BBC News – A report at the 244th meeting of the American Chemical Society described a new technique using uranium-absorbing mats made from discarded shrimp shells. The oceans hold billions of tonnes of uranium at tiny concentrations, but extracting it remains uneconomical. Although these trials proved the principle of uranium extraction from seawater, the cost …
The Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon went 2,400 miles from Hawaii to its target by the Kwajalein Atoll in the south Pacific. Darpa recently crashed a hypersonic glider had a radical, wedge-like shape: a Mach 20 slice of deep dish pizza, basically. The Army’s vehicle relies on a decades-old, conventionally conical design. It’s designed to fly …
CNET – Boston Dynamics has released new video of its Petman robot. The vid below shows the anthropomorphic bot (aka the Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin) walking on a treadmill, doing squats, and pumping out push-ups without breaking a sweat. Boston Dynamics site description of the PETMAN project PETMAN will balance itself and move freely; walking, …
Unit 1 at the Wolsong nuclear power plant in South Korea has been restarted following the completion of a refurbishment of the pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR). It marks the first time that a Candu-6 reactor has been successfully dismantled, retubed and restarted. The 679 MWe reactor to operate for a further 25 years. It …
Lawrence Livermore National Lab on the Diode-Pumped Alkali Laser (DPAL) Solid-state and gas lasers have followed largely divergent development paths. Gas lasers are based primarily on direct electrical discharge for pumping (energizing), while solid-state lasers are pumped by flashlamps and semiconductor diode laser arrays. The alkali-vapor laser’s intrinsically high efficiency (80+%) and its compatibility with …
There is a new website yottawatts from Thorium, which prompted this post to answer how in general to get yottawatts from fission, fusion or solar Here are the units prefix definitions from wikipedia. 10^3 W kW kilowatt 10^6 W MW megawatt 10^9 W GW gigawatt (current large hydro have 1 to 20 gigwatts. Nuclear and …
1. Japan’s first ever nuclear power reactor to use mixed oxide (MOX) fuel assemblies is now operating at full capacity, fuel supplier Areva has announced. Kyushu’s Genkai 3 was loaded with the fuel fabricated from uranium and the plutonium recovered from previously used nuclear fuel in October. Recycling of plutonium in MOX is to play …
New Scientist covers progress in understanding how to speed up the brain. Van den Heuvel’s team to build connectivity networks for each volunteer, and to measure the efficiency of each network. “It more or less reflects how many steps a [brain] region has to take to send information from one region to another,” he says. …
Safe quantum communication will be ready for daily use with the world’s first optical quantum cryptography network completed in east China’s Anhui Province recently. The American journal Science reported about the result, which was published in the latest issue of Optic Express in April. The network allows real-time voice telephone among three users, or a …