New nuclear plants constructed in the USA can provide electricity at about 5-9 cents/kwh Because of the large capital costs for nuclear power, and the relatively long construction period before revenue is returned, servicing the capital costs of a nuclear power plant is the most important factor determining the economic competitiveness of nuclear energy. The …
Current world nuclear power is 611 million tons of oil equivalent. (multiply by 7.1-7.4 for barrel of oil equivalent) This is from 64000 tons of Uranium per year being burned at about 5% efficiency. 3200 tons of Uranium if deep burn reactors were used. Deep burn (50-99%) burn of uranium and thorium for nuclear power …
DARPA today has a long-term, $3 billion program to help make such a “Metabolically Dominant Soldier.” In other words, the military is studying how to use technology and biology to meld man and machine and transcend the limits of the human body. Described the project director, “My measure of success is that the International Olympic …
Some people have criticized the technological Singularity and Transhumanism because of the upside being things that they do not believe can be achieved.Also, the primary technologies that are often described as enabling the Singularity and Transhumanism are Molecular Nanotechnology and greater than human intelligence general AI. There has been virtually no effort or money spent …
The Methuselah Foundation is having a major Aging conference at UCLA in Los Angeles June 27 through June 29, 2008 It is at Royce Hall in UCLA. The press release on the free June 27 event What: Aging: The Disease, The Cure, The Implications, hosted by Methuselah FoundationWhen: Friday, June 27, 2008, Drinks 4pm, Presentations …
Charles Barton reports that the US Geological Service will be announcing huge new reserves of Thorium in the United States. Charles also discusses the needs and issues of a comprehensive national energy policy. This information is crossposted at thoriumenergy “Thorium Power, Inc. has told me that they already have the technology to “switch over” from …
Dwave Systems closed a $17M financing round as of the end of January 2008. These funds will be used primarily to push the level of integration of our chips into the low thousands of qubits by the end of the year. In parallel with this central effort we will be working on running experiments on …
The technological singularity is a hypothesized point in the future variously characterized by the technological creation of self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, or some combination of the two. I would want to focus on the aspect of “unprecendentedly rapid technological progress“. I feel that a proxy for measuring “technological progress” can be the rate …
Mark Whittington had a submission for the week 16 space carnival on what could happen in 2057 for space The following is my scenario for space in 2057. At the end of this article, I provide pointers to key projects that should be pursued to enable this version of Space in 2057. Developing key technologies …
From EEtimes, Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) scientists will next month describe a technique that would allow spintronics to be inserted into the standard silicon CMOS processes using ferromagnetic materials similar to those already used for magnetic random access memory. Our demonstration showed a 30 percent polarization of the injected electrons, which is not bad considering …
Michael Anissimov over at Accelerating Future discusses CNN polls target=blank>that CNN presented as part of their future summit One facet of enhancement that is not controversial but is widespread is vision enhancement. In the further reading section, I refer to my past articles on other methods of enhancement which are being developed such as regeneration, …