Lifeboat Foundation

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing had a budget of $730 million, most of it funded by the US Department of Energy, with a $94.5 million contribution from the state of Michigan. MSU contributed an additional $212 million in various ways, including the land. It replaces an earlier National Science Foundation accelerator, called the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), at the same site. Construction of FRIB started in 2014 and was completed late last year, “five months early and on budget”, says nuclear physicist Bradley Sherrill, who is FRIB’s science director.

For decades, nuclear physicists had been pushing for a facility of its power — one that could produce rare isotopes orders of magnitude faster than is possible with the NSCL and similar accelerators worldwide. The first proposals for such a machine came in the late 1980s, and consensus was reached in the 1990s. “The community was adamant that we need to get a tool like this,” says Witold Nazarewicz, a theoretical nuclear physicist and FRIB’s chief scientist.

James McCall SpringerHmmm… So quantum computing systems aren’t close to being perfected BUT they’re being used for ransomware attacks?

Is “bleepingcomouter” a bs sensationalist media producer like Futurism?

Len Rosen shared a link.

Continue reading “Russia’s Attack on Ukraine is Making Everything on this Planet Worse” »

High-tech advances in weapons technologies and a return of ‘great power nuclear politics’, risk the world ‘sleepwalking’ into a nuclear age vastly different from the established order of the Cold War, according to new research undertaken at the University of Leicester.

Andrew Futter, Professor of International Politics at the University of Leicester, makes the warning in a research paper for the Hiroshima Organization for Global Peace (HOPe), published today (Friday).

While stockpiles are much reduced from the peak of up to 70,000 nuclear weapons seen in the 1980s, progress in a number of new or ‘disruptive’ technologies threatens to fundamentally change the central pillars on which nuclear order, stability and risk reduction are based.

Crossrail, or the Elizabeth Line, is set to revolutionize London transport, with high-speed trains running from east to west underneath the UK capital.

There are so many paths we humans are running down in our chase for a greener future it’s extremely hard to keep track of everything. The auto industry is trying to go electric, either by means of batteries or hydrogen, the aviation industry is going for biofuels, while energy production and storage, well, this one is all over the place, betting on anything from the sun to the wind and nuclear.

This could be the most important construction project of our lifetimes. See how digital tools are enabling the ITER project — https://bit.ly/3KGfiF8

Full story here — https://theb1m.com/video/inside-iter-worlds-largest-nuclear-fusion-reactor.

Continue reading “We Went Inside the Largest Nuclear Fusion Reactor” »

2020 One of the heaviest known elements can be modified more than scientists thought — possibly opening the door to new ways of recycling nuclear fuel and enhanced long-term storage of radioactive elements — according to a recent study published in the journal Nature.

Squeezing heavy elements between diamonds might open doors for recycling nuclear waste.

The discovery changes our understanding of everything. The world of physics may have been turned on its head.

“While this is an intriguing result, the measurement needs to be confirmed by another experiment before it can be interpreted fully,” said Fermilab Deputy Director Joe Lykken.

The W boson is a messenger particle of the weak nuclear force. It is responsible for the nuclear processes that make the sun shine and particles decay. Using high-energy particle collisions produced by the Tevatron collider at Fermilab, the CDF collaboration collected huge amounts of data containing W bosons from 1985 to 2011.

Continue reading “CDF collaboration at Fermilab announces most precise ever measurement of W boson mass to be in tension with the Standard Model” »