a limited space. Recent research indicates that removing one key component used to heat the plasma could create the additional space required.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), the private company Tokamak Energy, and Kyushu University in Japan have proposed a design for a compact, spherical fusion pilot plant that heats the plasma using only microwaves. Typically, spherical tokamaks also use a massive coil of copper wire called a solenoid, located near the center of the vessel, to heat the plasma. Neutral beam injection, which involves applying beams of uncharged particles to the plasma, is often used as well. But much like a tiny kitchen is easier to design if it has fewer appliances, it would be simpler and more economical to make a compact tokamak if it has fewer heating systems.

The new approach eliminates ohmic heating, which is the same heating that happens in a toaster and is standard in tokamaks. “A compact, spherical tokamak plasma looks like a cored apple with a relatively small core, so one does not have the space for an ohmic heating coil,” said Masayuki Ono, a principal research physicist at PPPL and lead author of the paper detailing the new research. “If we don’t have to include an ohmic heating coil, we can probably design a machine that is easier and cheaper to build.”

Our future energy may depend on high-temperature superconducting (HTS) wires. This technology’s ability to carry electricity without resistance at temperatures higher than those required by traditional superconductors could revolutionize the electric grid and even enable commercial nuclear fusion.

As we have alluded to numerous times when talking about the next “AI” trade, data centers will be the “factories of the future” when it comes to the age of AI.

That’s the contention of Chris Miller, the author of Chip War, who penned a recent opinion column for Financial Times noting that ‘chip wars’ could very soon become ‘cloud wars’

He points out that the strategic use of high-powered computing dates back to the Cold War when the US allowed the USSR limited access to supercomputers for weather forecasting, not nuclear simulations.