UK Space Agency announced £2.9 million of new funding for a nuclear micro-reactor by Rolls-Royce. They want nuclear power to support a future Moon base for astronauts. This follows a £249,000 study funded by the UK Space Agency in 2022. Rolls-Royce plan to have a reactor ready to send to the Moon by 2029. Scientists …
Last Energy is a startup working to make low-cost small pressure water reactors (20 MW) with simple off the shelf parts. They are designing to keep things simple, use as much off the shelf parts as possible and to use workers with existing training and skills. The demonstration model project showcases Last Energy’s standard, modular …
Helion Energy has received over $570 million in funding and commitments for another $1.7 billion to develop commercial nuclear fusion. Helion has performed thousands of tests with their sixth prototype called Trenta. In 2021, Trenta reached 100 million degrees C, the temperature they could run a commercial reactor. Magnetic compression fields exceeded 10 T, ion …
A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. It is most commonly a natural phenomenon, created during some of the largest bushfires and wildfires. Firestorms resulting from the bombardment of urban areas in the Second World War were generally confined to the areas initially seeded …
In 2010, I had written about the reason why Alan Robock and Brian Toons 2007 paper was wrong that an India and Pakistan nuclear war would trigger a nuclear winter and mass famine. Everyone knows that a nuclear war would be very bad and would cause a lot of casualties. There is no reason to …
China has added heat capture equipment at the Haiyang 2 nuclear plant so it provide heat to 1 million homes and avoid the use of 900,000 tons of coal each year. The plant heating project began in July last year and has now been completed. The heating pipe network and pumping station in the plant …
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) using lasers would resemble the rapid-fire explosions of an internal combustion engine. The NIF’s (National Ignition Facility) shot had a one-off ignition event. An ICF-based power plant may need to fire up to 10 laser shots per second, consuming almost 1 million targets a day, and produce far more energy per …
Tokamak Energy’s roadmap is for commercial fusion power plants deployed in the mid-2030s. They plan to complete the ST80-HTS prototype reactor in 2026 “to demonstrate the full potential of high temperature superconducting magnets”. They will then design and build a fusion pilot plant, ST-E1, which is slated to demonstrate the capability to deliver electricity – …
Lightbridge plutonium disposition fuel variant consumes 5.5 times more plutonium per fuel rod than mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel. Lightbridge’s proprietary next-generation nuclear fuel technology features metallic fuel rods with a helical multi-lobe design that can be used to fuel small modular reactors as well as existing light water reactors and pressurised heavy water reactors. The high …
Avalanche Energy published a research paper in an IEEE journal. Avalanche is a VC-backed, fusion energy start-up based in Seattle, WA. with about $51 million in funding. They are designing, testing and building fusion batteries small enough to hold in your hand. Their modular reactor design can be stacked like battery packs for a wide …
Helicity Space is making good progress fabricating key parts for their lab prototype of their nuclear fusion drive. This was described last month. Helicity Space has raised their seed round of over $3.5 million per Pitchbook but could have raised over $6 million. The first prototypes would be better than current electric drives. The ISP …
