Terrestrial Energy working with Oak Ridge National Lab on molten salt reactor design

Canadian company Terrestrial Energy is to collaborate with the USA’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to develop its molten salt reactor to the engineering blueprint stage. Molten salt reactors (MSRs) use fuel dissolved in a molten fluoride or chloride salt. As an MSR fuel salt is a liquid, it functions as both the fuel (producing …

Read more

Private Russian company Lin Industrial talks big about a $9.3 billion moonbase about 2030

Tass reports that the Russian company “Lin Industrial”, which is developing a missile ultralight “Taimyr”, declares its readiness to establish a base on the moon within 10 years after the decision. The cost base, according to preliminary estimates, will amount to 550 billion rubles [9.3 billion]., Told Tass general designer firm Alexander Ilyin. “The cost …

Read more

Paul March is providing more information about the NASA EMDrive Experiments

Paul March works at NASA on the EMDrive, Cannae drive experiments. He is providing information about the experiments on the NASA spaceflight forum. How High RF issues are being managed Please note that the entire RF system including its voltage controlled oscillator, phased locked loop, RF amplifier, RF coupler and coaxial transmission lines are hard …

Read more

First 500 GHz Photon Switch Built which is more than ten times faster than before

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have built the first 500 Gigahertz (GHz) photon switch. “Our switch is more than an order of magnitude faster than any previously published result to date,” said UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Stojan Radic. “That exceeds the speed of the fastest lightwave information channels …

Read more

First 500 GHz Photon Switch Built which is more than ten times faster than before

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have built the first 500 Gigahertz (GHz) photon switch. “Our switch is more than an order of magnitude faster than any previously published result to date,” said UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Stojan Radic. “That exceeds the speed of the fastest lightwave information channels …

Read more

China’s population, urbanization and GDP statistics

Elizabeth MacDonald at Fox Business News tries to make the case that China’s economy will not pass the US economy on a nominal basis before Dec 31, 2029. She refers to the 2005 cutting of purchasing power parity (PPP) but does not talk about the reversal in the 2011 World Bank statistics. The reason for …

Read more

India’s economy getting back on track with 5.7% GDP growth in first quarter

[Hindustan Times] The Indian economy expanded at its fastest pace in two-and-a-half years in the quarter ending June on the back of a turnaround in manufacturing as sentiment was boosted by the Narendra Modi government’s measures to help recover from the longest slump in a quarter of a century. Data released on Friday showed gross …

Read more

Spacex Dragon lander could land on Mars with a mission under the NASA Discovery Program cost cap

One of Ames’ long standing science interests has been to robotically drill deeply into Mars’ subsurface environment (2 meters, or more) to investigate the habitability of that zone for past or extant life. Large, capable Mars landers would ease the problem of landing and operating deep robotic drills. In 2010, an Ames scientist realized that …

Read more

Dwave Superconducting Quantum Computer passes more rigorous tests that confirm Quantumness of the System

The USC Viterbi School of Engineering is home to the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center (QCC), a super-cooled, magnetically shielded facility specially built to house the first commercially available quantum computing processors – devices so advanced that there are only two in use outside the Canadian lab where they were built: The first one went …

Read more

Roadmap to Supercritical CO2 turbines

Here is a presentation on Closed Brayton Cycle (supercritical CO2) Research Progress and Plans at Sandia National Labs The EU also sees a role for Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Power Cycles in power generation with CCS (carbon capture and storage, both in terms of efficiency increase and costs reduction. The reasons of growing interest toward this …

Read more

Extreme Ultraviolet lithography could take over at the 9 nanometer level and beyond

The view of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) has always been a bit rosy from this part of the world, where it is being born. So it’s no surprise that EUV held a relatively sunny spot in an otherwise fairly detailed and balanced semiconductor road map the IMEC research institute showed at an annual press event …

Read more