Carnival of Space week 31

Carnival of space 31 is up at outofthecradle.net My contribution is my article on combining the newly announced nuclear “battery” with Vasimr plasma propulsion engine technology. there is discussion about the Chinese space program which currently has a probe orbiting the moon There is discussion about the economic develop of the moon Out of the …

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Congress pushes for re-examination of Thorium nuclear power

MIT Technology review reports that Senators representing several Western states, including Utah’s Orrin Hatch and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, are working on legislation to promote thorium. I am a big supporter of developing Thorium fission reactors and in particular molten salt reactors. I support the upcoming legislation from Orrin Hatch and Harry …

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Near term lifeboat technology: integrated and seamless robustness

AlFin’s excellent blog points out that “nuclear batteries” could be used for a near term civilization lifeboat. The initial goal would not be creating fully resistant civilization lifeboats that could handle destruction of the biosphere but hardened points of key civilization services like databases, medical facilities, food services, water services and electricity. The goal would …

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Desktop supercomputers

SiCortex and Scalable Servers Corporation have each packaged something like a server cluster into a single box, to produce what each hopes will be a commercially viable desktop supercomputer. On the outside, the machines in question look like big desktop PCs. On the inside, they are rather different. Instead of one or two microprocessors (the …

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