Lifeboat Foundation

Fusion reactors will use abundant sources of fuel, will not leak radiation above normal background levels, and will produce less radioactive waste than current fission reactors. Learn about this promising power source.

The chernobyl special industrial zone — ecosystem restoration, remediation, and the development of energy and chemical byproducts — mykola tolmachov, chernobyl-51 industrial cluster.

The Chernobyl disaster / nuclear accident, occurred on April 26th, 1,986 at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of Ukraine.

Continue reading “Mykola Tolmachov — Chernobyl-51 Indust. Cluster — Ecosystem Restoration — Energy/Chemical Byproducts” »

NuScale Power, the startup specializing in the design of small modular nuclear reactors, has published new data concerning the production capacities of its NuScale Power Module (NPM). Thanks to the 25% increase in power output of an NPM, each NuScale module is now capable of producing 2,053 kg/hour of hydrogen, or nearly 50 metric tons per day.

Just one NuScale Power Module can produce 77 MWe of carbon-free electricity to power 60,000 homes in the U.S. NuScale’s flagship power plant design can house up to 12 modules for a total gross output of 924 MWe. The 924 MWe that a 12-module NuScale plant produces is enough to power nearly 700,000 homes with clean, reliable energy.

Continue reading “NuScale modular nuclear reactors can produce over 2,000 kg/hour of hydrogen” »

Housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the US$3.5-billion facility wasn’t designed to serve as a power-plant prototype, however, but rather to probe fusion reactions at the heart of thermonuclear weapons. After the United States banned underground nuclear testing at the end of the cold war in 1,992 the energy department proposed the NIF as part of a larger science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program, designed to verify the reliability of the country’s nuclear weapons without detonating any of them.

With this month’s laser-fusion breakthrough, scientists are cautiously optimistic that the NIF might live up to its promise, helping physicists to better understand the initiation of nuclear fusion — and thus the detonation of nuclear weapons. “That’s really the scientific question for us at the moment,” says Mark Herrmann, Livermore’s deputy director for fundamental weapons physics. “Where can we go? How much further can we go?”

Here Nature looks at the NIF’s long journey, what the advance means for the energy department’s stewardship programme and what lies ahead.

A floating nuclear power plant is a site with one or more nuclear reactors, located on a platform at sea.

It is an autonomous site that can provide electricity and heat to areas with difficult access, such as the cold Northern territories. It can also provide drinking water to dry areas, via desalination techniques.

You may not want to live near areas like this in the country.

“The problem you have here is that the NRC is simply not doing its job as a regulator. So what it has done is allowed the industry to basically determine the conditions under which this material is stored on a temporary basis across the country,” echoed retired Rear Admiral Len Hering, who served more than 30 years in the US navy and was awarded a2005presidential award for leadership in federal energy management from President George W Bush.

Continue reading “‘A combination of failures:’ why 3.6m pounds of nuclear waste is buried under a popular California beach” »

A Danish startup plans to fit small nuclear reactors onto ships that plug directly into the grid.

A laser blast in California ignites a fleeting, self-sustaining chain reaction.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California has achieved a major breakthrough in the quest to develop nuclear fusion power.

The NIF is the world’s largest inertial confinement fusion (ICF) device and contains the world’s largest laser. Its 192 beams are housed in a 10-story building the size of three football fields. When combined, these can generate over a million joules of energy, or about 0.1% the amount of a lightning bolt.

Scientists have been using the immense power of this laser to heat small capsules of deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) in an effort to reach “ignition” and kickstart thermonuclear fusion. This process, the same reaction that powers our Sun, could one day provide a limitless source of clean energy.